"How two lottery-crazed bank clerks cooked up China’s biggest bank robbery of all time"

From Marker via Medium:
BREAKING BAO 
Jackpot
How two lottery-crazed bank clerks cooked up China’s biggest bank robbery of all time

Handan is an industrial city of three million people in northern China, about a two hour bullet train ride from Beijing. Pollution from coal-burning factories regularly fills the sky and blots out the sun. On April 16, 2007, the fuzzy, grey star had just set, and the bustling streets cast further into darkness, when police detectives arrived at the Agricultural Bank of China. Nervous employees led them to the vault. They didn’t have the keys to open it, so officers broke through the heavy steel door.

When detectives entered the vault, they were stumped by what they found — or rather, what they did not find. There were no tasered guards with their hands bound: Round-the-clock watchmen had worked their shifts without incident. The vault itself showed no sign of forced entry: The 60-centimeter-thick, steel-plated walls were intact. Security cameras and trip alarms operated normally.

Bank officials struggled to explain why they had waited hours to call the police. A lot of money was unaccounted for.

And the suspects had left behind only one piece of physical evidence: a bag full of lottery tickets.

In many ways, Ren Xiaofeng had already won the lottery. He was the youngest of four in an upwardly mobile family from northern Hebei province. Ren was handsome too, with chubby, prosperous cheeks.

As China opened to the world in the 1980s, rural young men of his generation migrated to cities to labor in factories and at construction sites. But Ren bypassed that arduous journey — his parents made the great leap forward for him. Before he was even born, Ren’s father, a Communist Party cadre, moved the family from their village in rural Hebei province to the small city of Daming. Ren took ping-pong classes through his father’s sports connections, attended a good school in the old walled town, and then for high school moved to busy Handan. His dad wasn’t wealthy, but he had enough guanxi to pull strings — and sufficient wealth to likely pay bribes and buy gifts to secure Ren a job at the city’s largest, most prestigious branch of the Agricultural Bank of China, one of the country’s “big four” financial institutions.

Ren stood out on his own: His fingers were some of the fastest in the land. At the time, most Chinese banks didn’t have sophisticated electronic bill counting machines. Tellers were trained — drilled, really — to count by hand. Some strummed stacks of cash with four or five fingers as the bills went click click click like bicycle spokes. Others stabbed with their pointer fingers, like a sewing machine needle, while flipping bills. Another method involved waving out cash like a hand fan.

Ren stood out on his own: His fingers were some of the fastest in the land.

In five minutes, a decent teller could count 800 bills, double check the count, and band and stamp the wad of cash. Elite counters like Ren could blur through 2,000 bills in the same amount of time. Banks regularly held inter-branch competitions, and Ren won a local contest, then placed second in a provincial tournament. The bank was proud of its native son and promoted him to management. He soon met a beautiful woman at work and proposed.

And finally, in 2004, the capstone: Ren’s young wife gave birth to a boy and a girl, celebrated in China as dragon-phoenix twins (the dragon represents the boy, phoenix the girl). By the early 2000s, with China’s one-child policy still in effect, having fraternal twins (odds: 1 in 43) was like hitting a jackpot. The family lived in a modest apartment block where neighbors cooed over the twins, and Ren’s parents often visited to babysit. His life was the definition of double happiness.

But in 2006 Ren caught a bad break: The Agricultural Bank of China culled its leadership ranks. Ren, 33, was demoted from manager to a less prestigious job: handling cash withdrawals for the vault. The bank cut his salary in half. He needed more money to support his young family. Ren had always been so fortunate, colleagues said. Why didn’t he try gambling?

When the Communists seized power in 1949, they banned gambling across China. By the time Ren decided to lay down bets, the only legal gambling was at casinos in Macau, horse racing in Hong Kong — both of which were too distant and pricey for him — and the state-run lotteries. A third of the lottery revenue went to social projects like old-age care, public sports fields, and the Red Cross. By 2006, the China Welfare Lottery and China Sports Lottery were booming, with $10.4 billion in revenue and growing.

