Sean Flynn
speaker
148 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5 Feb
Sean Flynn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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Could you just start by introducing yourself?
Well, let's just start then with 19 bank robberies. Why did you rob 19 banks?
Martin Pedersen is sort of a legend in Norway. People don't recognize him on the street. It's more of a trivia question fame. Who is Norway's biggest bank robber? It's him, Martin. In fact, that's the title of a Norwegian documentary that he just mentioned, Norges Storste Bankraner. This is a judgment call, by the way.
The biggest bank robbery in Norway was pulled off by a guy named David Tosca in 2004, $13.5 million. But Tosca had 12 people working with him, and a cop got killed. Martin never killed anyone, and he worked solo for most of his criminal career. Between September 1974 and May 1980, Martin robbed, at gunpoint, 19 banks. And he got away with the equivalent today of almost $10 million.
But when Martin tells me this story, he starts with his father.
Martin's father was a grocer, also sold insurance. Did very well. He also came from money. The family lived in a big house that Martin's grandfather had built, and it was filled with antiques and art. Martin was the baby of the family. His father doted on him.
When Martin was 20 years old, his father died. It was unexpected, a heart attack, and for Martin, shattering. Not long after, his mother, worried about her finances, sold the house, Martin's childhood home. Martin was feeling lost, alone. So he got married.
Martin, however, did not want to be a teacher. In his heart, he was still an actor. And then one day, he heard about this amazing character.
Munch is a Norwegian icon and one of the most influential artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. If the name is unfamiliar, that's probably because it's pronounced Munch, but spelled like Munch. You definitely recognize his most iconic work, The Scream, even if you only saw it on a coffee mug or in an internet meme.
That was the beginning, how it started. A young man, heartbroken and adrift, play-acting as a French TV thief. But it worked. Easter 1974. The widow was away. Martin snuck up to her house in the dark.
He left through the front door, which he realized could only be locked from the inside.
A masterpiece. In this little fantasy, Martin imagined himself to be an elegant thief, a sophisticate. And now the reviews were in. The police were convinced. A debonair bandit clearly was afoot. In Martin's real life, his wife gave birth to their first son later that spring. He was studying to be a teacher. The responsibility, the routine, already were suffocating.
Wait, hold up here. Yeah. So you went into an empty house or a house where nobody was home.
And took five lithographs. Yeah. And then you have a new baby.
And you think you would like a nice house, so let's rob a bank.
There's a lot of ways to get a nice house that don't involve robbing a bank. Yeah.
This was not a reckless impulse, a spur-of-the-moment cash grab. Martin prepared. First, he got a gun. He disguised himself as a military officer and drove to a barracks.
Then he studied, researched, scouted. He chose a small bank in a nearby village called Sem. Only four, maybe five people working, cash in wooden drawers behind the counter, and a stairway leading down to the vault. No cameras. This was 1974 in a small Norwegian town. But remember, the point was to steal a lot of money.
Showing 61–80 of 148 · page 4 of 8
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