The
Bleeding
Hearts

An ex-cop pulled off the largest armed robbery in Austria’s history, with his friend’s mistress as his accomplice. But he wasn’t trying to get rich. He wanted to be a real-life Robin Hood.

_{By Matthew Wolfe}

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On the evening of December 22, 2013, an armored van packed with cash made its rounds through the regal streets of Vienna. The city’s elegant Baroque buildings were trimmed with glinting strings of lights; Christmas markets sold spiced glühwein on cobbled squares. A little after midnight, as the festivities quieted, the van, operated by the security company Loomis, stopped at a walk-up ATM on a desolate stretch of storefronts. Two guards stepped out, entered a room-size vestibule behind the machine, and commenced replenishing the ATM with cash. A minute later, two figures wearing black balaclavas and carrying handguns emerged from the shadows and followed the guards inside.

The pair ordered the guards onto the ground and handcuffed them. After snatching the keys to the armored van, one of them unlocked the vehicle and began stuffing crisp bank notes into black duffel bags. The thieves then checked the street for witnesses and disappeared into the night with nearly three million euros.

It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed, revealing intimate knowledge of Loomis’s anti-theft procedures—perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street whenever it was being restocked. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head. Detectives decided that it was almost certainly a woman.

They soon homed in on a former Loomis employee, Tamara Svoboda, who, when she worked for the company, had scheduled the routes and was only five feet three inches tall. On the morning of January 10, 2014, federal police raided Svoboda’s apartment and arrested her. Initially she denied any involvement in the robbery, but eventually she confessed. Investigators were stunned when she named her accomplice. The man she claimed had masterminded the job was one of their own: Gabriel Einstein, a former officer in the city’s WEGA unit, the Viennese equivalent of SWAT.

The next day, a team that included some of Einstein’s former colleagues raided his upscale apartment and placed him under arrest. Unlike Svoboda, Einstein confessed right away. When detectives asked why he had committed such an audacious crime, he replied that he hadn’t stolen the money for himself. He’d done it for the children of Africa; he planned to build an orphanage there.

It sounded absurd—the kind of desperate lie a thief might invent to deflect blame or ameliorate punishment—but it was very much the truth.

“Wouldn’t it be right,” Einstein asked, “to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?”

Austrians have a reputation, even among themselves, as scrupulous rule followers. In Vienna it’s rare to glimpse people jaywalking, and the city’s subway runs on an honor system. An Austrian friend suggested that this predilection had its roots in the country’s imperial past. From its power center in Austria, the Hapsburg monarchy ruled enormous portions of Europe for six centuries with the help of a dizzyingly complex bureaucracy. The compulsion to follow rules even a hundred years after the Hapsburgs lost power, my friend explained, was like the twitching of empire’s phantom limb.

As a police officer, Einstein had been an enforcer of rules in a rule-bound society, making his crime all the more perplexing. His family told me that he was staunchly law-abiding, and had never incurred so much as a speeding ticket. In retrospect, however, they realized that there had been hints of where he was headed. He always loved to give things: presents to his three children, donations to charity, food to people begging in the street. After leaving the police force and starting a private-security business, he became wealthy, only to grow conspicuously ascetic, donating increasingly large amounts of money and possessions. By the time he was arrested, he’d sold his Audi and his Rolex, and he was down to almost his last suit. When police raided his home, they found bags filled with clothes purchased from H&M that Einstein planned to give away.

Einstein’s son Florian* recalled that the summer before the Loomis heist, his father had posed a curious hypothetical. “Wouldn’t it be right,” he asked, “to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?” Florian, who was studying to become a police officer himself, disagreed, and his father dropped the issue.

* Out of respect for their privacy, pseudonyms have been used for Einstein’s family members.

Still, to idly philosophize about such a crime was one thing. To actually do it—to fashion oneself into a twenty-first-century Robin Hood—was another.

After his arrest, Einstein was remanded to Vienna’s largest and most forbidding jail, Josefstadt. When I visited him there in 2014, I expected to encounter someone solemn and morally serious—a grim-faced saint. But when Einstein entered the room, he radiated the warm excitement of a Labrador retriever. A tall, fit man of 50 with fetching salt-and-pepper stubble, Einstein was wearing a cerulean-blue hoodie, clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, and a beaded necklace. He looked less like a former law enforcement officer than a hip Los Angeles dad. We sat down, and without hesitation Einstein, still the inveterate benefactor, offered me exactly what I wanted: an explanation of how he’d gotten into this mess.

Einstein’s childhood, he told me, had been shaped by “gruesomeness.” He was raised in Tyrol, Austria’s bucolic eastern province, by an alcoholic father given to punching his two sons. Einstein and his elder brother eventually came under the care of their grandmother, who as punishment would regularly lock them in a darkened closet. “I had a very fucking childhood,” he told me in emphatic, accented English, omitting an adjective but still making the point. (After our first encounter, I would meet with Einstein several times in the ensuing decade and communicate with him by letter, phone, and email.)

