On Jan. 2, 1972, over $27 million in jewels and cash were stolen out of the Pierre Hotel’s safety deposit boxes. The heist remains unsolved.
The world-famous Pierre Hotel sits just steps from Central Park on Manhattan’s East Side. It opened in 1930 as a place for the rich and famous to stay when they came to the city that never sleeps.
President Richard Nixon, Coco Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn and Joan Collins were among the guests at the hotel, which stands a towering 525-feet, has 41 floors and 714 rooms. Sitting at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 61st Street, the Pierre Hotel offered its guests unrestricted views of Central Park.
But all of those impressive details would be destined to come second to a prevailing fact about the Pierre Hotel after Jan. 2, 1972, when the hotel became the target of what the Guinness Book of World Records calls the largest unsolved hotel robbery in history.
In the late hours of that winter night, over $27 million in jewels and cash were stolen out of the hotel’s safety deposit boxes by eight armed men who had walked into the hotel just after before 3 a.m. and took it over.
Authorities reportedly have long had hunches on who was responsible for the crime, but to this day, no one has been brought to justice for the crime.
Unsavory People in a Savory Setting
New York City in the early 1970s was a hotbed of criminal activity.
Robert Comfort and Sammy Nalo were professional robbers who had a knack for stealing from the rich and holding up high-end hotels in New York like the Regency Hotel, the Drake Hotel, the Carlyle Hotel and the St. Regis.
In 1971, they had stolen $1,000,000 in jewelry and cash from Sophia Loren’s suite in the Sherry Netherland Hotel and were so charming to the Italian actress that the “Two Women” star never gave up the men who robbed her, according to reports.
For months, Robert Comfort, Sammy Nalo and six others plotted a robbery of one of Manhattan’s most exclusive hotels, which they decided to carry out as the rest of the city recovered from New Year's celebrations. The Pierre Hotel became a target because of its lax security, Daniel Simone, who wrote “The Pierre Hotel Affair: How Eight Gentlemen Thieves Orchestrated the Largest Jewel Heist in History,” tells Inside Edition Digital.
“They only had two security guards on duty at night,” he says. “Most of the other luxury hotels had far greater security. And the second advantage to robbing the Pierre as opposed to the others, was the fact that the guests were typically extremely affluent and wealthy. It was known in those circles that many of the guests were loaded with the jewelry, bearer bonds, cash, and they would use the hotel safe deposit boxes to store their valuables.”
Claire White, the director of education at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, tells Inside Edition Digital that there was special reason why the crooks picked Jan. 2 to carry out the heist.
“They knew that these safe deposit box would be loaded, but that staff in the hotel would be minimal,” she says.
And to pull off the heist, Comfort and Nalo also sought the go-ahead from the Lucchese crime family, which controlled the area in which the hotel was located.
“If you pull off such a robbery of that magnitude and you don't share it with the local mafia, guess what? You either share it with them or they'll just take it from you, and they'll take whatever else they can as well. So for that reason, they had to secure the backing of the Lucchese family, Consigliere,” Simone says.
Comfort and Nalo recruited Nicky Sacco, Bobby Germain, Val Visconti, Donald “The Greek” Frankos, Al Ben and Al Green for the heist, according to Simone, who interviewed Sacco for his book. All of the men believed to have been involved have since died.
“Who ever thought of taking a hotel, going in there and ripping off the safety deposit boxes?” Sacco told Simone in one such interview, according to a recording of their conversation provided to Inside Edition Digital.
Ahead of the heist, Comfort made reservations under an alias for Jan. 2. He also befriended a woman working at the Pierre who oversaw records of what was in each safety deposit box.
The Heist and Its Many Unexpected Detours
Under his alias, Comfort checked into the hotel. Soon after, the rest of his conspirators arrived.
At 2:45 a.m. on Jan. 2, 1972, the crew entered the Pierre Hotel lobby from its 61st street entrance and went to work.
“Typically, from 1 a.m. until 6 a.m. in the morning the only access that anyone had to enter the hotel was from the 61st Street side entrance,’ Simone says. Simone says the crew held the sole security guard by the 61st street entrance captive and took his clothes, which one of the crooks put on.
The group then handcuffed the few guests and staff in the lobby "very gently to ensure that no one would be hurt or manhandled. They locked all the doors to the hotel," Simone says.
Four of the criminals comforted the hostages in the lobby and kept them calm, Nalo and Sacco used everyday tools to begin raiding the safety deposit boxes. Time was of the essence, and so the group used records Comfort obtained from the unwitting woman who worked at the hotel to plot out a strategy to target the safety deposit boxes containing the most precious and expensive valuables, Simone says.
Simone says about 250 people were staying at the Pierre that night, but many were fast asleep and none the wiser to what was happening in the lobby.
“I cannot imagine what was going through the crew's minds when they were dealing with this hostage situation and sort of dealing with the ins and outs of the hotel. If you read accounts, there is definitely a bit of conflict even between the crew themselves. There were people who were like, ‘we should leave,’” says White, the director of the Mob Museum.
“They know that a hotel environment is going to pose all of these risks and they're willing to absorb some of that random chance, and that is one of the things that does make this into such a Hollywood story,” White says.
Among the moments unable to be accounted for ahead of time was the uncovering of an affair between a newlywed staying at the hotel and his apparent mistress, Simone says.
“There was a newly married couple in the hotel, and it turns out that the groom, a Brazilian magnate, had planned on seeing his mistress in one of the other rooms of the hotel after his wife, his new bride, would've gone to sleep,” Simone says.
