Norway’s Most Wanted | 5

Steve Buscemi here. I've played a lot of bad guys over the years.

Gangsters, kidnappers, con artists.

Mr. Pink sounds like Mr.
Pussy. How about if I'm Mr.
Purple?

Blood has been shed. We've encarted wrists, Jerry.

Untie him.

Oh, but before you do, put a bullet in his fucking head.

But none of these villains are as charismatic, smooth, or as Norwegian as today's subject.

A gentleman bank robber and a master of the escape.

Two things that have to work in perfect harmony, it turns out. I'm Steve Buscemi, and you're listening to Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.
Today's episode, Norway's Most Wanted, is reported by Sean Flynn. Could you just start by introducing yourself? Yeah.
But one thing I just wanted, I was not a mess with your interview, but what they did a little wrong, these people that made this documentary about me, not once did I say 19 bank robberies. that is

very documentary about me. Not once did I say 19 bank robberies.
That is a very

essential point, you know, that I robbed 19 banks.

Well, let's just start then with 19 bank robberies. Why did you rob 19 banks?

Yeah, it's a little difficult to answer that question.

My name is Martin Peterson, and I come from a wealthy family in Ternsvere, a little city in Norway, south of Norway.

And I grew up with a very good father and mother, and I had a very, very good life.

Martin Peterson is sort of a legend in Norway.

People don't recognize him on the street. It's more of a trivia question fame.
Who is Norway's biggest bank robber? It's him, Martin. In fact, that's the title of a Norwegian documentary that he just mentioned, Norgis Stryste Bankraaner.
This is a judgment call, by the way. The biggest bank robbery in Norway was pulled off by a guy named David Tosca in 2004.
$13.5 million. But Tosca had 12 people working with him, and a cop got killed.
Martin never killed anyone, and he worked solo for most of his criminal career. Between September 1974 and May 1980, Martin robbed, at gunpoint, 19 banks.
And he got away with the equivalent today of almost $10 million. But when Martin tells me the story, he starts with his father.
I love my father very much. He was the nicest man you can imagine.
Martin's father was a grocer, also sold insurance. Did very well.
He also came from money. The family lived in a big house that Martin's grandfather had built, and it was filled with antiques and art.
Martin was the baby of the family. His father doted on him.
I wanted more to be an actor. I wanted to go to the actor school in Oslo.
Did your father support that? He supported me in everything. Every year when the school ends, we make a show in the school, big, so thousands of people come, and I was ahead of that.
And he was there every day looking, oh, that's my son. I'm so proud.
When Martin was 20 years old, his father died. It was unexpected, a heart attack, and for Martin, shattering.
Not long after, his mother, worried about her finances, sold the house, Martin's childhood home. Martin was feeling lost, alone.
So he got married. Just to have security.
And instead of then going to Oslo to become an actor, she got me to start a teacher school in Tunisberg. Did your mother want you to be a teacher?

No, definitely not. That wasn't good enough for her.
She wanted me at least to be a lawyer.

But she accepted that.

Martin, however, did not want to be a teacher. In his heart, he was still an actor.
And then

one day, he heard about this amazing character.

I was sitting with a couple of guys,

and they were talking about this thing that was in TV.

It was a series about a gentleman,

and he was stealing paintings.

But he did it with style.

He had white gloves.

He was named Arsène Lupin.

It's a French series. And I was fascinated by it.
One of those guys he was talking with knew of a rich man, a shipbuilder, who had Edvard Munch lithographs hanging in his house. Munch is a Norwegian icon and one of the most influential artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
If the name is unfamiliar, that's probably because it's pronounced Munch but spelled like Munch. You definitely recognize his most iconic work, The Scream, even if you only saw it on a coffee mug or in an internet meme.

Even though we had paintings and money things, we didn't.

Edward Munch, that was very rare.

And then suddenly I woke up one night and I thought, ah.

Should I take those pictures?

It will be a challenge.

It was just a fantasy in the beginning.

And I found out where this sheep owner lived. And he was dead, but his widow was living there.

That was the beginning, how it started.

