The 1993 Brinks Robbery: IRA Links, Verdicts, and Missing Millions

The 1993 Rochester Brink’s robbery was a $7.4 million armored-car heist pulled off on the night of January 5 at a Brink’s depot on South Avenue in Rochester, New York. Masked gunmen subdued the employees and walked out with nearly all of the paper currency on site, leaving several pallets of coins behind. It was the fifth-largest armored-car robbery in American history at the time, and investigators later described the depot’s security as “laughably lax.”¹ Four men were eventually charged. Two were convicted of handling the stolen money. No one was ever convicted of the robbery itself, and about $5 million has never been recovered.²

What Happened at the Depot

The South Avenue depot served as a transfer point for cash collected from area banks and destined for redistribution to other banks and the Federal Reserve. At least two robbers entered wearing ski masks. One was dressed in an armored-car company uniform. They forced employees to the floor, put bags over some of their heads, and tied up at least one worker. The haul totaled about $7.4 million in paper currency.³

Federal officials called it an inside job almost immediately. Thomas O’Connor, a retired Rochester police detective working as a Brink’s guard, was one of three guards on duty. He told investigators masked assailants had handcuffed him at gunpoint, kidnapped him, and dropped him off at a Rochester bar hours later. Investigators did not find the story credible.⁴

The Four Men Charged

Thomas O’Connor had served twenty years with the Rochester Police Department before retiring in 1982.⁴ He was later hired as a security guard, first at the Genesee Brewing Company and then at the Brink’s depot. He was an active member of NORAID, the Irish Northern Aid Committee, which raised funds in the United States for families of imprisoned IRA members and was suspected by the FBI of channeling money to the IRA itself.⁵ Prosecutors accused him of being the mastermind. One investigator summed up the sentiment among law enforcement: “If Tom O’Connor isn’t dead, he did it.”¹

Samuel Millar was a Belfast native and teenage IRA recruit who had been imprisoned twice at Long Kesh, where he was among the “blanket” prisoners who refused to wear prison uniforms.⁶ He had served six years for firearms and explosives violations.⁵ Denied a U.S. visa because of his record, he was smuggled into the country in 1984 by O’Connor and O’Connor’s then-girlfriend Jean Arena, who picked him up at the Toronto airport and arranged a boat crossing.⁷ He lived in Rochester before moving to Jackson Heights, Queens, where he was based at the time of the heist.

Father Patrick Moloney was a Melkite Catholic priest based in Manhattan’s East Village, where he operated Lazarus House, a shelter for troubled youth.⁸ He was a vocal supporter of an independent Northern Ireland and knew Millar and O’Connor through community work with Irish men seeking amnesty.⁹ In 1980, he and his brother had been arrested in Ireland on suspicion of trying to smuggle weapons from the United States. His brother was convicted; Moloney was not prosecuted at that time.⁵

Charles McCormick, 30, was a fourth defendant who had allowed Moloney to use his apartment.¹⁰

The Arrests and the Cash the FBI Found

For ten months after the robbery, the FBI ran an intensive investigation, including surveillance in Queens focused on Millar’s family van to try to match its tires to tracks left at the depot.¹ In November 1993, agents arrested all four men on the same day: O’Connor at his home in Rochester, Millar in Queens, Moloney in Manhattan, and McCormick at his apartment.¹² An additional $168,000 was found in a safe in Moloney’s office.⁴ Moloney admitted buying a money-counting machine to tally the bills in the apartment. He said he assumed they were gambling proceeds.

All four were charged with receiving and possessing stolen money insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. O’Connor faced the most serious charges: robbery, conspiracy, and possession, carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years.¹⁰ He was released on $500,000 bond secured by his home, with orders to stay within Monroe County, avoid contact with co-defendants, and surrender all weapons.¹³

The Verdicts

The case went to trial before U.S. District Judge David Larimer in Rochester in October 1994 and lasted seven weeks.⁷ Testimony from witnesses including Ann Colleen Dunham and Jean Arena established the long relationship between O’Connor and Millar, the 1984 smuggling operation, and Millar’s years in Rochester under an assumed identity.¹⁴

On November 28, 1994, after two and a half days of deliberation, the jury returned split verdicts. Millar and Moloney were each convicted of conspiring to possess money from the robbery, carrying a maximum of five years. O’Connor was acquitted of everything, including robbery, conspiracy, and possession. McCormick was also acquitted.¹⁰ The jury effectively concluded that Millar and Moloney had handled stolen cash but that the government had not proved who actually pulled off the robbery.