The two siblings both went into law enforcement, Einstein in Vienna, where he hoped to help others in desperate situations, and his brother in the state police. Athletic and competitive, Einstein quickly made the famed Wiener Einsatzgruppe Alarmabteilung (WEGA), the Vienna police department’s most expertly trained unit. Despite his severe upbringing, Einstein was by nature cheerful. Every WEGA operation, as he saw it, was a new problem to be solved through hard work and an upbeat attitude.

One afternoon in 1994, Einstein told me, his WEGA squad was tasked with busting up a drug deal in Vienna’s Fifteenth District, which at the time was the city’s seediest neighborhood. When the team moved to make an arrest, the seller, an African immigrant, bolted. Einstein pursued him, shouting for the man to stop and firing his pistol in the air. As he closed in, the suspect turned and pulled out his own handgun. The two men exchanged fire, hitting each other in the thigh. Einstein tackled the dealer and, following a short, bloody wrestling match, overpowered him. The pair shared an awkward ambulance ride to the hospital.

The shooting put Einstein’s relentless positivity to the test. He endured months of physical therapy to regain the use of his leg. When he returned to work, he transitioned out of WEGA. After a brief, unhappy stint as a traffic cop, he left the force entirely. In 2001, he started his own private-security company, specializing in investigations of corporate theft. He gave it an English name: Service of Secrecy. The early years were lean as Einstein struggled against larger competitors, but as word of his talents spread, the business thrived.

Einstein occasionally found himself thinking about the man who’d shot him. He saw him only one additional time, in court, and knew little of his past—not even which country he was from. But at some point, Einstein learned that the man was an asylum-seeker, as were so many African immigrants in Austria. They’d begun arriving in the country in the 1990s, fleeing civil wars and ailing economies. Einstein wondered what the man’s life had been like back home, what he was running from.

In 2006, Einstein told me, he had an opportunity to visit Africa himself; a client had recommended him to authorities in the Central African nation of Gabon, which was interested in creating its own version of WEGA. He told me he flew down for an interview with the defense minister, Ali Bongo, the son of the country’s notoriously corrupt authoritarian president, Omar Bongo, and was offered a lucrative multiyear consulting contract. Einstein didn’t love the idea of working for a despot, but he had a family to support. And at the end of the day, someone was going to train the country’s police. Why not him? Einstein accepted the job.

He commuted between Gabon and Austria every few weeks. During his trips to Gabon, he told me, he spent much of his time touring the countryside, where Bongo wanted to establish an array of military bases. The poverty Einstein witnessed shocked him. By African standards Gabon was wealthy, mainly due to its coastal oil reserves. In the capital, Libreville, a former French colonial port, supermarkets stocked expensive Bordeaux and Roquefort cheese. But the wealth was unequally distributed. “People lived in huts without ANYTHING,” Einstein wrote to me in 2015. “Yet merely one hundred meters further I could see pompous buildings with inconceivable luxury.” The experience, he added, “completely overwhelmed me.”

Einstein began to feel guilty about the money he made, which had bought him a posh apartment and car. He responded to his unease with an energetic program of handouts. Einstein had been raised Catholic and later joined a Pentecostal church. He told me that charity was an important part of his faith. He decided to give money to destitute Gabonese. There was no formal plan; when he encountered someone in need—particularly single mothers and people requiring medical care they couldn’t afford—he gave them whatever cash he had.

Back in Vienna, Einstein’s family was growing. Following an amicable divorce, he had remained close with his first wife, Sabine, with whom he had two children, Julia and Florian. He remarried a woman who taught French—helpful for his work in Gabon, where French is the official language—and, in 2012, she gave birth to his third child. Domestic life was good. But the feeling that plagued Einstein abroad persisted at home. Soon he began filling the trunk of his car with clothes, toys, appliances, and other items, then driving east to Romania, where he’d stop in poor villages and give it all away. Sometimes he took his two elder children, who by then were teenagers and growing concerned about Einstein’s haphazard giving. (So was their mother.) But the donations, and the astonished smiles of the people who received them, never failed to make Einstein happy. It felt more than good, he told me once. Then he paused, searching for the correct English word. “It was,” he said, “mandatory. My duty. My obligation.”

In 2009, Omar Bongo died, and his son left the ministry of defense to run for president. The new defense minister, Einstein told me, declined to renew his contract. Although the lost income was regrettable, Einstein was by then so consumed by his mission to help Gabon’s people that he didn’t mind. While making his ad hoc contributions to everyday Gabonese, Einstein had begun to dream of something bigger—something that, to his mind, would be truly consequential.

