It was a heist straight out of a Hollywood movie script, but experts said the team of thieves who broke into a Gardaworld facility on Easter Sunday and stole $30 million could soon “go bankrupt” and against others.”
While the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department have remained tight-lipped about details about the raid at the cash storage facility on Roxford Street in Sylmar, California, several law enforcement experts who spoke to DailyMail.com said the incident points to an inside job made possible by a “system-wide failure.”
“There’s so much money involved here that there’s going to be some kind of internal conflict,” said former Los Angeles Police Department investigator Moisés Castillo. ‘At some point, someone in this group will want more money and say, ‘Hey, you didn’t give me the portion you promised me.’
He continued: ‘It will only be a matter of time before they start attacking each other. They will surely turn on each other because someone will snap.
Moses said that to avoid the sophisticated alarms typically found in money storage facilities like GardaWorld, someone with inside access or intimate knowledge of the security system had to have been involved.
“This was so planned and sophisticated that they could have even monitored radio calls to police to see if they were on their way,” the former detective said.
Police experts said the thieves had an intricate plan to carry out the biggest robbery in the city’s history.
Law enforcement experts said it will be a “matter of time” before the mysterious group of thieves “run over each other” and their plans fall apart.
Former FBI investigator Charles Stephenson, an expert in crime scene security and recreation, said that while companies like GardaWorld are expected to have high levels of security, many do not regularly test their own systems.
“What surprises me is that you would think that the sensors inside the building would be enough to set off the alarms for the police to respond, which tells me that someone was able to disarm the entire surveillance system in the building,” Stephenson said.
“That would be an internal engineering problem and someone could blow up and defeat that system, but that definitely requires a lot of access to internal data and intelligence.”
Records obtained by DailyMail.com showed that the LAPD responded to a total of 21 calls for service at the Sylmar facility from January 2020 to March 31, 2024, but 80 percent of the false alarm calls were made in the last two years.
Records also show that the GardaWorld alarm went off at 11.30pm the night before Easter Sunday, but was recorded as a false alarm.
On Easter Sunday, the day of the robbery, 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 whether police who responded to the call found anything.
There was a second alarm call on Easter Sunday at 7:22 a.m. and police responded 45 minutes later, but deemed the call a “valid alarm.”
A large section of the wall at the southern end of the GardaWorld facility was destroyed.
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 were the supervisor of that building, I would make sure to review the entire system because it is concerning to receive several false alarms every few months,” Stephenson said. ‘I would better study the security procedures they have in place and re-educate staff.
“The fact that they’ve had so many problems over the last few years tells me that there was definitely a failure in the entire system even before the robbery.”
Issa Alhosry, 22, co-owner of the nearby Kwik Market Deli, told DailyMail.com that her WiFi, phones and servers were down for hours that Sunday morning and into the evening.
“We couldn’t receive or make calls, not even from my cell phone,” Alhosry recalled.
However, Alhosry said he never heard any alarms go off at the GardaWorld facility that day.
The GardaWorld alarm sounded again for the third time at 3:51 p.m. on Easter Sunday, but police recorded the incident as a false alarm and responded to the call, according to LAPD call logs.
The team of thieves are believed to have entered the premises through a roof hatch. The group then somehow blew up a portion of the south end of the building where the vaults are located.
A woman who lives in the nearby Tahitian Mobile Home Park told DailyMail.com that she was in the shower when she heard a loud, distinctive “boom” around 8:30 p.m. that Sunday.
FBI and LAPD officials have remained tight-lipped about details of the investigation.
GardaWorld has not responded to DailyMail.com’s comment questions
“I was taking a shower when I suddenly heard an explosion,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous. ‘It was so loud that she resonated. I got out of the shower and asked my husband, “What was that noise?”
The couple dismissed the loud bang as “random explosions” often occur on the block, which is largely an industrial area next to a train track.
“Things just explode around here and then the train comes and shakes our houses,” he said.
Residents of the mobile home park who live directly across the south end of the GardaWorld building said they did not hear any alarms coming from the facility, but many of them were not at home as it was Easter Sunday.
Stephenson said the group of thieves most likely targeted the GardaWorld premises specifically over a holiday weekend, when most businesses would have fewer staff and surrounding businesses would also be closed.
FBI officials told DailyMail.com on Friday that their investigation is ongoing, but declined to comment further.
Stephenson said it would be difficult to keep $30 million, which could cause a rift with this group of expert thieves.
“Time is against them and they will eventually be defeated,” Stephenson said.
“You can only maintain that discipline of having that amount of cash when someone like a jealous wife or a jealous friend says, ‘Hey, this guy was part of that.'”
‘Their downfall will be a combination of police surveillance work or informants who have a special interest. The more time passes, the more relatable they become too as they start to feel more comfortable and start spending large sums of that money. It’s human nature.’