The money was sorely needed. The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing loomed, and organizers were desperate for cash. The games would be a coming-out party for China’s global ambitions, and the price tag was an eye-watering $45 billion — the most expensive in history.

State-run TV broadcast the nightly drawings from a Beijing studio where large plastic bubbles roiled with numbered balls. Ren bought a ¥2 ticket (worth about 25 cents) for the Chinese Sports Lottery. He lost. He bought more. He watched the balls bounce the wrong way again.

The losses stung because they didn’t comport with his otherwise lucky life. More upsetting, they didn’t comport with everyone else’s luck. When he looked around China in 2006, his great fortune — beautiful wife, dragon-phoenix twins, a stable job — didn’t seem so great.

At the bank, Ren had a front-row seat to the greatest economic expansion in world history. China’s economy enjoyed double-digit growth — but Ren was on a fixed salary. Property prices soared — but Ren rented in a modest building for bank employees. The Shanghai Composite Index roared: Newly minted millionaires bought bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild at hundreds of dollars a pop and mixed it with Coca-Cola. Even in the dusty backwater of Handan, local coal magnates filled Handan’s bank vaults with mountains of cash. Everyone else seemed to be getting richer.

Ren had two new mouths to feed and aging parents. After work, he visited dank, hole-in-the-wall lottery shops. When he cashed the occasional winning ticket, a barcode scanner chirped a sad beep beep to announce his modest payday, and the shopkeeper fished some loose yuan from a drawer. Walking home, rubbing a few grubby bills between his fingers, Ren could smell greasy gutters and filthy public toilets. It contrasted sharply with his days attending to the finances of the city’s nouveau riche entrepreneurs, counting out thousands of crisp, red ¥100 bills as Chairman Mao’s suspicious face stared back.

If Ren was looking for further justification to bend the rules, he could easily find it. The worst-kept secret in China was that the lottery was a cesspool of corruption: Officials swiped top prizes, vendors printed phony winning tickets, and private citizens stole cash to play.

At some point, everything that Ren was about to do next must have made perfect sense. He had enjoyed 33 years of ceaseless luck. And where had it gotten him? Living in the Dickensian grime of the Chinese economic boom, witnessing epic levels of official graft by his bosses and the government, trapped in a dead-end job, and blessed with the curse of a large family to feed on a shrinking salary. He needed to press his good luck further. Like a Chinese Walter White, with no promise of a future in sight, he wanted to provide for his family using his know-how. Ren knew how his bank worked — how money got into the vault and how it got out.

Ren came up with an idea that was as audacious as it was ludicrous. He would rob the bank — really just borrow the money, in his mind — buy enough tickets to win the jackpot, return the principal and keep the profit.

The bank had two vault managers. Both men needed to use their keys to open the heavy steel door. In October 2006, Ren recruited Zhao Xuenan for his plan, and then cajoled the other manager, Zhang Qiang.

It was an easy sell; bank security was a joke. Nearly all of Ren’s colleagues had gotten their jobs through family connections and bribes. It bred a sense of entitlement and laziness. Most mornings a line of frustrated customers stretched down the block because the bank rarely opened on time. A culture of looking the other way — “one eye open, one eye closed” in Chinese parlance — discouraged employees from speaking up when they witnessed security lapses. It wasn’t their money. Security guards often dozed by the entrance of the bank.

On October 13, 2006, the three men stole ¥100,000, or about $12,500. (Conversions throughout are at the exchange rate at the time.) They divvied up the money, and Ren took part of his cut and bought ¥20,000 worth of lottery tickets.

One by one, the chosen balls rolled down a ramp. Ren looked up at the TV screen. He looked down at his tickets.

That night, Ren watched as a TV host prepared the drawing in Beijing. Upbeat synth music played in the background. Balls jittered around their large plastic bubbles. This was the end of Ren and his foolish plan. The end of his promising career too, and his young family and good name.

One by one, the chosen balls rolled down a ramp. Ren looked up at the TV screen. He looked down at his tickets.

He had won.....

....MUCH MORE