His difficult upbringing had made him empathetic toward children in dire circumstances, particularly those without parents. He wanted to instill in a frightened child a durable sense of safety and security—a feeling that, growing up, he had been denied. Before leaving Gabon at the end of his consultancy, Einstein began drawing up plans to build an orphanage there. It was to be a whole complex, in fact, where every child would have their own lodgings, painted in bright colors, and where all their needs would be met. He named the imagined community Blue Sky Village.

Back in Vienna, Einstein began soliciting donations to make Blue Sky Village a reality. He estimated that he’d need nearly a million euros to begin the project, and he wrote dozens of letters to aid organizations and philanthropists requesting help in financing the plan. Soliciting charity, Einstein found, was much tougher than handing it out. He received few responses. The people who did reply politely suggested that, given his lack of experience in the aid space, he donate to existing groups. But investigating corporate theft hadn’t done much for his faith in how companies managed their money. What’s more, Einstein thought that a lot of groups wasted money on lavish fundraisers—the Viennese have a long tradition of philanthropic balls—rather than spending it on people in need. He grew angry when he thought about money being used for frivolities when children were starving and scared. “This makes me so… hateful,” he told me. The only way to know that orphans in Gabon were being saved, he thought, was to save them himself.

As he struggled to get his project off the ground, Einstein received a call from Heinz Marek, an old WEGA colleague. Marek was now working for Loomis as its head of Austrian security. Loomis had suffered some recent employee thefts, and Marek wanted Einstein to help the company’s Austrian branch sharpen its embezzlement protocols.

In a bleak irony, Marek had been fired from the Viennese police in 2006, after he was accused of beating a Gambian immigrant resisting deportation. Einstein told me that he’d heard about Marek’s case in the media. Despite what Marek had allegedly done, Einstein found it easy to rationalize taking the Loomis job: The more money he earned, the more he could give away to those in need. He agreed to come on as a consultant, and the two men became friendly. Soon, Marek introduced Einstein to a Loomis employee named Tamara Svoboda.

Svoboda realized that, at the end of the day, all she required was a roof over her head and food on her table. Everything else was a luxury.

As a child growing up middle-class in Vienna, Svoboda had been on track to play professional tennis. She worked with private coaches and traveled to tournaments. But when she was 15, her father died in a car accident. On top of her grief, there was suddenly no money for tennis. Her promising career withered. The years that followed were dark. Svoboda dropped out of school, became addicted to drugs, and fell into an abusive relationship. Eventually, she got clean and reported her boyfriend to the police. She became close to the officer assigned to her case, and the two kept in touch after it concluded. When the officer left the police department and started his own private-security company, he hired Svoboda as his assistant.

Svoboda worked in the private-security industry for a decade, moving up the ranks until she earned enough to buy a Mercedes. Her boss once had her accompany his wife as a sort of bodyguard on a charitable trip to Moldova, among the poorest countries in Eastern Europe. Svoboda was overwhelmed by the level of destitution she saw: homeless children with dirt-smeared faces, an old woman who carried buckets for miles every day to collect drinking water. Like Einstein, Svoboda responded by giving things away on the spot, including her mobile phone and the money in her wallet. “I left it all behind, except for the clothes I was wearing and my passport,” she told me. “I had never experienced this suffering, this misery. I had never seen anything like that.”

After she returned to Austria, Svoboda sold her Mercedes, donating most of the money to charitable organizations, and gave her motorcycle to someone she knew who needed transportation. Svoboda realized that, at the end of the day, all she required was a roof over her head and food on her table. Everything else was a luxury.

In 2011, she began working at Loomis. She was loading an armored van one day when she met Heinz Marek, who was looking into an attempted robbery. Her first impression of Marek, throwing his weight around in an expensive suit, was that he was “an arrogant prick.” Later, after being promoted, Svoboda was put in charge of supervising the company’s drivers as they transported cash to ATMs around Vienna. When she had to send Marek a text about a training session, she politely ended it with a smiley-face emoji. Marek sent one back. The smiley faces led to longer texts, which Svoboda found surprisingly charming. The texts soon became calls, then coffee and dinner. Though Marek was married, Svoboda was smitten with him. According to police records, the two began an affair.

Svoboda and Marek hadn’t been together long when he introduced her to Einstein. Knowing that Marek was conflicted about the affair, Einstein invited him to visit his church, a Pentecostal denomination where pastors and congregants joined in ecstatic worship. Marek reluctantly attended once or twice with Svoboda but never returned. When Svoboda showed up by herself shortly afterward, even though she wasn’t religious, Einstein was pleasantly surprised. Soon she was attending the church several times a week with Einstein.

In no time, the pair struck up a platonic friendship. Einstein’s relentless positivity turned out to be exactly what Svoboda needed at that moment in her life. Her beloved grandmother had recently died, and dating a married man came with difficulties. Einstein was the most warm-hearted, energetic person she’d ever met, always willing to listen to her problems and asking nothing in return. Being emotionally available for Svoboda was, it seemed, another form of giving, and it left Einstein feeling replenished. “No matter what it was, he was always there for me,” Svoboda said. “And that’s why he was my angel”—her own Gabriel.

