All the President Money

On March 27, 1972, a group of bank robbers steal from a small branch of United California Bank in Laguna Niguel. 

An FBI investigation into the robbery reveals that a bank that normally didn’t have more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash has lost $30 million at the hands of the burglars.

Following the robbery, one man who becomes a person of interest for law enforcement agencies is Amil Dinsio.

Whose money did Dinsio and his group of robbers steal? Who gave them the information about such a huge amount of money in a small bank? What did President Nixon have to do with the robbery? And how was Dinsio eventually caught by the FBI?

This is the story of the best bank robbers in American history who hatched an ingenious plan to steal $30 million from a rumored Nixon slush fund - sparking the biggest FBI manhunt since the Kennedy assassination!

Background

In the early 1970s, Amil Dinsio perfected the art of stealing money from banks with a team of the best bank robbers.  

Born into a poor family in Youngstown, Ohio, Amil Dinsio had always wanted to climb out of poverty.

In his efforts to become rich, Dinsio didn’t care about the methods he was adopting to make money.

Soon he earned a reputation as an expert bank burglar in his hometown’s criminal underworld because of his smart and fearless attitude. 

On a fine day in 1972, Amil Dinsio got a hot tip about a bank in California through his underworld connection. 

The tipster was none other than Jimmy Hoffa, one of the notorious mobsters in the United States at the time.

He was the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, or IBT, a labor union in the United States and Canada. 

Hoffa’s associate who had connections with the Cleveland mob told Amil Dinsio that a safe deposit box in the United California Bank in Laguna Niguel had a staggering $30 million hidden in it.

Dinsio knew if he successfully pulled off this robbery it would be a score of a lifetime for him and his team. 

Before moving further, one question that arises here is: Why would a small California bank that rarely had over a hundred dollars in cash on hand have over $30 million sitting in a safe deposit box?

The answer to this question lived just 15 miles south of Laguna Niguel: San Clemente. The place was the personal residence of then-President Richard Nixon and was also called the Western White House.

According to the information revealed by the FBI later, the money in the United California Bank in Laguna Niguel belonged to the President of the United States. 

Nixon was running a costly presidential campaign at the beginning of 1972 and needed as much campaign funding as possible to win the presidential race.  

A huge amount of dirty money from different donors was contributed to help Nixon in his campaign.

President Nixon allegedly took the extorted campaign contributions from donors and hid them in different places, and one of those places happened to be the United California Bank, Laguna Niguel.

Jimmy Hoffa was alleged to be Richard Nixon’s one of the top donors and had contributed $3 million to his campaign. Before the elections, Hoffa was jailed for his illegal activities. He wanted a pardon from the President in exchange for his union endorsing Nixon for the presidential elections.

While President Nixon commuted Jimmy Hoffa’s sentence, he made it impossible for the mobster to be Teamsters’ president ever again.

This severed Hoffa’s and the President’s relations and Hoffa wanted his $3 million back which was hidden in a safe deposit box in Laguna Niguel’s United California Bank. So, he hired Amil Dinsio for the job.

Assembling a Team of Burglars

After getting the assignment from Hoffa to carry out the biggest robbery of his life, Amil Dinsio knew what he needed to do next: assemble a team of people who could help him in his robbery.

Instead of hiring someone from the outside, he began with his family and added his brother James Dinsio to his team. Amil also recruited his nephew Harry Barber, and his brother-in-law, Chuck Mulligan to his team.

After assembling the four-member core team, Dinsio knew the Nixon job could only be pulled off with the help of one of his friends in Cleveland, Phil Christopher. 

Phil also brought his friend, Charlie Broeckel, to the team. Charlie was an accomplished thief but had a volatile track record.

When his dream team was assembled, Amil Dinsio told them about the bank they were going to rob, but there was one thing that he hid from them: the money they were planning to steal allegedly belonged to the President of the United States. 

Only three people knew the real value of the heist: Amil Dinsio, his brother James, and his brother-in-law, Chuck.

The three of them were going to be the main beneficiaries of the burglary after paying off Jimmy Hoffa, giving their teammates their cut, and paying for money laundering.

The calculation Amil Dinsio did give him, his brother, and his brother-in-law $8 million each, the biggest share when all is said and done.

Job as Usual

While it was a bank robbery involving the alleged money of the most powerful man on Earth, the job was as usual for Dinsio and his team.

Every single member of the crew had years of experience under their belt and knew exactly how they were going to go about their business during the robbery that would make them rich overnight.