A young man, heartbroken and adrift, play-acting as a French TV thief.

But it worked.

Easter 1974.

The widow was away.

Martin snuck up to her house in the dark. I was so proud of myself because I got the window up.
It was no alarms, no nothing, you know. And in I go.
Suddenly I was in a house that was even much, much bigger and more beautiful than my mother and father's. They also had Picasso things there.
But I should be a gentleman, you know? So I took only five pictures of it with Munch, and I let the rest be. He left through the front door, which he realized could only be locked from the inside.
When I went out, the door was then open. Anyone could come in.
And I didn't want real thieves to come there, you know? Of course, I was a real thief myself. But I didn't want thieves to come in and do something bad to the property.
So I just wondered, what do I do? Someone has to close the door. So I thought about calling the police in Tundsburg, but I was afraid that they had a tape recorder.
So I called the newspaper, Tundersburg, and I told them with a different voice that the door was open. It had to be a break in there, and they had to close the door, and they did.
I got away with it. I took them out of the frames, and I put them behind a very big painting that I had inherited from my father.
They were hanging there for years.

How did you feel about it?

I felt a little proud.

It was me against the society, in a way, and the police.

And the newspaper said, this was a masterpiece because they had stolen that and that.

It must be someone who had wanted that.

Why didn't they take all?

And it was little me, just these teachers, students. A masterpiece.
In this little fantasy, Martin imagined himself to be an elegant thief, a sophisticate. And now the reviews were in.
The police were convinced. A debonair bandit clearly was afoot.
In Martin's real life, his wife gave birth to their first son later that spring. He was studying to be a teacher.
The responsibility, the routine, already were suffocating. But I felt not good about my life.
So I said to myself then, no other person knew this. Why don't I rob a bank? So I could buy a house like the house my mother had sold.
Not the same house, but something like it. But you know, you need a gun to rob a bank.
You cannot come in with a pen or your finger. I didn't have a gun.
Wait, hold up here.

Yeah.

So you went into an empty house or a house where nobody was home.

Yeah.

And took five lithographs.

Yeah.

And then you have a new baby.

Yeah.

And you think you would like a nice house, so let's rob a bank.

Yeah.

A nice house for the family for him too, you know? There's a lot of ways to get a nice house that don't involve rob rob a bank. Yeah.
A nice house for the family for him too, you know?

There's a lot of ways to get a nice house that don't involve robbing a bank.

Where did rob a bank come from?

You know, Mooch Cassidy and the Sun on Skid, you remember 1969?

Robert Redford and those, you know, charming guys.

I'm okay charming myself.

And I saw also the Norway, which was going to be a very rich society because of oil. And then I said to myself, why don't I steal from the rich, the banks? I don't give it to the poor, but I give it to myself and my family at least.
This was not a reckless impulse, a spur-of-the-moment cash grab. Martin prepared.
First, he got a gun. He disguised

himself as a military officer and drove to a barracks. And I just saluted in the gate, and I saluted back.
And then I went to this barrack. And it was a little late, so there was no one there.
And it was very simple to take that machine gun, put it under my coat, and then I went out again.

Then I had a gun.

Then he studied, researched, scouted. He chose a small bank in a nearby village called Sem.
Only four, maybe five people working, cash in wooden drawers behind the counter, and a stairway leading down to the vault. No cameras.
This was 1974 in a small Norwegian town. But remember, the point was to steal a lot of money.
So four or five days before, I called the bank, telephone. And I've been acting a lot since I was a young boy, you know.
So I made voice old and i said in norwegian then my name is john i don't know where hansen from oslo you know i have a little cabin down there not so very far from your little sweet town and i have my wife and i we've been so lucky now to win kronor in a lottery. And we're going to go there on Friday.
Can you please order 250,000 extra from the Norwegian Central Bank so we can come and get it? Oh, yes, please do that, the woman said. We're glad to order money for you, sir.
So I ordered money for my own bank robbery.

The day of the robbery, he took a train to a different town about 15 miles south of Sem.

I went there in the railway station into the toilet and changed.

And when I came out, I was a totally different guy.