In Svoboda, meanwhile, Einstein had found someone else who yearned to mend the world’s horrific inequalities. She told Einstein about her painful trip to Moldova, and he confided in her about his frustrations making Blue Sky Village a reality. After church, they often went out for pizza, offering the leftovers to unhoused people.

Svoboda and Einstein both understood that their desire to give went beyond typical human sympathy. Svoboda believed that they both suffered from a psychological condition—a compulsive, all-consuming need to aid others. A German psychologist named Wolfgang Schmidbauer had coined the term helfersyndrom (helper syndrome) in 1977 to describe a malady he observed in some of his patients. As detailed in his book The Helpless Helpers, Schmidbauer found that assisting others made some otherwise unhappy or anxious individuals feel calm and confident, which in turn created a feedback loop: a desire to help that became so insatiable it could lead to burnout and depression. Teachers, doctors, and clergy were especially vulnerable, he noted, as were people with traumatic childhoods.

Einstein recognized something of himself in the condition Svoboda described. “It probably stems from my childhood, which was full of violence and abuse,” he told me. “This probably drives me to help people, especially children, because witnessing their suffering has had a profound effect on me.”

Schmidbauer also warned that the compulsion could cause a person to become delusional, losing all sense of what’s helpful and even moral. “Ideals of perfection can only be maintained by denying reality,” he wrote. “As a result, the helper’s activities easily lose their focus.” This proved true for Einstein and Svoboda. As they became closer, they chose a fateful course of action—one that, in the depth of their mutual sympathies, made complete sense to them. The only way to get the money needed for Blue Sky Village, they decided, was to steal it.

Svoboda and Einstein would later disagree about who first suggested robbing Loomis. As Einstein told it, the idea began as a wisecrack. One evening, around June 2013, they were eating pizza and he was lamenting the lack of progress on Blue Sky Village. He made a lighthearted suggestion that they steal the funds from their employer. In Einstein’s recollection, he was clearly kidding, but Svoboda was intrigued by the notion. “I said, ‘Hey, come on. It was a joke. I’m joking,’ ” Einstein told me. But Svoboda’s response, he said, was serious.

Einstein claimed that for months afterward, Svoboda wouldn’t stop talking to him about a possible robbery. She insisted they could come up with a foolproof plan. She was familiar with Loomis’s routes and security systems, while Einstein, with his WEGA training, could provide the muscle and operational expertise. Even as Einstein resisted the idea—he told me he went so far as to cut off all contact with Svoboda for a while, and even changed his phone number—he found himself beginning to justify the heist. “Over the months, I rejected the project on numerous occasions, as I simply considered it too dangerous and pointless,” he wrote me. “At some point, however, I found myself in the midst of preparing for it.”

Einstein came to view the robbery as a victimless crime—even a virtuous one. He often complained to his wife that it was obscene Loomis had so much money while children starved. The company’s loss would be covered by insurance, he reasoned, and at last he’d be able to save orphans. He even offered Svoboda a job as an administrator for Blue Sky Village, with a salary drawn from the stolen loot.

In Svoboda’s version, it was Einstein who persuaded her to do the robbery. She said that he earnestly pitched her on the idea, the logistics of which he’d begun sketching out by the time he brought it up with her. Svoboda said that she was open to the idea, so long as no one got hurt. She was newly single—she told Einstein that Marek had dumped her after his wife confronted him about the affair. She’d also recently left her job at Loomis. The robbery seemed to offer the chance of a new start. She had never been to Africa, but she liked the idea of helping children. As much as anything, Svoboda told me, she was swayed by Einstein’s optimism.

Having lost his perch in Gabon—and with it his visa—Einstein decided to build Blue Sky Village in neighboring Equatorial Guinea, where he’d been offered a new security assignment, set to begin in 2014. On his first trip, Einstein encountered the kind of poverty he’d seen in Gabon, and he noted that many children had been left parentless by the AIDS epidemic. He told me that he also met some locals interested in helping him build an orphanage.

As Einstein and Svoboda became more serious about the heist, they began communicating via prepaid phones, changing their numbers every two weeks. Einstein also plotted how he would get the stolen money to Africa. He was wary of bank transfers and other means that would leave a record. He decided instead to buy a batch of secondhand electronics—radios, TVs, VCRs—and conceal the cash among them in a shipping container, which he’d then dispatch to Equatorial Guinea. A year later, after construction of Blue Sky Village was complete and her relocation wouldn’t raise suspicions, Svoboda would fly down and get the orphanage up and running.

Next came the question of where precisely to strike. While the vault at Loomis’s fortified Austrian headquarters contained huge sums of money, the delivery vans were more or less unprotected, defended only by a pair of often unarmed guards. Einstein and Svoboda could catch one of the vans on its twice-weekly rounds. After some scouting, they selected a stop, an ATM in an area of the city that seemed free of security cameras. To load money, the guards entered a vestibule behind the machine. The vestibule was owned by an adjacent plumbing company and had a tiny bathroom, but otherwise there was only one way in or out of the space. Einstein and Svoboda could be sure to catch the Loomis guards unaware.