From torches to wiring to explosives, Dinsio and his team knew exactly what they needed to break into the bank’s vault.

But there was one thing even more important than having the right tools - transporting them to Laguna Niguel, California. For that, Dinsio used his girlfriend who took the equipment to California while Amil Dinsio and his team took a flight to Los Angeles. 

Upon arriving in Los Angeles, the next task was to set up a heist headquarters that would catch the attention of law enforcement authorities.

They rented a condo on a golf course located around half a mile from the United California Bank. The special thing about this condo was that the roof of the bank was visible from there. 

After getting the perfect location to set up their headquarters for the heist, Dinsio and his team began the final preparations. 

They needed a transportation vehicle, so Amil Dinsio bought a 1962 Oldsmobile. The main reason behind choosing this car was its huge trunk which Dinsio thought would help them to carry the equipment to the bank and then carry the money after they were done robbing.

Moreover, the car was registered against a bogus name, so even if someone traced it later, they wouldn’t be able to link it to Dinsio and his team.

The bank robbers spent a few thousand dollars to prepare for the heist but they knew they were going to get a lot more money than that in return if their plan was successful.

A week before the heist, the group monitored each and every movement around the bank. This included when the bank opened and closed, who walked in and out of it, and how busy the area was during peak hours.

One thing that caught the attention of Amil Dinsio and his crew was that no police car ever drove by the bank, ever. This meant they had a good and safe escape route after they were done robbing the bank.

The bank was defenseless and the only defense mechanism that the bank had in place was an audible alarm hanging outside, but Dinsio knew exactly how to stop it from working.

Since the United California Bank was part of a strip mall, the group needed to consider a number of different factors if they wanted to get in and out of it safely.

The trickiest variable in the heist was the building surrounding the bank. Dinsio knew that after disabling the alarm, they would need to drill a hole in the roof of the bank and explode through the reinforced concrete before they could enter the locked safe deposit boxes.

This all had to be done without alerting anybody in or around the bank. It was a tough task but Dinsio knew that his team was well-equipped to carry it out.

The Heist Begins

After planning for months, it was time for Amil Dinsio to pull off the heist of his lifetime at the Laguna Niguel branch of the United California Bank.

And Dinsio had only one target in mind: President Richard Nixon’s alleged slush fund valued at $30 million.

The crew even had a police scanner set up outside so they could be informed if any police approached the area. 

Dinsio and his team stole a ladder from a nearby church and started climbing up the roof of the bank. According to the plan, James and Amil went to the roof while Phil Christopher stood guard outside with a shotgun. 

The rest of the crew members started to fill burlap bags with dirt from the garden to use as a muffle the sound of the explosion. 

When all the tools were on the roof of the bank, Amil Dinsio started working on the first task at hand: disabling the bank’s alarm system. To do that, they sprayed liquid styrofoam into the alarm so that when it hardened, the clapper inside the alarm couldn’t clap. 

Now they moved to job no. 2: Make a hole in the roof and get into the vault. They cut a hole right above the door of the vault. The team put tools and sandbags on top of the vault. After the hole was complete, Dinsio and his team quietly made their way to the roof of the vault and focused on the next task: disabling the interior alarms of the bank.

It didn’t take Amil Dinsio to disable the interior alarm and he could now focus on the ultimate prize of $30 million. Dinsio knew the vulnerable part of the vault was its roof so his team started drilling holes through it. They drilled a total of six holes and placed dynamite in each of them.

To stifle the sound of the explosion, Dinsio and his team put sandbags on top of the dynamites. 60% of the dynamite was filled with nitroglycerin but there was one problem: it was highly unstable and there was no guarantee that the dynamites would explode.   

But it was Dinsio and the team’s lucky day and the dynamite exploded. As for the movements around the bank, no one noticed the sound of the explosion which was a good sign for the burglars.

After cutting the rebars with an acetylene torch, the crew finally had access to the safe deposit boxes in the vault. But the job wasn’t done yet. They still needed to find a way to get into the safe deposit boxes. For that, Dinsio and his team used a hammer with a spiked end.

Soon, the boxes started opening one after another. But Dinsio wasn’t opening boxes randomly. He knew exactly which boxes to open because he had already been given information about the box numbers to target, and one of those boxes belonged to President Richard Nixon.

It was the first box Dinsio opened and he could see $100 bills stacked from front to back. But this box only had $2 million in it. So, he had his team open another safe deposit box which also belonged to Nixon. And his eyes lit up when he saw millions of dollars in there. 

