Ioanid Gang

The Ioanid Gang (Romanian: Banda Ioanid) was a group in Communist Romania named after two of its members, Alexandru and Paul Ioanid. On 28 July 1959, they carried out the most famous bank robbery in a Communist state.

An armed group of six Jewish Romanian intellectuals and Romanian Communist Party cadres (Alexandru Ioanid, Paul Ioanid, Igor Sevianu, Monica Sevianu, Saşa Muşat and Haralambie Obedeanu) were alleged to have stolen 1,600,000 Romanian lei (about 250,000 United States dollars in 1959) from an armoured car of the National Bank of Romania in 1959. The first five were alleged to have been in a getaway car, while Obedeanu was alleged to have been in a telephone cabin, keeping the bank's phone line busy.

The case was investigated by the Securitate, the secret police, and the supposed perpetrators were arrested within two months. They were rounded up in night-time raids, tried behind closed doors, and all but one sentenced to death. The executions, also kept under secrecy, including for family members, were carried out in 1960.

Monica Sevianu, the only woman involved, had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment because she was a mother of two. Also, in 1964, she was released through an amnesty for political crimes, and emigrated for a second time to Israel in 1970. She had already "made Aliyah" once to British mandate Palestine, in the 1940s.

In 1960, the government issued a propaganda film, Reconstituirea (Reconstruction), to be viewed only by Communist Party members, which reconstructed the way in which the heist had allegedly been planned and carried out. The jailed members of the Ioanid Gang acted out their own roles, either simply forced or possibly having been told that their death sentences would be commuted in return.

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