They would need a copy of the vestibule’s key, because the door would be locked while the guards fed bills into the machine. To solve this problem, Svoboda snuck into a cloakroom at Loomis—the access code to the office was the same as when she’d worked there, and it was easy for her to enter undetected. She stole a uniform. Then, disguised as a guard and wearing a dark wig to cover her light hair, she visited the plumbing company. She explained that the key to the vestibule had broken and they’d need a replacement to access the machine. She walked out with one in hand.

Einstein and Svoboda then needed to decide when to execute the heist. Einstein was heading to Equatorial Guinea in early 2014, which meant that they would need to act quickly if they wanted the money to arrive while he was there. To Einstein, success hinged on picking the right guards, the combination of which changed every shift. He and Svoboda scrutinized copies of Loomis’s weekly rosters, which Svoboda poached using company passcodes. Einstein preferred to target guards who had been with the company awhile, particularly women, on the assumption that they would be smart enough not to play the hero. At one point, Einstein and Svoboda set a date for the robbery at the end of November 2013, but they realized that the van would be manned by an amateur bodybuilder. Finally, they settled on a low-risk pair of guards, and the heist was scheduled for three days before Christmas. Millions of euros would be set for delivery to cash machines depleted by holiday shopping.

The day before the theft, Einstein noticed an unusual number of police patrolling the city. It was, he would later decide, a sign from the cosmos that he shouldn’t proceed with the crime—but one that, out of earnest belief in his purpose, he declined to heed.

On the evening of December 22, Einstein left his wife and one-year-old son at their apartment, explaining that he had a late work assignment. He picked up Svoboda in his minivan, a SEAT Alhambra, which he had cleaned to avoid spreading forensic evidence to the crime scene. The pair were dressed in matching black outfits, with military boots and stolen Loomis jackets. Einstein had shaved and his hair was slicked back. He brought along an unloaded Glock 19. Svoboda, who had little experience with firearms, carried a pellet gun Einstein had bought from a sporting goods store. Both weapons were fitted with red-laser sights to intimidate the guards.

They drove to the Loomis headquarters and parked outside, waiting for the van to head out. Although they knew the vehicle’s route, drivers left on their own schedule, and Einstein and Svoboda didn’t want to risk attracting suspicion by hanging around the ATM they’d selected longer than necessary. At one point, Einstein stepped out of his minivan to relieve himself on some nearby grass. Moments later, the Loomis van left the parking lot to begin its rounds. When Einstein got back in his vehicle, Svoboda was frantic that their target had left. Einstein jammed his foot on the accelerator and tried to catch up. Finally, they spotted the Loomis van at a bank in central Vienna—mere steps from Café Schwartzenberg, a coffeehouse Einstein often visited with his children. Svoboda and Einstein followed at a distance, then sped ahead to the ATM, where they pulled on ski masks and goggles and waited in Einstein’s vehicle.

A little after midnight the van arrived. Einstein and Svoboda watched the two guards enter the vestibule. A few minutes later, they crept into the darkness and approached the ATM. Svoboda inserted the key into the vestibule door and Einstein pushed it open, gun drawn. He expected to see both guards, but there was only one, crouched in front of the ATM. The guard, a man named Yakup Sivgin, looked up at the intruders and froze. Einstein held his finger to his lips.

Doing his best impression of a Russian accent—a ploy he’d decided would throw off investigators—Einstein whispered for Sivgin to get on the ground. The man knelt, and Einstein pushed him onto his stomach, securing his hands behind his back with handcuffs and pulling a wool hat over his eyes. Einstein and Svoboda looked at each other. Where was the other guard? There was only one possibility: The second Loomis employee, a woman named Dora Nagy, must be in the vestibule’s bathroom. Had she heard them? What if she didn’t come out? Was she calling for help? For a few agonizing moments, Einstein and Svoboda waited. Then they heard the sound of a toilet flushing and Nagy emerged, buttoning her pants. Svoboda—who remained silent throughout the crime, lest the guards recognize her voice—waved her gun. Nagy joined her colleague on the floor.

Einstein took a key ring from Sivgin’s jacket pocket and handed it to Svoboda, who exited to the street, removing her goggles and lifting her mask as she went. She opened the back door of the Loomis van. Inside were nearly twenty locked cases, each containing about 160,000 euros. While Einstein watched the guards, Svoboda unlatched the cases with a second key and began shoving the money into giant duffel bags. It was slow work. At one point, an old man walked up and asked her how long the ATM would be out of service. “Longer,” Svoboda replied.

