Driver comes forward to discuss security follies of 1999 Loomis heist / Robbers climbed cash truck, cut a hole in the roof and made off with $2.3 million

It was a daring, ingenious and baffling crime -- $2.3 million in cash spirited from a truck cruising down Interstate 80 without any of the three guards accompanying the shipment suspecting a thing.

On the rainy night of March 24, 1999, sometime during the hour it took the Loomis, Fargo & Co. big rig to drive from Sacramento to the Cordelia truck scales in Solano County, someone pulled a high-risk heist that would have given the boldest stuntman pause.

"I cannot think of any similar case nationwide," said Nick Rossi, spokesman for the FBI's Sacramento office. "It almost harkens back to train robberies and stagecoach robberies."

No one has ever been arrested in the theft. But now, more than two years later, Howard Brown, the driver of the truck, has gone public with questions about the security that the nation's largest armored car company provided for the trip.

According to Brown -- who was fired soon after the robbery after complaining for years about safety -- Loomis made a poor security decision just months before the heist, a choice that may have unwittingly helped the thief or thieves pull off the ultimate inside job.

was the first guard on the Loomis truck that night to spot something wrong after the rig pulled into San Francisco -- a large jagged hole cut in the roof of the semi, right over currency tubs that two hours earlier had been loaded with stacks of $100, $50 and $20 bills.

Now the tubs were empty.

Bettencourt called to Brown, using the 32-year veteran driver's college nickname: "Hamp, Hamp, come here. By God, a meteor hit us."

Standing in the Loomis depot, the 58-year-old Brown knew no act of God could explain why 270 pounds of cash were missing from the back of the semi he had driven without incident for years.

Feeling queasy, his blood pressure rising, Brown realized the first robbery in his career was turning out to be a doozy.

For years, Loomis shipped thousands of pounds of coins from its hub branch in Sacramento to San Francisco. Loomis, according to Brown and other guards, figured there wasn't much chance someone would try to rob the shipments, which contained a relatively meager amount of money.

Sometime in the early 1990s, Loomis decided it would be more cost-effective to include large amounts of paper money with the coin shipments and to carry it in an unarmored semi.

Brown and Bettencourt had handled dozens of such shipments. The run was routine: just a few stoplights from the Loomis depot to I-80, then a straight shot in the slow lane to the truck scales in Cordelia.

After clearing weigh-in, the truck would travel to Loomis' San Francisco branch, where the cash would be loaded into a vault.

As the truck rolled out of Sacramento that night, Bettencourt was locked into an armored compartment behind Brown and another guard, Ken Montgomery, who declined to comment for this story.

The semi's trailer had sides and a roof made of thin aluminum. Unlike the cab, it was not armored. And only the tall rear doors were wired to an alarm.

When they arrived in San Francisco, Bettencourt unlocked the back doors. "My eyes just kind of looked up at the ceiling of the truck," he said. "The hole had a very jagged shape with the edges pointed down into the truck. It was not a very cleanly cut hole. It had a trapdoor-type of look to it."

Bettencourt believes that the thief jumped from the roof of the Loomis branch in Sacramento onto the truck as it pulled out around 8:30 p.m. The thief could have quickly cut his way in, selected the high-value bills and tossed bags packed with cash onto the roadside where they could be retrieved with little risk of detection.

The robber apparently counted on the truck stopping at the scales in Cordelia, "something we didn't do all the time but 99 percent of the time," Bettencourt said. It gave the thief the chance to shinny down the back of the trailer, leaving footprints behind on the rear doors.

Within minutes of learning of the robbery, Loomis officials called the FBI. Brown, Bettencourt and Montgomery were ordered by the company not to tell a soul, not even their families.

There were few clues, the best being reports from two motorists who saw a man dressed in dark clothing drop from the top of the truck during the quick stop at Cordelia and run into a field.

Authorities kept quiet for two months, then went public, hoping headlines would generate better leads. Not much came of it.

Last year, in an attempt to jump-start the investigation, the FBI revealed one of the few pieces of evidence recovered -- an empty Dutch military duffel bag snagged under a load of coins in the back of the truck. But the trail remained cold.

What investigators and officials at Loomis did not reveal was a decision made by the company several months before the robbery to stop sending cars to shadow the semi between San Francisco and Sacramento.

"They pulled the chase cars," Brown said during a recent interview at his San Francisco apartment. "Why they did it, they never said. I had always asked for a chase truck."

Officials with Loomis declined to comment specifically on security the night of the robbery, but said chase cars are rotated to cover large cash shipments throughout the state.

For security reasons, the company does not tell its guards when a chase car will be used, although Brown said he always knew when one was following his truck.

The FBI won't talk about Loomis' security measures. But Rick Smith, a former FBI agent and now a security consultant, said, "To cut the chase car, that's a mistake. You have to have the right manpower."

One step Loomis has taken since the robbery is getting rid of "soft skin" aluminum-sided trailers such as the one Brown was hauling. The company was already replacing them with armored models.

"This was one of the very few we had left," said Mike Tawney, an executive vice president at Loomis. "This may have been the last truck."

Tawney conceded that the theft was most likely aided by someone at Loomis.

"In most robberies, there is almost always inside information," Tawney said.

"Whoever did it, did an excellent job of planning."

Investigators have no good description of their suspect.

"He was a Houdini in my mind," Bettencourt said. "This is the most daring robbery I can imagine. He did this without us even having a clue. Everything that he needed to go right, did go right."

Brown spoke at length with the FBI, and he and the other guards were cleared as suspects. But Brown -- a stickler for safety who never hesitated to tell his bosses when he thought they were wrong -- refused to hand over to the company the shoes he was wearing the night of the robbery, especially after the FBI said they weren't needed. He says he had no faith in the company's internal security unit.

Brown requested and was granted a transfer to a day route making pick-ups and drops. In June 1999, he refused to work with a supervisor who was not licensed to carry a firearm, and Loomis fired him.

An arbitrator refused earlier this year to order him reinstated. Brown said he had decided to speak publicly about the robbery out of concern that Loomis is putting its guards in jeopardy and unfairly fired him.

Over the years, Brown said, the number of pick-ups or drops to ATMs for Loomis guards has increased while the number of guards assigned to work them has been cut from three to two.

"I argued and argued and argued all the time about safety," Brown said. "A supervisor said I better get used to it. I said, 'I'm not going to get used to dying.' I've seen too many people killed."

Among the victims Brown worked with were three Loomis guards shot to death during a botched robbery at the company's Vallejo branch in 1991 and a guard killed in a 1995 Sonoma robbery.

Loomis officials won't talk about Brown's case, but they do defend their safety measures. Tawney said the company has improved security for its cash shipments while minimizing risks for its guards.

"We've made huge inroads in loss prevention in the last few years," Tawney said.

Bettencourt, who still works part-time for Loomis, said the 1999 robbery was a "wake-up call for me."

"Now when I look at the truck," he said, "I look up."