At this point, Dinsio and his team were running into a problem. The sun was about to rise but there were hundreds of deposit boxes yet to be opened. The bank burglars decided to come back to the bank the next night, which would be Saturday, and open the rest of the boxes. 

To temporarily close the bank’s roof to avoid suspicion, Amil Dinsio covered the hole with a cut piece of plywood and lined it up with tar.

They spent the Saturday afternoon watching the roof from their condo to make sure no one had noticed the robbery at the bank.

Dinsio knew if he wanted to open all the safe deposit boxes in the vault, he needed more manpower. So he brought the men on outside duty from the previous night to inside the vault. 

Things were going smoothly as Dinsio and his team were plundering the vault but then something unexpected happened.

Chuck Mulligan, who was outside looking for activity around the bank area radioed his colleagues inside the vault and informed them that a car was pulling up in front of the car.

It was the cleaning crew, who made an unscheduled stop at the bank. Lucky for Dinsio and his team, the janitors didn’t know they were inside the vault. So, all the robbers needed to do was sit still in there without making any noise.

In the early hours of Monday morning, after emptying 458 of the 500 safe deposit boxes, Amil Dinsio and his team were ready to exit the vault.

But there was one last thing Dinsio had in mind. He hit the vault door to damage the time clocks in there and locked the door so the bank could not get it open.

The Investigation

When the bank found out that the vault had been broken into and the belongings in the safe deposit boxes were stolen, it immediately called the police.

While the investigators were interviewing the employees and trying to connect the dots, they did not have any clue about why a small United California Bank branch in Laguna Niguel had become the target of such a high-level crime.

When the office of the Orange County sheriff realized that the bank robbery was unlike any crime they had seen before, they called the FBI.

Special Agent Paul Chamberlain was assigned to the case and was responsible for the overall investigation.

But he wasn’t the only agent assigned to the case. Francis A. Calley, a special agent in the FBI’s Santa Ana, California was also brought to the case because of his expertise in burglaries. 

At the time, Los Angeles was known as the bank robbery capital of the world and robbers stealing huge amounts of money from different banks had become a routine. But normally, such robberies happened during office hours at gunpoint. 

However, the bank burglary agents Paul Chamberlain and Frank Calley were investigating were different. It had happened at night time and the scene inside the vault of utter destruction. There were sandbags lying around everywhere and it took almost a whole day for the FBI agents to go through everything that was there in the vault.

But what surprised the agents the most was how the robbers had opened and emptied several hundred safe deposit boxes without anyone noticing. This also made it difficult for them to identify exactly what was gone from those boxes. Regardless, they knew the loss would be very significant.

A forensic team examined the evidence in the vault while Agent Frank Calley went outside to see if he could find any clues. That is when he noticed a long ladder going to the roof of the bank.

The FBI agents then discovered the audible alarm system that had been neutralized by the burglars. This was a new technique that was unheard of at that time. 

The pattern of the robbery was new and very different from the criminal activities the FBI agents were used to investigating in Los Angeles.

The first conclusion Agent Paul Chamberlain and Frank Calley reached was that the robbers were from outside the Los Angeles area and they were right.

This wasn’t an ordinary bank robbery and needed more than a mere few agents to investigate. So, the Federal Bureau of Investigation assigned a staggering 125 agents to the case, making it one of the most investigated cases in the history of the FBI.

While the FBI began its investigation of a marvelous bank robbery, Amil Dinsio and his team started the meticulous process of covering their tracks to avoid getting caught by the U.S. law enforcement authorities.

From cleaning the windows to doors, floors, and even the ceiling, the bank burglars were extremely careful to make sure they didn’t leave any traces behind in the condo they were living in.

Dinsio and his team left the condo 36 hours after pulling off the heist. After leaving Laguna Niguel, when it came to calculating the exact amount the robbers had stolen from the United California Bank, it wasn’t $30 million rather they had 12 million and 8 hundred thousand dollars with them.

Out of this, 12 million dollars allegedly belonged to President Nixon, and the remaining 800 thousand were stolen from the other safe deposit boxes in the vault.

Dinsio took most of the stolen money to Las Vegas to launder it using Jimmy Hoffa’s connections in the underworld.

In the 1960s and 1970s, criminals washed their dirty money in Las Vegas which had made it the hub for money laundering. The process of converting dirty money into clean money was simple: the money was converted to chips, and then the criminals would gamble away the agreed cut to the casino, and convert the remaining chips back into clean cash.

