A good criminal never gets caught. But a famous criminal does, and he does it with flair.Big Time is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/BigTimePod
Chapter 1: Who is Martin Pedersen and why is he famous in Norway?
Yeah, it's a little difficult to answer that question. My name is Martin Pedersen, and I come from a wealthy family in Tønsberg, a little city in Norway, south of Norway. And I grew up with a very good father and mother, and I had a very, very good life.
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.
I loved my father very much. He was the nicest man you can imagine.
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.
I wanted more to be an actor. I wanted to go to the actor school in Oslo. Did your father support that? He supported me in everything. Every year when the school ends, we make a show in the school, big, so thousands of people come, and I was ahead of that. And he was there every day looking, oh, that's my son, I'm so proud.
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.
Just to have security. And instead of then going to Oslo to become an actor, she got me to start a teacher school in Thunberg. Did your mother want you to be a teacher? No, definitely not. That wasn't good enough for her. She wanted me at least to be a lawyer. But she accepted that.
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Chapter 2: What was Martin Pedersen’s early life and family background like?
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.
I was sitting with a couple of guys, and they were talking about this thing that was in TV. It was a series about a gentleman, and he was stealing paintings. But he did it with style. He had white gloves. He was in Saint-Dupin. It's a French series.
And I was fascinated by it. One of those guys he was talking with knew of a rich man, a shipbuilder, who had Edvard Munch lithographs hanging in his house.
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.
Even though we had paintings and many things, we didn't have Edvard Munch. That was very rare. And then suddenly I woke up one night and I thought, ah-ha. Should I take those pictures? It would be a challenge. It was just a fantasy in the beginning, and I found out where this sheep owner lived, and he was dead, but his widow was living there.
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.
I was so proud of myself because I got the window up. It was no alarms, no nothing, you know. And in I go. Suddenly I was in a house that was even much, much bigger and more beautiful than my mother and father's. They also had Picasso things there. But I should be a gentleman, you know? So I took only five pictures of it with Munch, and I let the rest be.
He left through the front door, which he realized could only be locked from the inside.
When I went out, the door was then open. Anyone could come in. And I didn't want real thieves to come there, you know? I was a real thief myself. But I didn't want thieves to come in and do something bad to the property. So I just wondered, what do I do? Someone has to close the door. So I thought about calling the police in Tønsberg, but I was afraid that they had a tape recorder.
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Chapter 3: How did Martin Pedersen start his life of crime with art theft?
So I called the newspaper, Tønsbergsplan, and I told them with a different voice that the door was open, it had been a break-in there, and they had to close the door, and they did. I got away with it. I took them out of the frames, and I put them out behind a very big painting that I had inherited from my father. They were hanging there for years. How did you feel about it? I felt a little proud.
It was me against the society, in a way, and the police. And the newspaper said, this was a masterpiece because they had stolen that and that. It must be someone who had wanted that. Why didn't they take all? And it was little me, just these teachers, students.
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.
But I felt not good about my life. So I said to myself then, no other person knew this. Why don't I rob a bank? So I could buy a house like the house my mother had sold. Not the same house, but something like it. But you know, you need a gun to rob a bank. You cannot come in with a pen or a finger. I didn't have a gun.
Wait, hold up here. Yeah. So you went into an empty house or a house where nobody was home.
Yeah.
And took five lithographs. Yeah. And then you have a new baby.
Yeah.
And you think you would like a nice house, so let's rob a bank.
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Chapter 4: Why did Martin Pedersen decide to rob banks and how did he prepare?
I waited and waited, but the time went, and it was closed at four o'clock. And I hoped he could go, but he didn't, and then I had to go.
The bank was about to close, but Martin caught the bank manager just in time.
And I also had decided to talk Swedish. He said, in Swedish then? Hello, I'm a Swede. Can you please let me change some money? I don't have any Norwegian money. I need to change Swedish money. Yes, sir. Come in, she said. And we went in. And then when we come in, she got the shock of her life, I think, because suddenly this man took out this machine gun.
There were no bullets in the gun. That's intentional. Martin wanted to be scary, not deadly. But he's the only one who knew that.
