Josef Gunther: The Clean Withdrawal
The bank on Kottbusser Damm had not been robbed in the ordinary way. No masks, no shouted orders, no dye pack. At 11:17 on a Tuesday a man in a maintenance jacket had walked into the staff corridor with a copied fob, opened the cash room during the morning count, and left with €180,000 in a tool bag. The alarms had not sounded because the door had been opened with a code that was still valid. By the time the manager noticed the gap, the man was on the U8.
It had been issued to a contractor who had finished the air-conditioning work six weeks earlier and had never returned it. The contractor’s company had gone quiet. Its registered address was a mailbox. Its last invoice had been paid by a holding firm in Frankfurt whose other interests included two nightclubs and a car wash that never seemed to wash cars. Gunther sat with the payment trail until the names stopped being names and became a route: cash room, contractor, mailbox, Frankfurt, and then a man called Keller who had once been useful to people Gunther used to investigate before those files were closed.
He did not go to the police. He went to the car wash at closing and waited until Keller came out alone. He did not accuse him of the robbery. He laid three pages on the bonnet of Keller’s car: the fob log, the invoice, and a transfer that had moved most of the money the same afternoon into an account Keller’s wife thought was still empty.
“The bank will call it an inside job,” Gunther said. “The insurer will pay. You will keep what you already moved, and you will not do this again with my client’s name on the policy. If the rest of the cash is not back in a locker at Ostbahnhof by morning, I send the pages to someone who still answers the phone at the BKA.”
Keller looked at the pages a long time. He did not ask who Gunther was. Men who have had files closed on them learn the difference between a threat and a transaction.
In the morning the locker held €140,000. The rest, Gunther assumed, had already become someone else’s problem. He photographed the bands, sent the location to the insurer, and did not stay to watch the police arrive. On the train home he smoked at the open window between stations and thought, not for the first time, that the cleanest robberies were never cleaned up. They were only priced.