Amil Dinsio made a deal with a casino that he would gamble away around $450,000, about 3.5% of the final take, in order to wash all the money he and his team of robbers had stolen from the United California Bank.

He thought it was a clean job and he was right about it. Without any solid evidence or lead into who had done the bank robbery, the FBI’s investigation was going nowhere. That is when the bureau decided to bring in a total of 126 agents in this case to speed up the investigation and catch the people behind the burglary. 

Before this case only once so many agents were assigned to a case and that was when President John F. Kennedy was shot dead. 

The pressure was mounting on the FBI to make an arrest. So Agent Chamberlain and Cally decided to contact all their fellow agents in the country and ask them for any potential leads on informants that could connect them with the burglary in Laguna Niguel. 

As time passed, the FBI investigation seemed to have hit a dead end until one afternoon nearly two months after the robbery.

Breakthrough in Investigation

The FBI office in Los Angeles received a call from the Cleveland office which told them that in Lordstown, Ohio, a bank burglary had happened where the robbers had used the same techniques.

The Cleveland office of the FBI gave the Los Angeles office around 100 names of possible suspects of such a robbery. This list also mentioned the specific expertise of each of the criminals, and that’s when the FBI in Los Angeles knew that they were heading in the right direction.  

Agent Paul Chamberlain and Frank Calley checked the flight records to see who had flown in and out of their area around the time the United California Bank was robbed, and that is when they came across Amil Dinsio’s name.

The FBI Office in Cleveland also knew about Amil Dinsio, they had been chasing him for robberies for years but hadn’t been successful in catching him.

The passenger list also included names of other members of the robbery crew. Dinsio and his team were so sure about getting away with the heist that they had used their real names while booking their flight tickets.

The next task was to find out where the robbers went after stealing millions of dollars from the United California Bank. So the FBI agents started asking the taxi drivers in the city about Dinsio and his team. After asking around for days, one taxi driver recognized Dinsio’s picture and told them that Dinsio and his team had threatened him a few weeks ago and they gave him a $100 tip.

The next thing the FBI agents did was go to the luxury hotels in the area and show the management Dinsio’s picture to see if anyone recognized him. When they didn’t find any luck they started checking with motels, and that’s when they stumbled upon a motel named Jubilee Inn in Cudahy where Dinsio’s brother-in-law, Chuck Mulligan checked in using his true identity.

The FBI gathered the telephone records from the room the suspects stayed in and one of the calls was made to a person named Earl Dawson who lived in Tustin, California. But what was more interesting was the fact that Dawson was originally from Youngstown, Ohio.

When the FBI investigated him, Dawson told the agents that he was good friends with Mulligan and that the Dimensions had visited his home twice when Mulligan wanted to use his garage to store a car that was still in his garage. However, he didn’t know anything about the bank robbery. 

After getting the search warrant for the car, Agents Paul Chamberlain and Frank Calley searched the car and that’s when they found the equipment used for the bank burglary.

From gloves to masks, weapons, and the hammer used to open the safe deposit boxes, everything was in there and some of the items even had Dinsio’s fingerprints on them. 

The next task was to find the robbers' hideout during the heist. From the phone call records, the agents noticed that Mulligan had made calls to a real estate agent in Laguna Niguel and booked a condo under the name of Harry Barber.

Barber had rented the condo for three months which meant no one was living in it when the FBI agents went there. However, the entire space had been wiped clean and there was no physical evidence that could lead the FBI to Dinsio and his gang except one thing: the unwashed plates in the dishwasher.

Beginning of the End

The FBI’s forensic team was able to develop fingerprints on the dishes, and when these fingerprints were analyzed they matched Dinsio and his band of bank thieves.

This also meant that now the FBI could arrest the bank robbers. 

On June 27, 1972, Amil Dinsio, while he was leaving the house and getting into his car, a dozen police cars pulled around him and arrested him.

Upon searching his house, the authorities found thousands of dollars hidden in random places.

After arresting all members, the FBI now wanted convincing evidence against them. That’s when one of the gang members, Charlie Broeckel, agrees to cooperate with the authorities and testify against Amil Dinsio.

Outro

For robbing the United California Bank in Laguna Niguel, James Dinsio received 15 years behind bars whereas Amil, Chuck, and Barber were each sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.

As for Charlie Broeckel, he didn’t receive any sentence for his cooperation with the authorities, marking an end to one of the greatest bank robberies in American history!