French police arrest Marseille ganster after Riviera bank robbery

French police arrest Marseille ganster after Riviera bank robbery: "French police have arrested a Marseille gangster after he claimed to be the mastermind behind a famous bank robbery in the Riviera.

Police seized Jacques Cassandri, 68, a known figure of the southern French underworld, after he decided to set the record straight about the robbery.

In The Truth about the Nice Heist, Mr Cassandri - writing under the pseudonym Amigo - said he was tired of living in the shadow of the man assumed to have run the Ocean's Eleven-style bank job, Albert Spaggiari, who he said played only a bit part.

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On 16 July, 1976, after two months of drilling through the underlying sewers, 13 robbers broke into the vaults of the Societe Generale bank in central Nice. They spent six days clearing 370 coffers of gold, jewellery and cash amounting to 50 million francs - today worth about $38 million - before making their getaway as rising sewage waters began to flood the bank.

When police arrived, they found the words ''neither weapons, nor violence, nor hatred'', scrawled on the walls."

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