It was a heist straight out of a Hollywood movie script, but experts said the team of burglars who broke into a GardaWorld facility on Easter Sunday and stole $30 million could soon “crack in” and “turn on each other” could turn around’.
Although the FBI and Los Angeles Police Department have remained tight-lipped on details surrounding the burglary of the cash storage facility on Roxford Street in Sylmar, California, multiple 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 in this that there’s going to be some kind 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 share I was promised.’
He continued, “It’ll only be a matter of time before they start rolling on each other. They will definitely turn on each other because someone will crack.”
Moses said that to bypass sophisticated alarms typically found in cash storage facilities such as GardaWorld, someone with inside access or in-depth knowledge of the security system had to be involved.
“This was so planned and sophisticated that they may have even listened in on radio calls to police to see if they were on their way,” the former detective said.
Law enforcement experts said the burglars had an elaborate plan to pull off the largest heist in the city’s history.
Law enforcement experts said it will be ‘a matter of time’ before the mysterious group of burglars ‘roll into 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 amazes me is that you would think that the sensors in the building would be enough to set off alarms for police to respond, which tells me that someone was able to disarm that entire surveillance system in the building,” Stephenson said.
“That would be an inside engineering problem and someone could blow up and destroy that system, but that certainly requires a lot of access to insider data and intelligence.”
Data obtained by DailyMail.com shows that LAPD responded to a total of 21 calls at the Sylmar facility between January 2020 and March 31, 2024, but 80 percent of the false 911 calls were made in the past two years.
Records also show that GardaWorld’s 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 911 calls at the Sylmar building, including one at 4:46 am. The alarm was reported to GardaWorld supervisors, but it is unclear whether the police who responded to the call found anything.
There was a second emergency call on Easter Sunday at 7.22am and police responded 45 minutes later, but deemed the call a ‘valid alarm’.
Much of the wall on the south side of the GardaWorld facility was blown away.
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 the space of a few months should have alerted GardaWorld regulators.
“If I was the supervisor of that building, I would make sure I checked the entire system because it’s concerning to have multiple false alarms every few months,” Stephenson said. ‘I would take a closer look at the security procedures they have in place and retrain the staff.
“The fact that they’ve had so many problems over the last few years tells me that there was definitely a system-wide outage even before the break-in.”
Issa Alhosry, 22, co-owner of the nearby Kwik Market Deli, told DailyMail.com that their Wi-Fi, phones and servers were down for hours that Sunday morning and well into the evening.
“We couldn’t make or receive calls, even on my cell phone,” Alhosry recalls.
However, Alhosry said he never heard an alarm go off at the GardaWorld facility that day.
The GardaWorld alarm went off for the third time on Easter Sunday at 3:51 p.m., but the incident was recorded as a false alarm by police who responded to the call, according to LAPD call logs.
The burglars probably entered the building through a roof hatch. The group then somehow blew up part of the south side 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 distinct loud “boom” around 8:30 PM that Sunday.
FBI and LAPD officials remained tight-lipped about the details of the investigation
GardaWorld did not respond to requests for comment from DailyMail.com
“I was taking a shower when I suddenly heard an explosion,” said the woman, who wished to remain anonymous. “It was so loud it reverberated. I got out of the shower and asked my husband, “What was that noise?”
The couple ignored the loud bang because “random explosions” are common in the block, which is largely an industrial area next to a train track.
“Things are just blowing up here and then you also have the train coming through and shaking our houses,” she said.
Residents of the mobile home park, who live directly across from the south side of the GardaWorld building, said they heard no alarms from the facility, but many of them were not home since it was Easter Sunday.
Stephenson said the group of burglars most likely specifically targeted the GardaWorld facility during a weekend holiday, when most businesses would be employing fewer people 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 “sit” on $30 million, which could cause a rift with this group of expert burglars.
“Time is against them, and time will get them eventually,” Stephenson said.
“You can only maintain the discipline of having that much cash as an issue like a jealous wife or a jealous boyfriend saying, ‘Hey, this guy was part of that.’
‘Their downfall will be a combination of police surveillance or informants with an ax to grind. The longer it goes on, the more recognizable they also become as they become more comfortable and start spending large sums of that money. It’s human nature.’