I had a wig, I had this, I had that.

I don't recall if I had beer at that time. But I was also then a long coat.

And then I went around in the streets.

He's looking for a car to steal.

One with the keys in it, because Martin doesn't actually know how to steal a car.

It took a while.

Many people saw me.

They didn't see Martin Peterson.

They saw a totally different guy.

And then suddenly I saw a car.

And I jumped in and started, and I drove away. Martin got to the bank, and immediately there's a problem.
A taxi, right out front, near a big window with a clear view of the stairway to the vault, where the money Martin ordered should be safely locked up. I waited and waited, but the time went and it was closed at four o'clock.
And I hoped he could go, but he didn't. And then I had to go.
The bank was about to close, but Martin caught the bank manager just in time. And I also had decided to talk Swedish.
I said, in Swedish then? Hello, I'm a Swede. Can you please let me change the money? I don't have any in which money.
I need to change Swedish money. Yes, sir.
Come in, she said. And we went in.
And then when we come in, she got a shock of her life, I think, because suddenly this man took out this machine gun. There were no bullets in the gun.
That's intentional. Martin wanted to be scary, not deadly.
But he's the only one who knew that. I yelled out in Swedish, don't do anything, I'll shoot you if you try.
And they automatically fell to the floor. All of them.
And it was very strange because I never had such power before. I nearly looked around, who has got this power? And it was me.
It was very strange.

Again, Martin was the only one

who knew his machine gun wasn't loaded.

And then I said, I want your money.

He tossed a bag to the manager,

told her to fill it with cash from the drawers.

But the big money, the money he ordered,

was downstairs in the vault.

And that taxi driver,

who could see the stairs to the vault, he was still outside. But I couldn't stay there for so long.
I could not know if they had pushed a button, an alarm to the police or something. There was no time to raid the vault.
Sir Martin abandoned the quarter million kroner he'd ordered, left with what he got from the drawers. He walked to the car, calmly, and drove away.
He hid his gun and the money where he could find them later, ditched the car, then slipped into the woods and lost the disguise. He came out in a tracksuit and jogged home to Tonesburg.
And when I met somebody, I was smiling and happy. It was sunshine and everything.
And then I got away with it. But then a couple of

days later, I picked up these things again, and then I was rich. But it wasn't so much money as I had hoped.
So it wasn't a flawless job, but it did all right. 230,000 kroner, enough to buy a house, which was the whole point.
It was a shipowner's house, beautiful house with a big property. and we moved in.

But it needed a lot of decorations,

new things,

because it was old.

And... It was a shipowner's house, beautiful house with a big property.
And we moved in. But it needed a lot of decorations, new things, because it was old.
And what did I do? I called this one and that one and do this, do that, and the garden and everything, you know? And the money went away like birds. What did your wife say? I told everybody that because they knew that I was into art and such, that I sold art, but I didn't make any money, you know.
It was more a dream that I should be that. By the spring of 1975, Martin was broke.
I thought to myself, okay, I have to rob one more then, but that should be the last one. He repeated the entire process.
He got a new gun because he'd thrown the first one from a bridge, believing that he wouldn't be committing any more armed robberies. He got a revolver, a .357 Magnum from a mail-order catalog.
Then he picked out a bank, cased it, robbed it, and got away clean. And I was so happy.
I felt like, I cannot tell you how happy I felt because I fooled them totally, you know. And I have lots of money now.
So then I was the ordinary family man again. And nobody knew what I was doing.
Well, some people wondered. There were rumors about me importing things, drugs and such, but nobody believed it because I was a good-looking man with the short hair, perfect behavior, always smiling, being good to people, you know.
But I was not acting. That is me.
But then after a while, I wanted to get out of Norway because it was a little narrow for me, small. I drove down to south of France, a very beautiful area in our part of the world.
And of course, I knew a lot about Monaco, south of France. I love that, you know, a little upper class and all that because that's where I come from anyway.
Yachts and all that. When I went the casino in Monte Carlo, of course, I was in a black suit with a tie and I was drinking gin tonic or martini, stir nuts.
I'm not crazy or anything, but I liked that life. I liked it.
And I wasn't quite happy. I married this girl that I didn't love.
And at that time, you know, there were no AIDS. So I was together with lots of girls.
This seems to have been the point where Martin began to drift into method acting, into becoming the character he thought he was only playing.

