There’s a reason why heist films are so fun, so popular, and depending on who you ask, so overplayed. The idea of heists are romantic in a sense, though most of us would never want to actually attempt pull one off in real life. A group of people gets together to mastermind an overly complicated plan to steal some great object or large sum of money, something goes wrong, but — ta-dah! — that was actually part of the plan the whole time. Stories about these meticulous thefts often center around a lovable, charismatic person who’s only pulling “one more job” before “they’re out” of the heist business for good. It’s entertaining, but it’s also not usually how heists go down in the real world.

Cat burglars and multi-million-dollar grifters are exceedingly rare outside of the film reels of Hollywood. Many large-scale thefts tend to happen at gunpoint. Think bank robberies and the like. Of course, peaceful heists do happen, but you don’t hear about them often. And when you do, you aren’t expecting them to be carried out under the orders of the leader of an entire nation. In the case of the peaceful Saddam Hussein heist, however, that’s exactly how things happened. Let’s take a look at how Saddam Hussein, the fifth president of Iraq, once took a note out of the pages of the best fictional thieves and stole a ridiculous amount of money from his own country’s central bank.

The climate at the time

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This heist was an easy one

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