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 Jacques Cassandri in court more than 40 years after raid on Société Générale bank in Nice 
 
 Suspected mastermind on trial for France's 'heist of the century' 
 
 The suspected mastermind of France’s “heist of the century” has gone on trial more than 40 years after robbers tunnelled through sewers to snatch the equivalent of €29m from a bank vault. The robbery at the Société Générale branch in Nice on the French Riviera has inspired several books and a major film. They spent the next six days clearing 317 coffers of gold ingots, jewellery and cash amounting to 50 million francs – today worth around £24 million – before making their getaway just as the rising sewage waters began to flood the bank. He used a pen name, but investigators quickly concluded the writer was Jacques Cassandri, a key mafia figure in Marseille, where he went on trial on Monday. He had assumed he was safe because the crime was too old to be prosecuted, but Cassandri is being charged with laundering the millions from the heist – a crime for which France has no statute of limitations. Mr Cassandri says he only made the equivalent of 2m euros from the burglary and quickly spent it. “This book is a novel, and a novel is not a piece of evidence,” one of Cassandri’s lawyers has argued. In The Truth about the Nice Heist, Cassandri – writing under the pseudonym Amigo – said he was tired of living in the shadow of the man assumed to have run the Ocean's Eleven-style bank job, Albert Spaggiari, who he claims in fact only played a minor role. Image copyright AFP Image caption The 1976 robbery is the stuff of legend in France 
 
 The gang used rubber rafts in the sewers, installing hundreds of metres of electrical cables for lighting, to reach the place where they dug an 8m (26ft) tunnel to the bank's basement. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police watch as an acetylene tank is pulled from the sewers of Nice days after the bank was robbed by a gang. They broke into the vault during a weekend, went through almost 200 safety boxes and made off with 46 million francs - the equivalent of 29 million euros ($36m; £26m).
– Prosecutors in France say he was the mastermind behind the "heist of the century"—though "mastermind" might not be the best word for somebody who writes a book implicating himself in an unsolved crime. Jacques Cassandri, a 74-year-old organized crime figure in Marseille, is on trial for the audacious 1976 robbery of a branch of Societe Generale in Nice, AFP reports. In the heist, a gang spent months tunneling from the sewers into a bank vault, which they raided over a weekend. On the Monday, bank staff found the vault welded shut and a message on a wall inside: "Sans arme, sans violence, et sans haine"—"Without weapons, without violence, and without hate." The haul of 29 million francs, around $10.4 million at the exchange rate of the time, was never recovered. Cassandri—who was convicted in the 1970s of involvement with the "French Connection" drug ring—was quickly identified by police eight years ago after he wrote a book under a pen name portraying himself as the heist's mastermind, the BBC reports. He said he was tired of another robber, Albert Spaggiari, getting credit for organizing the heist. Police found the manuscript on his computer and he eventually confessed to orchestrating the robbery, possibly unaware that while the statute of limitations had expired for that crime, he could still be charged with money laundering. Cassandri's fortune appears to "draw its hidden origin from the Nice heist bounty," prosecutors said in court Monday, per the Telegraph. Cassandri's lawyer argued that the novel "is not a source of proof."