By Hans-Hermann Nikolei Nov 9, 2009, 15:20 GMT
Paris - He bicycled to work and complained about his miserable salary. But Toni Musulin, a 39-year-old armoured van driver, had a Ferrari in the garage and a total of some 100,000 euros (149,000 dollars) in a dozen bank accounts.
Last week, police say, he emptied his accounts and flat before disappearing with 11.6 million euros in cash picked up from the Lyon branch of France's central bank.
On Monday, officials said that more than 9 million euros of the loot had been found in a rental car parked in a garage near Lyon on the weekend. Musulin was still on the run.
Meanwhile, French police were trying to reconstruct the double life led by Musulin, a French national with Serbian roots, as fans of what is being called the 'heist of the century' proliferated on the internet.
'Hey Toni, have you got room in your van?' some have asked. On Facebook, many 'friends' have entered their thoughts on a page under the heading 'Toni Musulin, he has fled, he understood everything.' Musulin is 'stronger than Tony Montana,' one admirer wrote, referring to the protagonist of the 1983 gangster film Scarface, played by Al Pacino.
Enterprising businessmen have quickly capitalized on Tonimania. The website www.abrutishirt.com, for example, is selling t-shirts with Musulin's portrait and the inscription 'Best Driver 2009.'
Weighing 100 kilograms and 1.80 metres tall, Musulin nevertheless appears to have been rather inconspicuous. He has been described as quiet and reserved, lived in a run-down building and never drank alcohol. While he was married, he sometimes stood in for his then wife, who manages a bar in a Portuguese cafe in the south-eastern French town of Villeurbanne.
When he drove somewhere, it was in an old Peugeot 406. With a salary of 1,700 euros a month, that was all he supposedly could afford. Musulin was modest and 'very careful with money,' his ex-wife remarked.
His neighbours never saw his Ferrari. The sports car was part of his other life, the one in which Musulin was a entrepreneur. He traded in luxury automobiles and was co-owner of a property business. The deals he made, mostly by telephone and via the internet, were at the other end of France, though.
Musulin then reported his Ferrari stolen and planned his big coup: France's first armoured van heist by the driver.
The coup should have been impossible. According to the rules of Musulin's employer, the security company Loomis, the van's driver is not allowed to be alone in the vehicle with the key to the cargo compartment. The maximum amount of money that may be transported is 7 million euros. And it is forbidden to make stops for other clients while carrying money from the central bank.
Musulin had the key, however, there were 11.6 million euros in the cargo compartment and his two colleagues got out en route to fill out forms for another client. The unassuming Musulin had seen to it that he was partnered with a pair of greenhorns.
'Brilliant, and no violence. Hats off!' a Musulin fan wrote in an internet forum. Police assume that Musulin has left the country. Even if he is caught, he faces no more than three years in prison for theft because no violence was involved.
'The state could bring him to book for his conduct,' a high- ranking French police official told the Paris-based newspaper Le Figaro. 'But if he settles down in a tax haven, he won't be bothered for a long time.'
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