Fun Friday: The Great Pharmacy Heist

Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash

The recent power substation outage to cover for a robbery reminded me of a similar event from my youth growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Story

It seems that some enterprising criminals in 1982 had the same type of idea - create some type of distraction and commit a robbery. They made their plans, and decided to act on New Year’s Eve.

There were two groups of the criminals - one group waited outside the Bergen Brunswig Drug Company warehouse on 54th Street in Tulsa, and the other group went to a Southern Bell Telephone switching station. They kept in touch via short-wave radio. After getting in place, at about 12:30am on January 1st 1983 the attack commenced.

The group at the phone switching station broke into a small little cement “shack” of sorts, which had several large trunks of telephone cables. Using a chain saw, they cut through all of the trunks, disabling 50,000 circuits and thousands of residential and business customers including many circuits that went to alarm companies. One of those alarm circuits was for the Bergen Brunswig Drug Company warehouse. The group with the chainsaw let the group at the warehouse know they’d made the cut over the radios, and warehouse group broke in, stealing a large amount of drugs including narcotics.

While the drug amounts stolen were originally supposed to be worth $500,000 according to initial reports, the figure was later revised to be $1.3 million. In today’s terms, that would be in excess of $4 million worth of drugs. This was a serious operation which took weeks of planning, and even included a manager of a security firm that was familiar with the warehouse. The manager had the warehouse blueprints from unsuccessfully bidding on a security contract for the drug company, but this manager had kept the blueprints.

As for the phone trunks, the cement building they were in was quite small, and there was actually only room for one technician to fit into it at a time, so working around the clock in shifts they finally repaired all of the severed lines. Phone service was down for several days for many people and businesses in the area. Some of the lines apparently even impacted military and civil defense customers.

I have no idea how they ended up getting caught, although the reselling of the stolen drugs might have had something to do with it. So yes, in the end they all got caught and were tried and sentenced to prison.

Conclusion

The Bergen Brunswig Drug Company later merged with Amerisource and became Amerisource Bergen in 2001, and moved the operations out of the Tulsa warehouse a year later. At this point all of the criminals have served their time as the longest sentence was something like 10 years.

If there ever was a good candidate for a movie plot, it has to be this particular story. I do know that I’d pay money to see it, because while I didn’t live in the area that was impacted by the phone line outage, I vividly remember the impact, and I’d love to see the story played out on the big screen.

Original story in the press: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1983/01/23/5-charged-in-tulsa-warehouse-heist/62859008007/

Follow-up with more information: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1983/11/22/tulsa-security-firm-owner-linked-to-cutting-of-phone-lines-drug-theft/62823573007/