I yelled out in Swedish then, don't do anything, I'll shoot you if you try. And they automatically fell to the floor, all of them. And it was very strange because I never had such power before. I nearly looked around, who has got this power? And it was me. It was very strange.
Again, Martin was the only one who knew his machine gun wasn't loaded. And then I said, I want your money. He tossed a bag to the manager, told her to fill it with cash from the drawers. But the big money, the money he ordered, was downstairs in the vault. And that taxi driver, who could see the stairs to the vault, he was still outside.
But I couldn't stay there for so long. I could not know if they had pushed a button, an alarm to the police or something.
There was no time to raid the vault. So Martin abandoned the quarter million kroner he'd ordered, left with what he got from the drawers. He walked to the car, calmly, and drove away. He hid his gun and the money where he could find them later, ditched the car, then slipped into the woods and lost the disguise. He came out in a tracksuit and jogged home to Tonesburg.
And when I met somebody, I was smiling and happy. It was sunshine and everything. And then I got away with it. But then a couple of days later, I picked up these things again, and then I was rich. But it wasn't so much money as I had hoped.
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Chapter 5: What happened during Martin Pedersen’s first bank robbery?
This seems to have been the point where Martin began to drift into method acting, into becoming the character he thought he was only playing. He'd been a gentleman thief three times, two banks and an art heist. Why go back to that boring, ordinary family man schtick? Why not act out the upside of gentleman thieving? The definition of gentleman has, we hope, evolved.
But this was the 70s, and Martin leaned hard into his best James Bond womanizing and gallivanting. That's the pop psychology take.
I spent very much money. On this trip, I spent what would be half a million Norwegian crowns on 14 days.
Soon enough, he was broke again.
So the money, and then I said, geez, must I do this again? So, okay then, once more, but not more.
Must he do it again? No. He wanted to because he was good at it. And that Playboy lifestyle ain't going to fund itself. He went through all the usual steps, but there was one detail that was different, significantly, from his first robbery. Martin was using a revolver.
What is the thing about a revolver? You have to see the barrels. So I had to put in the bullets.
Martin's playing his part with a loaded gun. At the bank, only two people are working. A young woman and the manager, a big man.
I ordered him into the back room because I knew the money was there. The girl, she went straight in, but he was little, what the fuck is happening? His brain didn't manage this. And then he attacked me. And the man was much stronger than me. Big guy.
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Chapter 6: How did Martin Pedersen’s lifestyle change after the robberies?
I had to fire twice up in the air. And then I moved away. And then I went to this old car. It was an old green Audi. And I sat in and... Not very funny. But then Sunday started, and then whoosh, and then I was home free. So this was a total fiasco. And I didn't have so much money then, so what should I do?
Let's consider the options. One would have been to get a job and stop robbing banks before someone got killed or he got arrested. Or two, he could become a better bank robber. Martin went with number two.
Now I have to be a traveling man in bank robberies. I will go now, rob a bank every second month. Quick in, quick out. Quick in, quick out. I cannot take the control of a big bank. So I drove around southern Norway, then on the other side of the fjord and everywhere. And I did this quick in, quick out of five, six, seven banks.
In one sense, this flurry of robberies was almost routine. Martin followed the same practice steps each time. But in another sense, each new job had its own hint of artistry. Martin tried out new disguises, new accents.
During his robbery, one minute he was a criminal, the next... And suddenly was an English fisherman with fishing gear and dressed more as an Englishman, you know, less as the upper-class Englishman. Can you please tell me where I can find a nice fishing spot, sir? Such things, you know. I was in the theater.
Where did you get the idea to put that much deception into the back end? Instead of just trying to get as far away as fast as you could.
I had to be smart. And the smartest thing was to vanish. Where is he? And then nobody can find you. Some bank robbers, they drive and drive and they meet the police. I would not do that. Never. So that was the way I used psychology as much as I could. And they believed it every time.
They believed it every time. 14 times, in fact. That's a lot of banks. Cats don't have that many lives. Martin stopped using live rounds after he almost killed that manager. But it still haunted him. A gentleman thief can't have blood on his hands. And at some point, you become more thief than gentleman.
