The Copenhagen Job

In the predawn hours of August 10, 2008, employees at a cash-distribution warehouse in suburban Copenhagen, Denmark, heard an ominous rumbling. Moments later, the shovel of a front-end loader crashed through the wall, followed by armed men in balaclavas. They quickly filled athletic bags with more than $10 million in cash, jumped into a fleet of black luxury cars, and sped away. Police trying to reach the scene were stopped by blockades of burning garbage trucks. Before the dust had even settled on the biggest robbery in Danish history, the police knew that they were dealing with the most sophisticated criminals they’d ever seen—and bringing them to justice would be an adventure in its own right.

Drawing on interviews with culprits and cops alike, as well as hundreds of pages of documents, The Copenhagen Job—published in Danish by the digital publisher Zetland and appearing here in English for the first time—tells the inside story of the heist, and of a startling crime wave that has swept Scandinavia in the past decade. Copenhagen-based journalist Line Holm Nielsen goes deep inside an epidemic of straight-out-of-Hollywood armed robberies that shocked what had previously been one of the least crime-ridden corners of the world.