However, the groom’s mistress was one of the hostages in the lobby. Unaware of what was happening downstairs or why the elevators were shut off, he made numerous calls to the front desk until some of the thieves, pretending to be hotel employees, went to his room. They then took him hostage, waking his wife— and her mother, who was along for the trip—in the process.
“When they brought her boyfriend and his new bride into the alcove, she was dumbfounded to see him with a woman and the two women started squabbling,” Simone says. “They started fighting and of course, then that's when it was revealed that she was his mistress, and that he was sneaking out of his room in order to meet her in the lobby and spend the rest of the night with her in a separate room that he had already booked.
“There was an argument, it was, like you say, comical in a way. There you're robbing this place and you got to listen to some marital problems that the guy just got married. What the hell did he get married for?” Sacco told Simone, the recording shows.
In another instance, one of the hostages suffered a heart attack, leading Comfort to quickly spring into action and call 911. "He didn't want this man to die because then this would not just have been an ordinary robbery; it would've been a murder as well," Simone says.
“This is why this was such a daring, daring act that they did, but they did it in good conscience because a, their intention was not to hurt anyone, first and foremost,” Simone continues. “The police arrived and ... they relocated all the captives inside the safe, where the safe deposit boxes were stored. They locked the door so that even if they yelled and screamed, nobody would've heard them.”
When EMS arrived on the scene, the man suffering the heart attack was brought to a local hospital. He ultimately survived and never mentioned anything to police about a heist, according to Simone.
“When the police came, naturally the police was concerned about getting assistance, medical assistance for this individual. They didn't notice anything abnormal. Bobby Comfort was wearing the concierge's jacket, and he acted like an official of the hotel,” Simone says.
“The plan was for them to stay as close to 7 a.m. as possible, because that was when the morning shift of the hotel would come in, but there are people in the crew who are saying, we should just cut our losses, we should leave earlier, we're not opening these safe deposit boxes quickly as we thought, we're having to call 911. There are a number of really concerning variables. Even for professional thieves, this is not what you're normally used to encountering,” White says.
And their getaway was not without its hiccups, either. Just after 6 a.m., the crooks made their way out of the hotel. As they attempted to make their getaway, one of their cars, a limousine parked in front of the hotel, would not work after the car battery died, according to Simone. Another one of their cars then made an illegal turn to jump the limo, which police nearby noticed. Rather than give the men a hard time for the traffic violation, the police gave the men a hand, Simone says.
All the close calls were a little too close for comfort for Comfort, who wanted to fence the jewels as fast as possible.
“You can plan a burglary, but what you can't always plan for is how to sell off those goods," White says. "You cannot take a $500 bill to the corner convenience store and use it to buy goods. You've got to find someone who's willing to take it and launder it for you. You cannot take an eight carat, registered diamond, to a normal jeweler and expect them to purchase it from you with no legitimate paperwork. In the process of trying to fence these goods."
The Search for the Thieves Behind the Pierre Hotel Heist Begins
With no surveillance cameras and no one talking, finding who robbed the Pierre would not be as easy as authorities thought.
“In the first few days after the Pierre Hotel heist, NYPD's got quite a challenge on their hands," White says. "This is all over the media. I think one of the things that is important to keep in mind is almost immediately, the public is sort of like, how did you have no idea this is going on? This is going on for two hours. Again, depending on what records you put the most stock into, there's anywhere from 19 to 24 people being held hostage, many of them handcuffed."
It appeared the care the thieves gave to the hostages worked in their favor.
“One thing that I think that the crew did really well was to treat the hostages in a way that really did make them think that they should not tell the police anything,” White says. “I'm not defending these criminals, but I do think that that's behavior that is above and beyond in a hostage situation.
“Beyond that, the one of the weirdest, most fascinating things, is as they were leaving, they actually paid all of the hotel employees who'd been hostages $20... with the exception of the security guards who they essentially said like, 'we think you got the same mentality as cops, so we're not going to give you 20 bucks," White continues.
Mutually-assured destruction may have also been a motivator to remain quiet, Simone says.
“Many of the captives who had items that had been stolen, they did not even admit that they lost anything,” Simone says. “They didn't want to admit that they even had any items of value in the safe deposit boxes. I mean, how do you explain to the government, to the IRS that your 84-carat necklace was stolen? Because the question may present itself, well, where did you get the money to buy a necklace for $300,000?”
Still, the police and FBI monitored Nalo and Comfort, who they suspected were involved. But ultimately, they couldn’t prove anything. Within weeks, however, Nalo and Comfort were busted in a raid on a safe house in which they were staying, but the federal case fell apart without any solid proof connecting them to the Pierre Hotel heist.
Both Nalo and Comfort were also busted by NYPD for having stolen items in their possession, but they never gave up any information about the Pierre Hotel robbery. “The important issue here is that although they did plead guilty to lesser crimes unrelated to the Pierre, they never admitted to the Pierre, and they did not identify any of their cohorts,” Simone says.
Both Comfort and Nalo served four years in prison for possession of stolen goods. Their charges were not directly connected to the Pierre Hotel robbery.
The case of the Pierre Hotel robbery remains, officially, unsolved.
In today's estimation, the amount of goods stolen from the Pierre would be worth about $450 million, according to Simone. Only one necklace from the Pierre robbery was recovered in Detroit but its rightful owner never claimed it, according to Simone.
“Any [crook] who was involved with the Pierre Hotel heist, I definitely think there had to have been a sense of real pride involved, and I think the Lucchese family in New York probably has, to this day, a real sense of accomplishment, and certainly these individual thieves. Even if they didn't wind up holding onto this money for very long, they're certainly, I think, a clout and a cache that they received from participating in this heist,” White says.