I wanted them to get out of it, really out of it. And I began to get bad conscience. I even went to the police to report myself. But when I came in there, I lost my courage. And it was not a good time, really. It was a very bad time. Why? Because I couldn't get out of it. I was the biggest bank robber at the first bank robbery. Two was even bigger. And I was a nice man.
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Chapter 7: What challenges did Martin face during subsequent bank robberies?
Martin saw a weakness, a vulnerability, in the way those sacks of money left the bank. Which was this. The police put them in the back of a car. Not an armored car, or one car in a convoy of cars. Just a regular police car. A little Scandinavian station wagon with blue lights on top. All Martin and Bjorn had to do was carjack that station wagon.
Everything had to be perfect. This was in the middle of a big city. The police, they had guns. They could shoot us down any way they wanted. If we got in too early, perhaps the police car was still going with the motor on. And then they could just give gas and drive us down. If you take the key out, they could throw the key to the car. Anything was possible. So it has to be perfect.
As always, the most important part of this job would be getting away, vanishing. Martin and Bjorn stole three cars and placed them strategically around the city, each ready to be used in a delicate choreography.
So I had, like in the theater, theater, tried it out. Rehearsal. Rehearsal, yes, just to see that it worked. And I was the boss, and I was the architect. So we cut it off twice. I said, forget it. It's not perfect now. We cannot do it. So we robbed some banks in between, small banks, just to have something to do.
Four. They robbed four banks to have something to do. And then, Monday, May 19th, 1980, showtime. Martin and Bjorn had parked one of their stolen cars in a little courtyard where the police would load the cash into their station wagon. They were out on the street, watching, waiting. They saw the police car, the one that would pick up the money, pull into the courtyard.
I came in and I shouted then that this was a bank robbery. We had these American stars and stripes hats on. Yeah, we wanted to blame the Americans. No, no, I'm kidding. I love the Americans. I promise you. Martin's .357 is loaded this time. I would not shoot at them whatever happens. That was sacred. But I had planned to shoot up in the wall.
The concrete will fall down on them, and they will be afraid, and they will not dare to use their guns. We were acting, but they couldn't believe that. Martin fired one round into the wall. That was frightening. So they did what we said.
Martin demanded the key to the loaded-up station wagon, then got behind the wheel.
Then I took the car and put on the siren and everything, and the blue lights, and I drove out into the street very quick. And he followed me in the other car, this Bjorn.
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Chapter 8: How did Martin use disguises and deception in his bank robberies?
I'm very fond of classical music, so I had Mozart and Beethoven, whatever, and I had champagne. I was happy to have that at home. I, whoo, so nice. It went so okay, you know, when my wife was at work. And I was the only one who knew this. So your wife was at work, and you have giant stacks of brand new bills. Yeah, but I didn't, it was, 35,000 is a lot of money, a lot of bills.
And you put them all in your swimming pool. Not all, not all, little by little, you know, because it was so much.
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.
So I disguised as a priest, look as innocent as possible. But what I did also was I had to take a new passport picture because my passport picture was very old. I looked like a fresh new passport picture when I went away as the priest. I had a Bible and some Christian magazines. I was a priest all the time, and I was stopped at the border. They looked at me, talked with me.
They didn't look at the car. They didn't examine the car, but it was very well hidden indoors and everywhere, you know.
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.
So I felt like a businessman in a way. And it went very well. So when I had gone down to many, many, many banks, I said to myself, okay, they don't care at all. And then I was back to Ceres, to a hotel, and I had all this money. And I thought to myself, what should I do now? The inflation is 10%. So in the next year, I will lose 10% of all this. So I have to do something smart now.
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.
And I was so happy. And you've gone legit. You've gone legitimate. You're straight. Yeah, then I'm straight. And then the money comes. It was so nice. I had a big Mercedes. I parked it outside my property. My people said, good morning, Mr. Peterson. Nice to see you, Mr. Peterson. Hello. And I smiled at everybody, the actor. And, you know, it was crazy.
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