I just ran across this instructional article on how to steal 100kg of pure gold: Walk in, pick it up and walk out.
August 2007 – BBC – Three masked men have stolen a massive block of gold bullion on display in a museum in Japan.
The gold bar, valued at $1.71m (1.27m euro; £0.87m), weighed about 220 pounds (100kg) and was kept in an open safe.
Shoving aside a woman museum worker, the three then fled with an accomplice who had been serving as lookout at the museum in Takayama, a small city in central Japan.
The gold was lugged past an employee alerted by the noise, down a staircase and out of the museum where the three men were driven away by a fourth accomplice.
“The gold was exhibited on the second floor, which was monitored by a security camera from the first floor,” said 59-year-old Hisao Nakahagi, the owner of the gold.
Also from 2007 BBC:
A bathtub made of gold, worth 120m yen ($1m; £500,000), has disappeared from a Japanese resort hotel in circumstances that remain unclear, police said.
Staff reported the tub was missing on Wednesday at the Kominato Hotel Mikazuki, a resort overlooking the Pacific Ocean, east of Tokyo.
Police said they had no idea how it was stolen, saying they had found no sign it was dragged on the floor.
Somebody cut the chains on the door and the tub and just walked out with it.
The bathtub has probably been melted down and sold for scrap. –Either that or there’s some very happy James Bond type villain sitting in his solid gold bathtub plotting the destruction of civilization as we know it.
Here’s an update on the gold block.
Japan Times: Trio held in March museum theft of 250 million yen gold block
GIFU (Kyodo) Police have arrested three suspects in connection with the snatching of a 100-kg block of gold bullion worth 250 million yen from a museum in Takayama, Gifu Prefecture, in March, investigative sources have said.
The Gifu Prefectural Police has seized a gold piece in the possession of the three — a Japanese man, another man of unconfirmed nationality and a Romanian woman — on suspicion it is part of the stolen block, the sources said.
The seized gold piece, trimmed to about two-thirds the size of the stolen block, was found in one of the two men’s homes in Kitakyushu, the sources said.
