One hot Monday morning in 1976, Albert Spaggiari had engineered the European crime of the century.

A bank president in Nice, France found his vault welded shut—from the inside—with a note left behind that read, "Without guns, without violence, without hate." Spaggiari and his gang of 20 men had dug a 25-foot tunnel from the city's sewer system into the bank, where they spent a weekend cooking meals, drinking wine, and clearing millions of dollars in gold, jewelry, gems, and cash. Here is the breathtakingly compelling story of Spaggiari, his "sewer gang," and the most daring, outrageous theft of the 20th cent