On January 17, 1950, eleven men carried out the greatest heist in history when they entered the Brink’s Building in Boston and made off with nearly $3 million. They had cased the building for nearly two years, even waiting after hours to practice entering and exiting the building. They had been waiting for the golden moment. It came on the evening of January 17. Seven of the men, dressed like Brink’s drivers, picked the locks at the facility, tied up five employees, filled 14 bags with a half-ton of paper bills, coins, checks and money orders, loaded the haul in a truck and drove away. As soon as the men were in the clear, they split a small portion of the money and hid the rest, agreeing to leave it until six years had passed – the legal statute of limitations for prosecuting the crime.

This seemed to be the perfect crime. They left no fingerprints because they all wore rubber gloves and no one saw their faces because they were wearing Halloween masks. The getaway truck was later found shredded at a junk facility. Each of the eleven men made sure they were seen after they left the crime scene so they could establish an alibi. The FBI was brought in to find the criminals. They even questioned some of them, but never had any evidence that they could make stick.

The sixth anniversary of the crime was approaching when the case finally broke. One of the burglars, Joseph "Specs" O'Keefe, was arrested on another burglary charge. He had hoped the other conspirators would use some of the money to help him fund his defense at his trial. It didn’t happen and O’Keefe went to prison. From there he began to be concerned that the others would take his cut. He began to send them threatening messages from prison. They became suspicious that he would turn into a stool pigeon and tried to have O’Keefe killed by a hit man when he was paroled. O’Keefe was shot and badly injured, but not killed. On January 6, 1956, only eleven days before the statute of limitations was to run out, O’Keefe spilled the details of the Great Brinks Robbery to the FBI from his hospital bed. The rest of the gang was rounded up and charged with grand theft just days before they had planned to split the spoils of their thievery.

This goes back to all those proverbs your mother taught you. What goes around comes around. Crime doesn’t pay. The bad penny always returns. Your sins will find you out. There just is no short cut to making a buck. Well let me add my marketing spin to this story and give you my own bit of proverbial wisdom. Golden moments in marketing come along. This is when the time is right and everything lines up for you to make a pitch to your customers. However, too often mistakes are made in the small details of marketing plans and the golden moment never produces gold (i.e. a conversion to a sale – the goal of any marketing plan.)

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let’s say you are attending a trade show that will put you in front of thousands of potential customers. Let’s say this is a trade show where only your target market will be there, so you don’t have to sift through people who have no interest in your industry. You purchase a nicely designed display and have nice trinkets to give away complete with your logo imprinted on them. The people working your booth are all dressed alike and are coordinated with the colors in your booth. Sounds like a golden moment, right? But the thing about a trade show is there are a lot of booths to visit and people to see. How will you be able to convert a prospect into a sale if you are just one in a million other vendors at a show? This is where the details of a marketing plan have to work in a coordinated way. With a marketing plan, you would have a pre-show campaign that would let the attendees know that you are going to be at the show, where you will be located at the show, and give an incentive for stopping by your booth. During the show, your plan should include a way to engage people in conversation in a way to find out what their particular needs are as well as follow up info to get back to them. After the show, you need to touch your leads within 48 hours. This might be with an email or a post card. Beyond that, you need a human touch – a phone call or a visit to the potential customer. Set up an appointment to meet one-on-one. Missing any one of these details can make the whole scheme fall to pieces.

The other thing I would say is that a good marketing plan should have some fluidity to it. Make your best plans and work out the details – pre, during and post your golden moment. However, stuff happens which will alter strategies. When it does, you have to adjust your plans. If the Brink’s robbers would have adapted their plans to help Specs O’Keefe, they may have beaten the legal system. Instead, they all went to prison on the failure of a detail eleven days before the payoff. Crime doesn’t pay, but a good marketing plan should!

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Side Note: The FBI only found a small portion of the stolen money. Over $2.7 million was never recovered and there are some who believe it is still hidden.

January 17, 1950: Boston thieves pull off historic robbery, This Day in History, www.history.com