No, in real life thieves don't need helicopters or EMP devices to pull off shit bigger than anything you've seen on the silver screen. You just need a ridiculous plan and the balls to carry it out.

Everyone loves a good heist movie. And it's easy to see why, what with all the exciting chases involving tiny British cars, the hacking of The Man's mainframe, and the giant, balls-to-the-wall helicopter battles over Los Angeles. But that kind of stuff doesn't happen in real life.

5 A French Gang Tunnels Into a Bank Vault, Has a Party Inside

Archives historiques Societe Generale

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One day back in the late 1970s, French photographer and former Vietnam War paratrooper Albert Spaggiari got up and said, "You know what? Wedding photos really aren't my 'thing.'" So he gathered up a group of professionals including some former paratrooper pals, an attempted assassin, and a jewelry appraiser, and he planned up a heist that, if successful, would land every last one of them on the swanky end of Easy Street. Over a long weekend due to Bastille Day (you know, that holiday named after the Rush song), the group would clean out the vault of the Societe Generale bank.

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Societe Generale: currently, France's most feared general.

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For months, the men pulled 10-hour night shifts to dig a 30-foot tunnel under downtown Nice, digging at the snail-like pace of six inches per night. Then, on July 16, 1976, the team finally busted through the outer wall of the bank vault ... and, due to a slight miscalculation, right into the back of a massive bank of safety deposit boxes. That was nothing a little quick thinking (and a stolen car jack) couldn't fix, however, and they were soon inside -- and that's when they transformed from successful bank burglars into downright obnoxious ones.

See, once they got in there, they welded the vault's door shut from the inside and presumably donned their striped sailor shirts and red berets while laughing like "oh-hoh-hoh-hoh," busting out the bread, cheese, and pate, and having themselves a full-on Frenchman party. They popped bottles of wine and drank it from priceless chalices; when the urge struck, they dropped big ol' deuces into antique silver tureens. Oh, and somehow, during all that, they also found time to break into hundreds of safety deposit boxes and retrieve "$8 million to $10 million in gold, cash, jewelry and gems."

Archives historiques Societe Generale

And silver. Specifically, silverware, which they used to eat their brie.

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As might be expected with such a ridiculously audacious crime, it didn't take authorities long to catch up with Spaggiari and force a confession out of him -- but they hadn't seen "audacious" just yet. While at the magistrate's office, he complained about the heat and asked if he could open a window. When his wish was inexplicably granted, the Spagster jumped out the window, landed on the roof of a car 10 feet below, then hopped onto the back of a speeding motorcycle, presumably throwing up an exaggerated bras d'honneur as he zoomed away.