He'd been a gentleman thief three times, two banks and an art heist.

Why go back to that boring, ordinary family man schtick?

Why not act out the upside of gentleman thieving?

The definition of gentleman has, we hope, evolved.

But this was the 70s, and Martin leaned hard into his best

James Bond womanizing and gallivanting.

That's the pop psychology take.

I spent very much money.

On this trip, I spent what would be

half a million Norwegian crowns on 14 days.

Soon enough, he was broke again.

So, the money, and then, and then, must I do this again?

So, okay then, once more, but not more.

Must he do it again?

No.

He wanted to, because he was good at it, and that Playboy lifestyle ain't going to fund itself. He went through all the usual steps, but there was one detail that was different, significantly, from his first robbery.
Martin was using a revolver. What is the thing about a revolver? You have to see the barrels.
So I had to put in the bullets.

Martin's playing his part with a loaded gun.

At the bank, only two people are working.

A young woman and the manager, a big man.

I ordered him into the back room because I knew the money was there.

The girl, she went straight in, but he was a little, what the fuck is happening?

His brain didn't manage this.

And then he attacked me.

And the man was much stronger than me.

Big guy.

The manager had Martin pinned to a table.

Martin was worried about getting caught, but he was also worried about his gun.

In this fight, I had to have it far away from him, from me, from anyone.

Because if it goes, it was a .357 Magnum. It could blow anyone's head off.
The manager tried to pull out Martin's hat, part of his disguise. And he did, but he also took my wig off.
Whee! And then he saw me, I said, what? And he got shocked. And I cannot recall why he got up or something, but he did.

And then I said, now you must go away or I'll shoot you in your legs.

And he didn't.

He attacked me again.

The manager swung at Martin.

Martin put his hands up to protect his face.

And then it's the biggest explosion I've ever heard.

It was not like you see in the movies.

Bang.

It was an explosion like it was dynamite.

The bullet didn't hit anyone, but the noise attracted attention.

And I had to think, I have to get out of this.

Now I'll just forget the money.

I always think of myself.

But the door was locked and the key was not there. I couldn't get out there.
And then I said to the man, boom! Just a boom! To frighten him. And then he didn't touch me.
Now he understood the situation. Martin went out a window, jumped six feet to the ground.
Outside, people were staring, moving toward this strange, loud noise.

I had to fire twice up in the air, and then I moved away. And then I went to this old car.
It was an old green Audi. And I sat in and...
Fuck. Not very funny, but then suddenly it started,

and then I was home free. So this was a total fiasco.
And I didn't have so much money then, so what should I do?

Let's consider the options.

One would have been to get a job and stop robbing banks before someone got killed or he got arrested.

Or two, he could become a better bank robber.

Martin went with number two.

Now I have to be a traveling man in bank robberies. I will go now, rob a bank every second month, quick in, quick out, quick in, quick.
I cannot take the control of a big bank. So I drove around southern Norway and on the other side of the and.
And I did this quick in, quick out of five, six, seven banks. In one sense, this flurry of robberies was almost routine.
Martin followed the same practice steps each time. But in another sense, each new job had its own hint of artistry.
Martin tried out new disguises, new accents.

During his robbery, one minute he was a criminal, the next... And suddenly it was an English fisherman with fishing gear and dressed more as an Englishman, you know, little as the upper-class English.
Can you please tell me where I can find a nice fishing spot, sir? Such things, you know. I was in the theater.
Where did you get the idea to put that much deception into the back end

instead of just trying to get as far away as fast as you could?

I had to be smart.

And the smartest thing was to vanish.

Which? Crazy.

And then nobody can find you.

