Daring Capers

In a suburb of Berlin, passers-by witnessed four masked gunmen enter a branch of Germany's largest bank. Quickly, more than 100 officers encircled the bank. The robbers sent out a list of demands that included 17 million DM and threatened to start shooting the 16 hostages if their demands were not met within six hours. Minutes before the deadline, police delivered a down payment of $3.5 million in German marks. The robbers never replied. They'd tunneled out with the money in tow. Eventually, all of the robbers were apprehended, but not much of the money was recovered. The program then chronicles the exploits of the "Stopwatch Gang," so dubbed because they used a stopwatch to time their heists. After snatching millions from U.S. and Canadian banks, police managed to track down the gang in Arizona, but their leader, Patrick Michael Mitchell, led the FBI on a worldwide chase for seven years. Mitchell was apprehended in 1994, by a police chief in Southaven, Mississippi.