What Happened After Prison

Millar received a five-year federal sentence.¹⁵ In 1997, he was transferred from a federal prison in Pennsylvania to a Northern Ireland jail under a prisoner-exchange program. An Irish Consulate spokesman described the transfer as based on “humanitarian concerns” and called it a “fairly common phenomenon,” though the FBI had opposed it.¹⁶ He was released two months after arriving in Northern Ireland and settled in Belfast, where he later published a memoir, On the Brinks, in 2003. FBI Special Agent Dale Anderson, who had led the investigation, called Millar’s account in the book “far-fetched.”⁶

Moloney was sentenced to five years and served nearly four before his release on October 5, 1998.⁸ He has always maintained his innocence, saying he was “dragged into the milieu” and that his arrest was an attempt to leverage his political activism into a fabricated IRA connection.⁹ He returned to Lazarus House in Manhattan and still runs the shelter. Asked years later about the missing money in a documentary interview, Moloney said: “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you anyway. And I certainly bloody well wouldn’t give it back to Brinks.”²

The IRA Question

The possibility that the stolen money was intended for the IRA hung over the case from the start. Court papers established O’Connor’s NORAID activity, and FBI investigators believed cash may have been funneled out of the country to the IRA through postal money orders or couriers moving through New York City and Canada.⁵ Customs patrols along the Canadian border were alerted in the robbery’s immediate aftermath.

Judge Larimer barred prosecutors from arguing an IRA connection to the jury, and no direct evidence tying the proceeds to the IRA was ever established in court. Investigative journalist Gary Craig, who spent years reporting on the case for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, concluded that while the men had ties to the republican movement, the IRA was probably not involved in planning the robbery itself.¹⁷ Millar denied the money reached the IRA at all, claiming it was stolen a second time from an upstate New York lawyer’s home by an associate.¹⁵ Craig put it more plainly: “I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out where the missing $5 million went, but I would like to know if it made its way to the IRA.”²

The Killing of Ronnie Gibbons

Joseph “Ronnie” Gibbons was a New York prizefighter who had been involved in the early planning of the robbery. According to investigators, he backed out when he learned firearms would be used, and he was never charged.¹⁷ Two years after the heist, in 1995, he traveled to Rochester to collect what he believed was his share. He was never seen alive again and was reported missing in 1996.

Human remains found in 1999 along the St. Lawrence River in Cape Vincent, New York, were identified as Gibbons in 2011. Police confirmed that his death was “directly related” to the 1993 robbery and the people involved in it, but no one has ever been arrested for the killing.¹⁸

What Remains Unsolved

The narrow legal case was closed decades ago. Two men were convicted of handling stolen money, two were acquitted, and everyone served or avoided their time. The robbery itself is another matter. No one was ever convicted of committing the holdup. About $5 million of the $7.4 million has never been recovered, and no credible public lead on its location has ever emerged.¹⁹ Gibbons’s killing remains an open homicide. O’Connor, who died after the events, was never charged with any other crime tied to the case. Craig has said he has “no idea” where the missing millions are, and that some of the people who could answer the remaining questions are now dead.¹⁷

1
Irish Echo. A Brinks Heist Still Unsolved
2
13WHAM. Journalists Book Spawns Documentary on Rochester Brinks Heist
3
Los Angeles Times. Priest and Ex-Policeman Arrested in Brinks Holdup
4
New York Times. Priest and Ex-Policeman Arrested in $7 Million Brinks Car Holdup
5
Los Angeles Times. FBI Probes Possible IRA Link to Brinks Heist
6
Democrat and Chronicle. Millar Brinks On the Brinks FBI
7
Democrat and Chronicle. Brinks Millar Smuggling
8
Democrat and Chronicle. Moloney Loretto
9
The Village Sun. Father Pat Documentary – East Village Priest Still Denies Role in Brinks Heist
10
Los Angeles Times. O’Connor Acquitted in Brinks Robbery
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Los Angeles Times. FBI Probes Possible IRA Link to Brinks Heist
More than $2 million in stolen cash was recovered from a “hospitality apartment” in Stuyvesant Town that Moloney had been renting and where Millar’s family had been staying.11The Village Sun. Father Pat Documentary – East Village Priest Still Denies Role in Brinks Heist
13
UPI. Retired Police Officer Arrested in Brinks Heist Makes Bail
14
Democrat and Chronicle. Brinks Trial Opening
15
The Guardian. Confession in Brinks Robbery
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Democrat and Chronicle. Millar Prison Transfer Brinks
17
ROC City Mag. A Cop, A Priest, A Soldier for the IRA
18
MPNnow. Police Confirm Link Between Ronnie Gibbons and Brinks Robbery
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Democrat and Chronicle. The Mystery of the Missing Millions