Some bankrupts that drive and drive and they meet the police. And boom, boom, boom.
I would not do that. No, no, no, no, no, never.
So that was the way. I used psychology as much as I could, and they believed it every time.
They believed it every time. 14 times, in fact.
That's a lot of banks. Cats don't have that many lives.
Martin stopped using live rounds after he almost killed that manager. But it still haunted him.
A gentleman thief can't have blood on his hands. And at some point, he'd become more thief than gentleman.
I wanted them to get out of it, really out of it. And I began to get bad conscience.
I even went to the police to report myself. But when I came in there, I lost my courage.
And it was not a good time, really. It was a very bad time.
Why? Because I couldn't get out of it. I was the biggest bank robber, the first bank robbery.

Two was even bigger. And I was a nice man.
It wasn't me.

Except it kind of was. Martin might have wanted out, but he wanted out on his terms.

He didn't want to fade away, leave nothing but a string of unsolved and apparently unrelated robberies.

He wanted one big score, the stuff of legends.

The Central Bank of Norway.

Martin wanted to rob the Central Bank of Norway.

After Bank Number 14, I said to myself, now or never.

Martin knew he couldn't rob the central bank by himself. A job that big, a stage that big, required a supporting cast.
So he found a partner, an apprentice, a Sundance kid, a Bonnie to his Clyde, a Pitt to his Clooney, an old schoolmate, Bjorn. He was a sportsman.
So I thought, if he can be with me, if he can come with me, we can take a really big bank because then we can control. No one will attack.
You know, I was afraid to be attacked again. Now Martin has to decide which branch of the central bank of Norway they should rob.
He chose the nearest one, Indraman, a mid-sized city southwest of Oslo. He went there one day to look around.
There was this man with a gun, the police, in the door, but there were no cameras or nothing. And the vault was quite open.
It's true. And there were these shelves there, with not books, but hundreds of millions.
And, whew, I nearly got a problem breathing. This was up the second floor, and there was no windows there.
No one could see what happened. And I thought, then that is the ideal bank to rob.
And yet, this already was more complicated than most jobs. Martin and Bjorn would need to get to the second floor and then back down, ideally saddled with cumbersome bags of cash, all without getting shot by that armed guard.
It was legal for him to shoot me. The guard, the second floor, these were just problems to be solved.
Martin was patient. He watched the bank, learned its rhythms, when and how people came and went, and eventually he discovered an elegant solution.

When it was the day before pensions, you know, lots of pensions were paid out in cash.

And I saw that the police, they picked up lots of sacks with money.

Martin saw a weakness, a vulnerability, in the way those sacks of money left the bank. Which was this.
The police put them in the back of a car. Not an armored car, or one car in a convoy of cars.
Just a regular police car. A little Scandinavian station wagon with blue lights on top.
All Martin and Bjorn had to do was carjack that station wagon. Everything had to be perfect.

This was in the middle of a big city.

The police, they had guns.

They could shoot us down any way they wanted.

If we got in too early, perhaps the police car was still going with the motor on.

And then it could just give gas and drive us down.

If you'd taken the key out, it could throw the key to the car. Anything was possible.
So it has to be perfect. As always, the most important part of this job would be getting away, vanishing.
Martin and Bjorn stole three cars and placed them strategically around the city, each ready to be used in a delicate choreography. So I had, like in the theater, theater, um, tried it out.
Rehearsal. Rehearsal, yes.
Just to see that it worked. And I was the boss and I was the architect.
So we cut it off twice. I said, forget it.
It's not perfect now. We cannot do it.
So we robbed some banks in between. Small banks.
Just have something to do. Four.
They robbed four banks to have something to do. And then, Monday, May 19th, 1980, showtime.
Martin and Bjorn had parked one of their stolen cars in a little courtyard where the police would load the cash into their station wagon. They were out on the street, watching, waiting.
They saw the police car, the one that would pick up the money, pull into the courtyard. I came in and I shouted

then that this was a bank robbery.

We had this American stars and stripes

hats on.

Yeah, we wanted to blame the Americans.

No, no, I'm kidding. I love the

Americans, I promise you.

Martin's 357

is loaded this time.

I would not shoot at them, whatever happened.

That was sacred.

