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
Martin thought about it and decided his best course of action would be to take those new, numbered Norwegian bills to Switzerland and exchange them for Swiss francs, bills that had not been stolen and wouldn't draw suspicion when he spent them. He ran that idea past Bjorn.
Not all the money they stole was brand new, so they split it up in such a way that Martin had all the new bills and Bjorn could walk away whole. But then Martin realized there's another complication, a sharp edge that needed to be sanded down. If spending those pristine new bills in Tonesburg would be suspicious, cashing in thousands of them at Swiss banks would be a screaming alarm.
So Martin used a little theater magic. He made them look old.
He laundered his central bank hall, physically washed it in his swimming pool, which, of course, was bought with money he'd stolen from other banks. If one fancies himself a gentleman thief, that is an awesome flex.
After the better part of a year, Martin had an enormous pile of artificially weathered and chlorine-soaked bills to transport to Switzerland. But as a general rule, one can't cross international borders with millions in undeclared cash. It has to be smuggled.
It wasn't a disguise so much as a costume. Martin hadn't hidden his face at all, hadn't pasted on a beard or puttied up his nose. He had to look like his new passport photo. But so what? He was in a foreign country a year after the robbery. He guessed the police had given up investigating months earlier.
He made some investments, legitimate ones, insofar as you can make legitimate ones with stolen money. And he did very well. He bought some commercial property, started to develop it. And everything was good.
Paper currency has serial numbers. Remember?
Martin is completely screwed. He just doesn't know it yet.
This was old-school shoe leather police work, asking bank tellers what they remembered about the guy who exchanged Norwegian kroner for Swiss francs. And some of them remembered just enough.
A lot of people gave a lot of names to the police, 80 or so altogether. Police gathered the passport photos of those 80 or so people.
That was in November 1981, 18 months after the central bank job.
There is, from one perspective, beauty in those smallest of details. Any lunkhead can point a gun at a bank teller and demand money, and those lunkheads almost always get caught. Martin got away with 19 bank robberies because of everything that came before that moment.
The planning, developing the characters and the accents and disguises, the rehearsals, the little touches designed specifically to throw investigators off his tail.
He revealed those details for two reasons. One, since they'd never been made public, the police would understand that only the real robber would know them.
two they're sublime martin was creating characters bank robbers all of them but still each one a character with a backstory and habits and quirks it was inevitable really that he would confess it all i was in the theater but i wanted more to be an actor i've been acting lots in theater since i was a little boy i was in the theater
Martin had written and directed 19 performances, almost all of them flawless. And if one wasn't flawless, he improvised, never broke character. And yet no one had ever applauded. Confessing was his curtain call.
And I'm not sure I believe that story. Still, it's a nice scene. Martin and his no longer stumped pursuers having a chuckle and a meal together. The Coca-Cola is a nice touch. Bjorn eventually was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in prison, though he was released after less than three.
As for Martin, he was convicted on multiple counts of bank robbery in the spring of 1982 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. With time off for good behavior and such, he served only eight months. He made very good use of those years. Scandinavian attitudes towards crime and punishment are considerably more pragmatic than, say, American ones. Martin went to school, university, then law school.
He became the lawyer his mother always wanted him to be. You robbed 19 banks, but somehow don't seem to have been seen as a bad guy.
Showing 121–140 of 148 · page 7 of 8
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