Inside the vestibule, Einstein threatened the guards with execution in broken, accented German. Later, at trial, Sivgin would recall Einstein exclaiming “death” over and over: “Death! Death! No police, no talking! We know everything! Death!” Occasionally, Einstein would bark nonsense into a walkie-talkie—“Da! Da! Da! Go! Go! Go!”—to give the impression that other accomplices were outside.

After Svoboda finished loading the cash, Einstein exited the vestibule and lugged the bulging duffel bags to his SEAT. Then he picked up a bucket, used the vestibule’s bathroom to fill it with soap and water, and dumped it on the guards, to make it harder for police to gather evidence. Before he left, Einstein bent down and hissed into Nagy’s ear that he knew where she lived. Then he and Svoboda slipped into the night.

As they sped away, Svoboda, suddenly overwhelmed, burst out laughing. “My adrenaline, once I was in the car, was so intense,” she told me. “I was caught in a fit of laughter, tears and all, because I simply didn’t know where to channel all those emotions.” After driving a few miles, she and Einstein parked in an alley, changed, and stuffed their clothes, their weapons, and the stolen keys into a garbage bag, which they threw into a dumpster. Einstein then dropped Svoboda off at a gas station, where she called a taxi. On the ride home, Svoboda passed the scene of the crime. Police were already there, blue lights flashing. Back at her apartment, Svoboda fell asleep a little after 4 a.m., but she didn’t rest long. She had to wake up a few hours later for a first-aid course—preparation for the move to Africa.

As agreed, Svoboda had taken a thousand euros from the haul—she was still unemployed, and the cash would help her cover expenses. The rest of the money remained with Einstein. Once he got home, he transferred the money from the bags into three suitcases. His family would be driving to Carinthia, a mountainous state in the eastern Alps, to celebrate Christmas with his wife’s parents. As they packed the minivan, his wife noticed the suitcases. Einstein explained that they contained business documents. When they arrived in Carinthia, he hauled the bags up to his in-laws’ attic, then joined his family for dinner.

Einstein kept hoping he’d suddenly wake up and realize that the robbery had been a ridiculous dream. He wondered if there was some way to return the money without getting into trouble.

In the months leading up to the heist, Einstein had felt an uncanny serenity. But once he’d succeeded, the enormity of the crime rose up and struck him like a tidal wave. From the minute he was back at his apartment, Einstein would later tell me, he was “nervous, nervous, nervous.” While he cared about his plans for Blue Sky Village, committing a historically large armed robbery to support the project now felt impossibly foolish. How had he not seen it before? “I was thinking it was the biggest mistake in my life,” he said.

On the afternoon of December 23, a distraught-sounding Heinz Marek called Einstein to inform him that there had been a robbery, an enormous one. He called again a day later and said that investigators had discovered a clue. There was a camera in the ATM that took a photograph every three seconds whenever the machine was being refilled. (This was a new security feature, one Svoboda hadn’t known about.) The images from the robbed vehicle, Marek confided, indicated that one of the thieves might be a woman. He explained that the heist was so well planned, there was little question that one of the perpetrators was a Loomis employee. The police were already considering female suspects.

Einstein was dumbstruck and suddenly nauseated by the thought of getting caught. Christmas Eve, when Austrians open presents, was usually his favorite night of the year—after all, it was entirely about giving. But that evening, Einstein felt no joy watching his youngest son unwrap toys. Uncharacteristically, he drank a lot of beer, trying to forget about the danger he’d placed himself in. His guts were in an uproar, forcing him to use the bathroom constantly. “It was a fucking feeling,” he told me later.

Lying in bed early Christmas morning, a jittery Einstein heard a noise outside and thought it was the police, but it was only the newspaper carrier. His wife said he looked nervous and stone-faced, and she asked him what was wrong. Einstein wanted to tell her the truth, but doing so would make her an accomplice. So he shrugged, saying that he didn’t know. When he returned to Vienna the next day, his two elder children came to his apartment and noticed him glancing nervously out the window.

In a panic, Einstein decided that he would give away some of the money as quickly as possible. He told me that he shoved tens of thousands of euros into the mailboxes of needy neighbors and a church. (This was never confirmed by authorities.) But he was still left with millions, and the crisp bills felt increasingly radioactive.

Svoboda, meanwhile, was suffering a similar if less perceptible breakdown. She’d later tell me that she recalled the days after the robbery only vaguely, because she had experienced a sort of “blackout.” She spent Christmas with her brother, who subsequently said that he’d noticed nothing unusual about her. Svoboda and Einstein had agreed to avoid speaking for a month following the heist, but after a week she left a note on his windshield urging him to contact her on a new burner phone. She signed the note “Robin H.”

