Overview

Heist is a three-part Irish crime documentary series broadcast on RTÉ One. It examined three memorable and notorious large-scale crimes committed in the country and was broadcast on a sequence of Tuesday evenings in July 2008 at 21:35. The series is produced by RTÉ Archive Unit. The first programme focused on the Real IRA's attempted robbery of a Securicor vehicle in County Wicklow. The second programme examined the 1995 Brinks Allied Heist in which an armed gang robbed £2.8 million from a Dublin depot in Ireland's most expensive cash raid. The final programme detailed the history of Russborough House, the Irish estate owned by the now dead Sir Alfred Beit, and from which priceless works have been robbed on four separate occasions since 1974. That year, an IRA gang stole nineteen paintings with an estimated value of £8 million including a Vermeer, a Goya, two Gainsboroughs and three Rubens. Beit and one of his staff members were struck by revolvers and then tied up in their library. Then in May 1986, £30 million worth of paintings were stolen by the prominent Dublin criminal Martin Cahill. Most of these were recovered in the United Kingdom and Belgium following an international police operation.