It was a heist that seemed straight out of Hollywood movie script – but experts said the team of burglars who broke in a GardaWolrd facility on Easter Sunday and stole $30 million could soon ‘crack’ and ‘turn on one another.’
While the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department have remained tight-lipped on details regarding the break-in at the cash storage facility on Roxford Street in Sylmar, Calif., multiple law enforcement experts who spoke to DailyMail.com said the incident points to an inside job made possible by a ‘systemwide failure.’
‘There is so much money involved here that there is going to be some sort of internal conflict,’ said former LAPD investigator Moses Castillo. ‘At some point, someone in this group is going to want more money and say, ‘Hey, you didn’t give me the portion I was promised.’
He continued: ‘It will only be a matter of time before they start rolling on each other. They are bound to turn on each other because someone will crack.’
Moses said in order to bypass sophisticated alarms usually found in money storage facilities like GardaWorld, someone with inside access or deep knowledge of the security system had to have been involved.
‘This was so planned out and sophisticated that they might’ve even monitored radio calls to police to see if they were on their way,’ the former detective said.
Law enforcement experts said the burglars had an intricate plan to be able to pull off the city’s largest heist in history
Law enforcement experts said it will be ‘a matter of time’ before the mysterious group of burglars will ‘roll on each other’ and their plans fall apart
Former FBI investigator Charles Stephenson, who is an expert on security and crime scene recreation, said while businesses like GardaWorld are expected to have high levels of security, many don’t regularly test their own systems.
‘What amazes me is you would think the sensors inside the building would be enough to set off alarms for police to respond, which tells me someone was able to disarm that entire surveillance system in the building,’ Stephenson said.
‘That would be an inside engineering issue and someone could blow up and defeat that system, but that definitely takes a lot of access to insider data and intelligence.’
Records obtained by DailyMail.com showed LAPD responded to a total of 21 calls service at the Sylmar facility from January 2020 to March 31, 2024, but 80 percent of the false alarm calls were made within in the past two years.
Records also show GardaWorld’s alarm went off at 11:30 p.m. the night before Easter Sunday, but was logged as a false alarm.
On Easter Sunday – the day of the heist – there were a total of three alarm calls at the Sylmar building, including one at 4:46 a.m. The alarm was reported to GardaWorld supervisors, but it is unclear if police who responded to the call found anything.
There was a second alarm call on Easter Sunday at 7:22 a.m. and cops responded 45 minutes later but deemed the call as a ‘valid alarm.’
A large patch of the wall at the south end of the GardaWorld facility was blown out.
Stephenson said the number of false alarms could mean the perpetrators were testing the security system. The former FBI investigator said the number of false alarms in a span of a few months should have alerted GardaWorld supervisors.
‘If I was the supervisor of that building, I would make sure to check the entire system because getting several false alarms every few months is concerning,’ Stephenson said. ‘I would take a better look at the security procedures they have in place and reeducate the staff.
‘The fact that they’ve had so many issues over the past few years tells me that there was definitely a systemwide failure even before the break-in.’
Issa Alhosry, 22, co-owner of the nearby Kwik Market Deli, told DailyMail.com their WiFi, phones, and servers were down for hours that Sunday morning and into the evening.
‘We couldn’t get or make calls, not even on my cell phone,’ Alhosry recalled.
However, Alhosry said he never heard any alarms go off at the GardaWorld facility that day.
The GardaWorld alarm went off again a third time at 3:51 p.m. on Easter Sunday, but the incident was logged as a false alarm by police who responded to the call, according to LAPD call logs.
It is believed the team of burglars got into the facility through a roof hatch. The group somehow then blasted a portion of the south end of the building where the vaults are located.
A woman who lives at the nearby Tahitian Mobile Home Park told DailyMail.com she was in the shower when she heard a distinct loud ‘boom’ at about 8:30 p.m. that Sunday.
FBI and LAPD officials have remained tight-lipped on details of the investigation
GardaWorld has not responded to questions for comment from DailyMail.com
‘I was taking a shower when all of a sudden I heard an explosion,’ said the woman, who wanted to remain anonymous. ‘It was so loud that it echoed. I got out of the shower and asked my husband, “What was that noise?”‘
The couple dismissed the loud bang since ‘random explosions’ happens often on the block, which is largely an industrial area next to a train track.
‘Things just explode around here and then you also have the train that comes by and also shakes our homes,’ she said.
Residents at the mobile home park who live directly across the south end of the GardaWorld building said they didn’t heard any alarms coming from the facility, but many of them were not home since it was Easter Sunday.
Stephenson said the group of burglars more than likely targeted the GardaWorld facility specifically during a weekend holiday when most companies would have less people on staff and surrounding businesses also would be closed.
Officials with the FBI told DailyMail.com on Friday that their investigation is ongoing, but refused to comment any further.
Stephenson said it would be difficult to ‘sit on’ $30 million, which could cause a rift with this group of expert burglars.
‘Time is working against them, and time will eventually get them,’ Stephenson said.
‘You can only maintain that discipline of having that amount of cash when some issue like a jealous wife, or jealous friend will say, ‘Hey, this guy was a part of that.’
‘Their downfall will be some combination of surveillance police work or informants who have an ax to grind. The longer it goes, the more identifiable they also become as they start becoming more comfortable and start spending large sums of that money. It’s human nature.’