After Christmas, Marek reached out to Einstein again and said that he wanted to speak about the case in person. On December 29, they met in the lobby of the lavish Grand Hotel Wien. Einstein was wary. It had been unclear on the phone whether Marek wanted help with the investigation or considered him a suspect. At the hotel, Marek revealed that the police’s prime suspect was none other than his own former mistress, Tamara Svoboda. Dora Nagy had told authorities that the robber’s small stature made her think of Svoboda even before she saw the photographs from the ATM. The police had since placed a GPS tracker on Svoboda’s car, hoping that she would lead them to the money.

Einstein, feeling dizzy, tried his best to act surprised. Spiraling into paranoia, he wondered whether Marek himself was in on the crime and had worked with Svoboda to set him up. Wasn’t it convenient, he thought, that Svoboda had claimed she and Marek had broken up right before coaxing him into committing the crime? That her access codes continued to work even after she left Loomis? (Call records would later show that Svoboda and Marek had remained in contact after the end of their relationship, although there’s no indication that Marek knew anything about the heist.)

Einstein, usually so magnanimous, suddenly felt that no one deserved his trust. Still, he called Svoboda at the number she’d left to tell her she was a suspect and that police might be following her. He assured her that the evidence was circumstantial at best. There was no proof linking either of them to the crime—only a guard’s hunch that the woman in the photos might be Svoboda. He urged her to keep quiet.

Svoboda drove her car to a maintenance garage, and sure enough a strange device was under the hood. To avoid further suspicion, she left the tracker in place but decided to use public transportation for a while. Days passed, and Svoboda entertained the idea that the police had lost interest in her.

Then, on the morning of January 10, federal officers smashed in the door of her apartment with a battering ram and rolled in a flash-bang grenade, which exploded with a deafening crack. The police hauled her out of bed and placed her under arrest. A cash-detection dog, trained to sniff out large sums of money, was brought in. It found the last 270 euros Svoboda had from the robbery. She had hidden the bills in a vacuum cleaner.

Questioned by police, Svoboda at first claimed to have been home alone at the time of the robbery. After hours of interrogation, she changed her story. She had participated in the robbery, she admitted, but under duress. Implausible details spilled out of her: Two masked men had threatened to kill her nephew and her former lover, Heinz Marek, if she didn’t help them commit the robbery—which she had done, reluctantly. The investigators were skeptical. Sliding across photos of a number of Loomis employees, they asked Svoboda if any of them were her accomplice, reminding her that the court would look favorably on her cooperation. Feeling hopeless, she finally told the police the truth.

Einstein had wondered whether Svoboda might turn on him. After she was arrested, Marek had called to let him know that she was in custody. Einstein didn’t think Svoboda would withstand the pressure of an interrogation. He told me he kept hoping he’d suddenly wake up and realize that the robbery had been a ridiculous dream. He wondered if there was some way to return the money without getting into trouble.

On the night of January 11, Einstein and his wife were in bed when they heard a rumbling on the street below. Einstein got up and looked out the window. He saw a swarm of officers, some of them former colleagues in WEGA who were now working for the federal police. Turning to his wife, Einstein calmly explained that he’d been responsible for the Loomis robbery and was about to be arrested. He gave her a kiss, then invited the officers inside and allowed himself to be handcuffed. “It was a huge relief when I was arrested,” Einstein wrote me later. Breaking the rules had knocked him off his axis, but the law had reasserted itself, and he could begin to live with the consequences.

Both Svoboda and Einstein pled guilty to two charges: unlawful deprivation of liberty—for restraining the guards—and aggravated robbery. At their sentencing six months after the heist, they learned that the crime had not been as victimless as they’d imagined. The guards testified that they were terrified, fearing Einstein would shoot them in the back of the head at any moment. They remained traumatized; Nagy had taken a leave of absence.

In court, Einstein and Svoboda covered their faces with file folders to avoid being photographed. Both hoped they would be shown leniency. Svoboda, for her part, told the court that she “was in a deep hole at the time,” and that Einstein was her lifeline. She trusted him completely. While admitting responsibility, Einstein told the judge that he was driven to commit the crime by the awful poverty he had witnessed in Gabon and the refusal of Austria’s rich to fund his vision for Blue Sky Village.

The judge, Claudia Zöllner, was unmoved by claims of noble motives. The abstract idea of saving children, she said, was “not a reason worthy of respect” for committing a serious criminal offense. Einstein and Svoboda were both sentenced to eight years in prison—severe by Austrian standards.

Through tears, Einstein told the court, “I was so obsessed with my dream of helping children that I didn’t even consider my family anymore.” The fallout was painful. When Einstein’s brother, who had become a lawyer for the Austrian state police, read about the case, he cut off Einstein completely. During his incarceration, Einstein’s second wife would divorce him, and he would have only limited contact with his children. “One minute I want to hug him,” his son Florian told me one day at Café Schwartzenberg, “the next I want to hit him.”

Einstein and Svoboda were able to exchange brief snippets of conversation in court, but Einstein cut off communication with his accomplice soon after sentencing. Svoboda sent him Christmas and Easter cards but received no response. Einstein had come to blame her for talking him into the crime, even as she maintained that he had been the one to persuade her.