But I had planned to shoot

up in the wall. The concrete Thank you.
is loaded this time. So I would not shoot at them, whatever happened.
That was sacred.

But I had planned to shoot up in the wall.

The concrete would fall down on them,

and they would be afraid,

and they would not dare to use their guns.

We were acting, but they couldn't believe that.

Martin fired one round into the wall.

That was frightening.

So they did what we said.

Martin demanded the key to the loaded-up station wagon,

then got behind the wheel.

Then I took the car and put on the siren and everything,

and the blue lights,

and I drove out into the street very quick.

And he followed me in the other car, this Bjorn.

They went screaming through the streets of Drammen,

Martin in a stolen police car, blue lights flashing, Bjorn following in a stolen car, like a reverse police chase. But no one chased after them, really.
By coincidence, half the city's police force, half, was at a training seminar three hours away. There simply weren't enough cops to chase the bad guys.
Martin and Bjorn drove to where they'd stashed another one of their stolen cars, one the police haven't seen them driving. And then we loaded all the money, the sacks, over to the other car.
And I also dressed out as a beautiful woman, with long dress, blonde hair, makeup. I did the best I could.
Then he lied down on the floor with little fur over him, so he looked like a dog. And then I drove back as a woman, a little feminine, you know, and we drove exactly the same way back.
And after a while, we come to this police thing, and I waved to them. Maybe a little over the top, but it worked.
The police waved on this nice lady and her dog. They drove a bit further, stashed the money somewhere safe, then split up.
They caught separate trains to Oslo. I remember I was very eager to see how much money we got.
So I took this note off one of the sacks, only one sack. Each sack has a tag on it that said where it was supposed to go and how much was in it.
And when I was in the train, I went to the toilet and I took this up. And it says, Kongsberg Post Office, 1.4 million.
Hoo-ah! And there were six more sacks. Altogether, they'd stolen 10 million kroner.

Adjusted for inflation, that's 7.5 million American dollars.

I was so happy, you won't believe it.

Finally, finally I can get out of this.

End of story.

And I was so happy.

If you rob a central bank branch, there's a decent chance you're going to get a lot of currency just entering circulation. Crisp new bills.
All of them will have a serial number, likely sequential ones, and the bank will know what those numbers are. Sometimes those bills will be from the same press run.
Martin did not see that coming. KJ19, they started all of them.
And Jesus, I couldn't come to Tosbury to spend them. So, what shall I do? Martin thought about it and decided his best course of action would be to take those new numbered Norwegian bills to Switzerland and exchange them for Swiss francs, bills that had not been stolen and wouldn't draw suspicion when he spent them.
He ran that idea past Bjorn. I asked him if he wanted to come with it.
No, Martin, I have enough money now. We had all these spent and the used money, you know? So I don't want you to do it yourself.
Yeah, okay then. I'll do it myself.
Not all the money they stole was brand new, so they split it up in such a way that Martin had all the new bills and Bjorn could walk away whole. But then Martin realized there's another complication, a sharp edge that needed to be sanded down.
If spending those pristine new bills in Tonesburg would be suspicious, cashing in thousands of them at Swiss banks would be a screaming alarm. So Martin used a little theater magic.
He made them look old. So I had them in my swimming pool.
He laundered his central bank hall, physically washed it in his swimming pool,

which, of course, was bought with money he'd stolen from other banks.

If one fancies himself a gentleman thief, that is an awesome flex.

I'm very fond of classical music, so I had Mozart and Beethoven, whatever, and I had champagne. I was happy.
I, woo, so nice. It went so okay, you know, when my wife was at work.
And I was the only one who knew this. So your wife was at work, and you have giant stacks of brand new bills.
Yeah, but I didn't, it was so much. $35,000 is a lot of money, a lot of bills.
And you put them all in your swimming pool. Not all, not all.
Little by little, you know, because there's so much. After the better part of a year, Martin had an enormous pile of artificially weathered and chlorine-soaked bills to transport to Switzerland.
But as a general rule, one can't cross international borders with millions

