How The Quiet Ones Tells the Thrilling True Story of Denmark’s Biggest Heist

In August 2008, the small European country of Denmark was rocked by the biggest heist in the nation’s history. That heist is brought to thrilling life in Frederik Louis Hviid’s The Quiet Ones, out this weekend. The film follows the fictional Kasper (Gustav Giese), a boxer who’s struggling to balance his burgeoning career with an ongoing life of crime. When Kasper is offered the opportunity to help plan the biggest robbery the nation has ever seen, targeting a cash-processing facility in the capital Copenhagen, it is too tempting to refuse.

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Kasper is based on a real person, Steffen Baadsgaard Andersen, who was involved in the 2008 heist—and provided valuable insight in the making of The Quiet Ones, says director Frederik Louis Hviid. Andersen came to Hviid’s attention when he read the 2015 book Røver, by Peter Sloth, which covers Andersen’s extensive criminal history and recounts his involvement in the heist. After some convincing, Andersen agreed to work with Hviid on the film and share his memories. It’s fairly unprecedented territory: the other prominent example of this is the spectacular French heist film Le Trou (1960), in which real-life criminal Roland Barbat (under the stage name Jean Keraudy) was cast as himself and served as a consultant on the film.

Andersen doesn’t appear in the film, but his expertise was especially vital in the depiction of the heist itself, according to Hviid. “From when they get into the cars to when they arrive back at the farm, that is done with 100% accuracy,” he says. “And I can only say that with confidence, because Steffen, when he saw the film, said ‘This is exactly 100% as I remember it.’”

Here’s what to know about The Quiet Ones and the biggest heist in Danish history. 

How did the heist portrayed in The Quiet Ones happen in real life? 

The heist occurred at a cash processing site in the Danish capital of Copenhagen—a Danish Value Handling facility—located within a storage unit. As one of five sites in the city, it holds approximately 20% of the entire city’s transactions, where the cash would be processed before being delivered to the banks. It would be reasonable to believe it’d be impossible to learn how the inside of the facility is structured, but The Quiet Ones reveals a true detail that made the heist a reality. A video on the processing site’s company website showed the robbers everything they needed to know, providing the impetus for the heist.

“It was a sort of company video in which they show all the processing rooms, and what’s processed. ‘This is where we store the Euros, This is where we store the dollars,’ that kind of thing,” Hviid explains. “So they knew exactly where everything was, which is insane.” While the video is impossible to find today and has been understandably scrubbed from the internet, Hviid believes it was a symptom of Denmark’s worldview at the time. “Looking back, it seems completely bizarre that anyone would open their doors and expose their machinery in that way. But back in 2008, Denmark was living in a very naive time…I think it was beyond our comprehension that something like this could happen, that somebody would take advantage of us this way.”

Many details of the heist operations remain something of a mystery, including the total number of people involved, though Hviid estimates there were 25 robbers. A total of six men were seen in the surveillance videos, but there were also the drivers of the garbage trucks, and likely even more criminals working behind the scenes. Such a large group is bound to cause tension, and the distrust was at a fever pitch through most of the planning—which Hviid notes actually took place over two-and-a-half years, instead of the few months presented in The Quiet Ones.

The criminals went to great lengths to conceal their identities from one another. Nobody knew each other’s names and were typically referred to by the town or city they were from. Others went to more extreme measures, including one man who, according to Hviid, wore a pillow under his shirt at all times, so he couldn’t be accurately profiled by any of the other criminals. One walked with a fake limp, and others wore fake hands—anything to avoid detection from the police. These physical details were left out of The Quiet Ones. Though they are accurate, “it seemed absurd and almost comical,” says Hviid.

There were other reasons for the criminals to not trust each other. Much of the complications came from paranoia. “A lot of the crew were hired from either very far-right criminal gangs in Sweden or Sweden’s immigrant community. That’s an explosive combo in itself,” Hviid says. Clashes of politics, gang affiliations, and race made things tense, though they were ultimately put aside in pursuit of cold hard cash.  

One thing everyone agreed on: The money would not be split equally. The cash would be split based on the kind of risk they took. “If you wanted the big reward, you had to be in the building. But there were the guys who stole garbage trucks, and they would have received only a fraction of what the other guys got—but those guys haven’t been caught,” Hviid says. Each person involved had to make a sort of life-changing calculation. “Would you rather have a million dollars and a high chance you’ll get caught, or have, I don’t know, $15,000, and you’ll probably get away.” That said, some with high-risk jobs did actually escape, including the man who drove the Caterpillar bulldozer through the wall.

The heist itself occurred in the early hours of August 10, 2008, in Glostrup, a Copenhagen suburb. Rather ingeniously, the robbers stole a number of garbage trucks and placed them throughout the city to block access to the crime scene. One was parked sideways at Copenhagen’s police HQ in Albertslund, preventing cars from exiting. Others were set on fire throughout the district, blocking freeways and approaching roads.

Six men went directly to the cash-handling facility, armed with Kalashnikovs. Knowing the precise locations thanks to the corporate video, they rammed a wall down with a Caterpillar boom lift, granting them direct access to the vault. They filled sacks full of high-value currencies like Dollars and Euros and fled in Audis stolen from Stockholm. A fascinating detail came from Steffen that gave the heist scene in The Quiet Ones an infusion of reality: The bags full of cash are extremely heavy. Hviid recalled Steffen’s explanation: “It’s a big hockey bag. And if you’ve ever changed paper into a printer, you know how much a bag of paper weighs. If you take three of those and put them into a hockey bag, it’s going to weigh about 50 kilograms…We dragged two of those at a time, so it’s 100 kilos you’re dragging over rubble and out on the road. Even though I was in peak shape, carrying those bags out was some of the hardest exercise I’d ever done.” This is backed up by real-life surveillance footage, which shows the assailants sweating through multiple layers of clothing.

What happened after the heist?

When the police were eventually able to get past the garbage trucks, their tires were destroyed by caltrops (clusters of nails), which were thrown out of the escaping Audis along nearby streets. At the time, the heist was a massive success. No arrests were made that night, and the take was staggering: over 70 million kroner (nearly USD 10 million in today’s currency) was stolen from the facility.

Arrests followed in the coming months and years after the heist. “The majority were found because they were a bit sloppy with their cellphone use. It was something as uncinematic as that,” Hviid says. Police were able to triangulate phone use, and see that the criminals had been at the facility in the months and weeks prior, as well at the farm where they had stashed the guns and trucks. Andersen’s arrest took much longer. He escaped almost immediately to Málaga, Spain, where rumors spread that he may have been part of the heist and had a huge amount of money. Local gangs grew curious about him. Hviid recalls a frightening detail: “Steffen told us that there was one incident where two men had been visiting his children’s daycare and asking them where their daddy was because they wanted to see if he had the money.” Told this by his wife and perceiving it as a clear threat, Andersen attempted to return to Denmark, and he was captured by the authorities at the border in Sweden. He was sentenced to 8 years in prison and was released after 5 years and 4 months.

The heist is still the largest in Denmark’s history. Two years after the heist in 2010, 15 men were convicted to a collective 100-plus years in prison. Only four million of the estimated 70-plus million have ever been recovered. The motivations of everyone in the heist were different, but Hviid is still struck by Andersen’s reason. When Hviid asked Andersen why he wanted to be involved, he responded “I wanted to see if I could. I didn’t have anything else.”

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