The Heist: The Birkenhead Foodtown Robbery

One Friday evening in October 1984, a security truck pulled into the car park of the Foodtown supermarket in the Auckland suburb of Birkenhead. It had already made a few stops at other supermarkets that day, so there was plenty of cash on board. A few minutes later, as the security guards emerged from the supermarket carrying the day’s takings, a white van skidded to a halt, narrowly missing one of them. Three armed men piled out of the van, and within three minutes, they had stolen $294, 524 (the equivalent of over $1.1 million today). The investigation that followed the heist soon fanned out from the North Shore suburbs to greater Auckland, into Northland and then across the Tasman to Sydney. Along the way, it shined a light on the activities of several well-known figures in New Zealand’s criminal underworld, who between them had links to at last three unsolved murders. ;