On some level, Einstein remained puzzled about his own reasons for staging the robbery. In a letter he sent me from prison, he wrote that he could only conclude he had been temporarily crazed by “eine sozialen uberwahn”—a social delusion. “I was blinded by the ‘good deed’ to help other humans and unfortunately did not realize the scope of my unjust and indictable actions,” he explained. “I did not see that injustice cannot be resolved by further injustice.”

Einstein said that he had been motivated purely by altruism, by a wish to do maximal good. But while his fantasy of Blue Sky Village was one of saving children, it was also about being needed—about building an entire community to which he could give, endlessly. Schmidbauer, the psychologist who defined helper syndrome, noted that while those afflicted with the condition enjoyed the social approval of selfless acts, there was also a hint of narcissism in their charity—the need to have a fragile sense of self continually burnished by good deeds.

Though he had modeled his actions on Robin Hood, upon closer examination Einstein more closely resembled the vexed protagonist of a Joseph Conrad novel: mortified by colonial—or, in this case, postcolonial—horrors, but also, in helping train the police force in an authoritarian country, perpetuating them. In seeking to do what he believed was right and good, Einstein seemed to have cast himself in the patronizing role of the white savior.

I once asked Einstein if he regretted taking the job in Gabon, for what it had done to him. He shook his head. He said the experience had showed him that if he could “get a lot of money,” it was possible to “give something back to people.” To his mind, the logic was simple: Austria is rich, and people in Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and other African countries would benefit from having that wealth redistributed. The problem was that no one seemed willing to do it but him.

“A crime remains a crime, even if the intention behind it is noble,” Einstein wrote.

Throughout their confinement, both Einstein and Svoboda recounted to me, proudly, of having given food and clothing to fellow inmates. Svoboda drew on her athletic skills to provide fitness classes for other prisoners. Einstein was transferred from Josefstadt to Stein, another high-security prison, after his sentencing. There he was assigned to keep the books for inmate commissary accounts. He often drew on his personal savings, he told me, to loan money interest-free to those who needed it.

Incarceration was difficult for the ex-cop, however. The prisoners at Stein considered him a traitor. This put him in constant danger, and it was nearly impossible to make friends. Eventually, he was transferred to a minimum-security prison an hour outside Vienna, situated in the countryside among Riesling vineyards.

When I visited, the facility’s design—low-slung dormitories surrounded by a whitewashed parapet—reminded me of an Italian inn. Einstein and I decided to sit on the lawn in the summer sun; after ducking into the communal kitchen, he emerged with a bottle of sparkling water and two coffees. I remarked that security seemed only notional. The prison’s exterior bulwark appeared squat enough that it could almost be jumped. “The walls,” Einstein replied, squinting, “they are really for the eyes.” He explained that the prison operated according to an honor system—incarcerated Austrians were trusted to follow the rules and not run away.

Einstein and Svoboda were both released on probation at the end of 2018, to lives that looked very different than before the robbery. Einstein got a job working for an old client from his private-security days, manufacturing upholstery for luxury SUVs. He threw himself into work, seeking to earn enough to support his children and occasionally donate to charities. He’d had a change of heart about such organizations; his favorite was called SOS Children’s Villages, dedicated to building orphanages in, among other places, Africa.

After Svoboda was released, she moved to a small town and began working in funeral services, preparing bodies for burial. She enjoyed the job, helping families in a moment of need. When refugees from Ukraine streamed into her community after Russia’s invasion in 2022, she organized distributions of donated clothing. Today she helps care for a neighbor in a wheelchair and finds homes for stray cats, many of which she tends to herself, selling odds and ends at flea markets to pay for their food. “Saying no, unfortunately, still doesn’t exist for me,” she wrote to me. “A friend of mine helps me coordinate my helper syndrome so that it’s done in a healthy way and I’m not exploited.” If Svoboda starts giving too much, the friend steps in.

In 2022, Einstein suffered severe burnout from overwork, and was later briefly hospitalized. People with helper syndrome, Schmidbauer noted, were particularly vulnerable to workaholism, because they hid difficult feelings under actions. Einstein told me he had come to realize that he’d spent years running from his past. He took some time to rest and saw a therapist.

When last we communicated, he said that he felt nothing but regret about the heist. “A crime remains a crime, even if the intention behind it is noble,” he wrote. Nor were the personal costs worth it. In seeking to give as much as possible, he ended up losing “many valuable and beautiful things.” Still, he found himself looking for ways to assist others. “Helping poor and vulnerable people will always be a part of me,” he wrote, “only now a little more distanced and with less emotion toward the situations of those affected.”

But Einstein had still not given up on his plans for Blue Sky Village. He continued to put aside money in the hope of one day seeing it come to fruition. “It’s my lifelong dream,” he wrote. “Only when it’s fulfilled will I leave this planet.”

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