When the sun rose on Handan the next morning, local lottery officials received an urgent message from provincial headquarters. Sales that week had shattered records. By the middle of the month, Handan had raked in ¥40 million, four times last year’s receipts for all of April.

More shocking: The day before, on April 14 — the day Ren and Ma robbed the bank — lottery sales hit ¥15.4 million, breaking the daily record and putting Handan squarely in first place, passing Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital with an urban population three times larger.

China had been rocked by embarrassing lottery frauds before. Corrupt officials were now using the lottery to launder money as well. The sudden surge in sales merited an official note: Congratulations. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.

The city’s taxi drivers were the first to find out. Around 2 a.m. on April 17, a cabbie working the night shift spotted police cruisers parked outside the bank. He radioed the handful of drivers working late: Police had cordoned off the street.

As dawn broke, more cabbies passed the bank, barking updates into the radio and to the city’s thousands of taxi drivers. Passengers overheard the chatter and brought the gossip into their offices, carrying word of the robbery deeper into the city’s bloodstream.

After Ren and Ma had met outside the old hospital to divvy up the remaining cash, they skipped town. On Monday morning, two days later, bank employees became suspicious when neither man appeared for work. A manager tried to call them. Both men’s cell phones were turned off.

The vault itself was locked: only Ren and Ma had keys. Stunned, confused, and then, terrified, bank officials delayed calling the police. A bank director later said he wanted to track down the rogue employees himself without involving authorities. As long as the vault remained closed, some alternate explanation for the sudden disappearance of his two vault managers, however remote the odds, still existed.

When bank managers finally called the police, officers broke through the steel door. Bank officials entered to find their worst fears realized: They’d been robbed. Inside, they found a plastic bag filled with bundles of losing lottery tickets. Why Ren would have left them remains a mystery — a taunt, perhaps, or absentmindedness, or merely a plea for forgiveness: Hey, at least the state-owned bank’s money went to the state-owned lottery.

That morning, word spread so quickly through the taxi radio network that state-run media couldn’t ignore the story any longer. By midday, radio stations reported basic details of the case. By nighttime, local TV beamed the news around the province. Newspaper reporters from around the country descended. The Chinese press rarely reports truthfully on official corruption, then and now, which made the media frenzy all the more remarkable.

It was official: Ren and Ma had stolen ¥51 million, worth $6.6 million. They were now the most prolific bank robbers in Chinese history. And they were still at large.

Newspapers around China published stories speculating how Ren and Ma could have pulled it off. They had lugged out more than 3,300 pounds of cash, journalists reported, a figure that an expert later revised upward because accumulated dirt on the bills would have added another 600 pounds. Journalists swarmed Ren and Ma’s hometowns. Many villagers said Ma was an honest man, and their initial reaction was doubt.

“No matter how much guts you gave him,” one said, “he couldn’t have done this.”

The robbery even earned a segment on China Central Television’s nightly news broadcast with 135 million regular viewers. Handan residents were almost proud that their tiny city had made national headlines. Online, commenters were aghast at the bank’s slipshod security, but others couldn’t help but cheer on Ren and Ma, the Robin Hood gang of Handan. Internet chat rooms filled with rumors that they had already fled the country.

In Beijing, one of Ma’s childhood friends, Ma Hailin, was selling apples, peaches, and pears at a streetside stand near Capital Airport one morning when he opened a copy of the Beijing Times. A small item from Hebei, his home province, caught his eye. As he read, Ma Hailin saw the name of his tiny home county, Linzhang.

“Hold on,” he said to himself. Staring back at him was the name of his childhood friend — the successful one with the school teacher wife and the fancy bank job. He read in disbelief.

By the time the police broke down the vault door, Ren and Ma were long gone.

After parting ways at the hospital, Ma took a long-distance sleeper coach to Beijing, and then a public bus to the outskirts of the city. All around him, the capital was transforming itself. Traditional alleyways known as hutongs were demolished. New Olympic sports stadiums went up. Cartoon dolls with names like Beibei and Jingjing — the official mascots of the Games — were plastered everywhere. Ma himself had partially bankrolled the construction boom with his lottery losses.

Ma arrived at a small slum outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road. An old army buddy, Song Changhai, lived there with his wife. He let Ma spend the night, and then helped him rent a small room in the neighborhood.

Ren made haste too, but was careful to cover his tracks. Handan police found the escape van abandoned in an alley. Inside there were only a few empty bags.

Handan police set up a tip hotline. In the first day, they received 10,000 calls from Chinese citizens hoping to claim the ¥200,000 reward for Ren and Ma’s capture. As soon as detectives hung up on a caller, the phone rang again. Officers struggled to keep their mobile phones topped up with enough credit to field long-distance calls.

Police around the country were on the case too. Hundreds of miles southeast, Ren Xiaofeng carried his luggage into the Nanjing railway station. A passenger overheard him identifying himself at the ticket window, and officers grabbed him. But it was the wrong Ren Xiaofeng. Police at the train station nabbed two more Ren Xiaofengs that day, each time the wrong man. In a country of 1.3 billion people, more than 4.2 million have the surname Ren.

The real Ren Xiaofeng had planned more cleverly. After he abandoned the van, he drove east in a Volkswagen Jetta carrying ¥3.3 million, plus a fake ID, several more IDs from family members and coworkers, burner phones, and roadmaps — all of which he had purchased or stolen days earlier in case the lottery balls didn’t bounce his way. He avoided highways with security cameras and took side roads.

