The Plan
According to information later gleaned from Joseph "Specs" O'Keefe, Joseph "Big Joe" McGinnis was the originator of the heist. He brought Atonia "Fat" Pino, and Stanley "Gus" Gusciora.
Secretly, O'Keefe and Gusciora entered the Brink's depot; they picked the outside lock with an ice pick and the inner door with a piece of plastic. Later, they temporarily removed the cylinders from the five locks, one at a time, so that a locksmith could make duplicate keys for them. Once this was done, Pino recruited seven other men, including Pino's brother-in-law Vincent Costa, Michael Vincent "Vinnie" Geagan, Thomas Francis Richardson, Adolph "Jazz" Maffie, Henry Baker, James Faherty, and Joseph "Barney" Banfield.
The gang decided to wait for the optimal time for their heist. Pino studied schedules and was able to determine what the staff was doing based on the lights in the building windows. O'Keefe and Gusciora even stole the plans for the site alarms. The gang members entered the building on practice runs after the staff had left for the day. Costa monitored the depot from a room of a neighboring tenement building, exactly across from the Brinks building on Prince Street. By the time they acted, the gang had been planning and training for two years.
Read more about this topic: Great Brink's Robbery
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