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a heavily armored Brinks truck forced its way through the morning traffic and pulled up to the underground garage at the World Trade Center. A frigid drizzle fell from overcast skies. Security guards inside the Trade Center building waved the truck through and it proceeded to wind along the concrete labyrinth to a certain freight elevator that led to One World Trade Center. This was neither the first nor the last delivery of the day. Two Brinks employees remained in the truck, while two others unloaded seven blue Brinks bags from the bag onto a steel cart. Inside the bags was a mix of French, Italian, Japanese, and U.S. currencies totaling just over $2.6 million. Most of the American dollars were placed in bundles inside the bottom three bags. The top four bags contained mostly foreign money. Both guards carried handguns that were plainly visible. They pushed the cart over to the elevator, pressed the button, and waited. Inside they were joined by two cleaning ladies and three other building employees headed to work. The guards pressed the button for the eleventh floor and began the journey upward, headed for the Bank of America.
    At about the same time three men strolled into the World Trade Center concourse in winter coats. Two of them—Michael Reed and Melvin Folk—wore nothing on their heads. The third, Richie Gillette, thoughtfully kept the hood of his Green Bay Packers jacket pulled up to hide his
face. Each carried a duffel bag that appeared to contain very little, if anything. Each bag contained a ski mask; two contained handguns.
    The three men pushed their way through the morning crush to the employee entrance to One World Trade. At the security desk they flashed their employee identification tags. If the guard had looked closely, he would have noticed that all three employees had the same name. The three men signed in under false names and pressed the button for the elevator bank that would take them to the eleventh floor. One of them, Richie Gillette, kept glancing at his watch.
    The three men got on the passenger elevator with a number of other employees. They tried to look as bored as everyone else. At the eleventh floor they got off, and when the door closed, they found themselves in a gray-carpeted hallway with no windows that led in two directions past numerous anonymous offices. They quickly pulled on ski masks and figured out which of the elevators was marked FREIGHT . It was 8:28 A . M . In a minute, the freight door opened.
    Inside, the two guards began to push out the cart full of money. They looked up to see three ski-masked men. Two were pointing guns at them.
    One of the men hollered, “Don’t nobody move! Everybody up against the wall!”
One of the cleaning ladies fell to her knees and began to pray loudly on the floor of the elevator. Later the guards would remember three men in ski masks in dark clothes, and that was all. A third man—it was Richie Gillette— handcuffed each of the elevator’s occupants with plasticcovered wire. The men were clearly nervous. They disarmed only one of the two guards. The other guard remained handcuffed in a corner with his gun only inches away in its holster during the entire robbery. While Gillette tied up the guards and the cleaning ladies and the rest of the stunned passengers, Mel and Mike pulled out box cutters and slashed open the top four of the seven money bags. They then began jamming the contents into their duffel bags, not paying much attention to the fact that most of what they were stealing was not manufactured by the United States Treasury Department.
They moved as quickly as they could, but time was passing quickly. They had now been in the elevator for nearly eight minutes, holding the door and pointing guns at seven prone people. The cleaning lady who had been praying on her knees was now weeping. The robbers decided to call it a day, leaving behind $1.6 million in U.S. currency in carefully stacked packages inside the bottom three blue