Ren arrived in Dezhou, ditched the car, then paid a taxi driver ¥300 to drive him to Rizhao, a small city south of the port of Qingdao. He spent the night, then took another taxi south to Lianyungang, a small coastal city.

As he fled, Ren ate little — he had no appetite. He could barely sleep either. But when he scoured the newspaper for reports of his escape, his eyes drifted helplessly to the box of lottery results. On the road, he watched small-town lottery shops drift past the window.

“My hand was itching to buy more,” he said later.

And he did: a few final, futile offerings to the lottery gods.

On April 16, at 7:55 am, Wang Li, the sales manager of Lianyungang Honda, arrived at work to find a tired, unshaven man and his taxi driver. He’d been waiting for 10 minutes. And he wanted to buy a car for ¥200,000.

“What’s your last name?” Wang asked, trying to engage the obviously downcast man. “Are you in town for business or pleasure?”

He muttered vague answers and kept his eyes on a black Honda with a sunroof. He wanted it immediately, now, today.

“Cash or credit?” she asked.

“Cash.”

He motioned to the driver, who carried over a large duffel bag. Zipping it open, Wang saw bricks of cash inside.

“This needs to be deposited in the bank first,” Wang said.

The unkempt man shifted uneasily.

“Which bank?”

“It’s not far at all,” she said. “Do you know the Agricultural Bank of China?”

Ren removed a few bricks, paid the driver and locked the rest of the cash in Wang’s office.

As Wang drove Ren to the bank, her nervous customer peered out the window.

“How’s law and order in Lianyungang?” he asked suddenly.

She knew it. He was a property investor! Wang praised the top-notch police department, low crime and tight security. Her mystery buyer fell silent again.

At the bank counter, Wang filled out a deposit slip. As she scribbled and chatted with the teller, Ren stood stiffly with his back to the counter, avoiding eye contact with bank employees.

“Hurry up,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

“Almost done,” Wang said. “And save your money. I’ll buy you breakfast.”

“I’m too hungry. I can’t wait any longer.”

The bank clerk pushed the stack of cash back through the window.

“Please double check the amount,” the teller said.

Ren Xiaofeng was surrounded by clerks, guards, security cameras and early-bird customers. He had a ¥200,000 reward on his head, and now he was back in the same bank chain, giving them back their stolen money. But even with his freedom dangling by a thread, Ren could not resist showing off.

Bank employees crowded around to watch as Ren fanned out ¥210,000 and counted with lightning speed. Red bills whizzed through his fingers, those same fast hands that had won contests and secured a promotion. Bank tellers muttered in amazement. Ren’s face was plastered all over the news. But all they saw were his hands.

Red bills whizzed through his fingers, those same fast hands that had won contests and secured a promotion.

Later that morning, Wang handed him car keys and watched Ren drive off the lot. In the showroom, she joked with a colleague.

“That guy has enough money on him for a Mercedes-Benz,” she said. “He’s gotta be a fugitive.”

Ren drove away with the intention of continuing his escape. He went to a suburb and used his alias to rent a garage — a small, windowless room to hole up in for a few hours. But with Lianyungang crawling with police — and after the heart-stopping trip to the bank — he realized driving out of the city would be impossible.

Remarkably, Ren went back to the dealership a few hours later to return the car. Perhaps he needed the cash — ¥200,000 was a large chunk of his ¥3.3 million get-away fund. Media reports would later imply that he may have had a crush on Wang Li, a friendly port in a storm.

Either way, it was a risky move. He had carelessly displayed his cash-counting prowess for local Agricultural Bank employees. At any moment, news of the robbery might break. Wang had only to turn on the TV and learn that her client was China’s most-wanted criminal.

But Ren was in luck: When he returned to the Honda dealership, Wang was as cheerful as ever. A refund was against regulations, she was sorry to say. He offered her a bribe to bend the rules: ¥5,000. She politely refused. How about ¥10,000? She said no again. He then offered to take her to dinner. She declined. That night, he ate a bowl of noodles on the side of the road and hid out in the garage, barely sleeping.

In the morning, Ren switched his plan. It was too dangerous to keep running. He’d stay in Lianyungang and wait until things blew over, then send for his wife and twins. He rented a three-bedroom apartment for his family. Then he went back to the car dealership for a third time and left the car with Wang Li. Sell it at any price, he told her. He’d come back for the money.

His spirit sapped, Ren went to the beach. He then bought mineral water and bread and holed up in his rented apartment looking at photos of his twins until he fell into an uneasy sleep.

All over Lianyungang, the local Public Security Bureau was fielding calls from tipsters who claimed to have spotted Ren. Police instructed the traffic radio station to broadcast continuous alerts. Officers distributed 2,000 reward posters to taxi drivers. Lianyungang residents were almost giddy: A walking, talking ¥200,000 lottery ticket was in their city, and some lucky resident would find it.

Among the tipsters was Wang Li. When news broke about the robbery and the nationwide manhunt began, she called the police after a friend said her work anecdote sounded fishy.

When Ren woke up the next morning, he didn’t dare go outside — the police dragnet had intensified. Officers were checking internet cafes, hotels, and rental houses. At roadblocks, traffic police inspected cars leaving the city. Ren nibbled on bread and, later that night, turned on the TV. The local news carried a breaking report: Ma Xiangjing had been arrested in Beijing.

Acting on a tip, Handan police had driven through the night to reach Beijing in time to nab Ma in his army buddy’s neighborhood. He was still carrying most of the ¥600,000. Ma would soon confess to police, and then travel under police escort back to Handan, where a crowd formed at the train station to greet their now-famous fellow native.

Ren watched his accomplice’s arrest on TV with certainty. It was over.