in undeclared cash. It has to be smuggled.
So I am disguised as a priest, look as innocent as

possible. But what I did also was I had to take a new passport picture because my passport picture

was very old. I looked like a fresh new passport picture when I went away as the priest.
I had a Bible and some Christian magazines. I was a priest all the time, and I was stopped at the border.
They looked at me and talked with me. They didn't look at the car.
They didn't examine the car, but it was very well hidden indoors and everywhere, you know. It wasn't a disguise so much as a costume.
Martin hadn't hidden his face at all, hadn't pasted on a beard or puttied up his nose. He had to look like his new passport photo.
But so what? He was in a foreign country a year after the robbery. He guessed the police had given up investigating months earlier.
So I felt like a businessman in a way, and it went very well. So when I had gone down to many, many, many banks, I said to myself, okay, they don't care at all.
And then I was back to Syri, to hotel, and I had all this money. And I thought to myself, what shall I do now? The inflation is 10%.
So in next year, I will lose 10% of all this. So I have to do something smart now.
He made some investments, legitimate ones, insofar as you can make legitimate ones with stolen money. And he did very well.
He bought some commercial property, started to develop it. And everything was good.
And I was so happy. And you've gone legit.
You've gone legitimate. You're straight.
Yeah, then I'm straight. And then the money comes.
It was so nice. I had a big Mercedes.
I parked it outside my property. My people said, good morning, Mr.
Peterson. Nice to see you, Mr.
Peterson. Hello.
And I smiled at everybody, the actor. And,.
It was so crazy. And I felt like I felt in the clouds, really, because I was out of it.
So how did you get caught? I didn't know that they didn't need all those 35,000 bills in Switzerland.

They didn't buy those bills to sit on them.

It was a business deal for them, you know,

so they bought it from me for a certain price and they sold it.

To whom?

The Central Bank of Norway.

Ha ha!

Okay, I should have thought of that.

And then the people working in the Central Bank of Norway, they recognized the bills. Paper currency has serial numbers, remember? KJ19, they started all of them.
Martin is completely screwed. He just doesn't know it yet.
Two policemen went to Switzerland, and they went from bank to bank. They asked, how does it look? This was old school shoe leather police work, asking bank tellers what they remembered about the guy who exchanged Norwegian kroner for Swiss francs.
And some of them remembered just enough. And they made these phantom drawings.
It didn't look so much like me, but my nose was there in a way.

And they described the man as very polite and all that, you know.

And then they put this drawing out

in the newspapers in Norway,

the television.

Who is this?

There was this woman in Tönsberg

and she was the one who thought,

oh, Martin Peterson,

he has spent a lot of money. Can it be Martin Peterson? And she gave my name to the police.
A lot of people gave a lot of names to the police, 80 or so altogether. Police gathered the passport photos of those 80 or so people.
Mine was brand new. Uh-oh.
And then, one day, the police turned out to my house.

That was in November, 1981, 18 months after the central bank job.

They were not hard.

They were not violent.

They didn't have guns even.

They said, we have to take you to Drummond to question you about the robbery there.

Oof, it was one of the worst moments of my life. I couldn't believe it.
Like my brain didn't accept this. What did you say? No, then when I came there.
No, before then, when the police are standing at your door saying, we have to take it. Yeah, I said, what is it? I don't know anything about that.
But yeah, but anyway, you have to come with us. And they put me in the back seat of an ordinary car.

I think it was a Volvo.

And the two policemen in civil,

without any uniform, sitting in front.

They drove me to police syndrome.

And then I had made up my mind

to tell them the truth straight away.

I said that to the police,

there were six, seven policemen there, And I told them I robbed 19 banks. They smiled.
They nearly laughed. So I had to prove it.
They didn't believe it at all. Because 19 banks is a lot of banks.
So I told them about what happened down to the smallest detail. There is, from one perspective, beauty in those smallest of details.
Any lunkhead can point a gun at a bank teller and demand money. And those lunkheads almost always get caught.
Martin got away with 19 bank robberies because of everything that came before that moment. The planning, developing the characters and the accents and disguises,

the rehearsals, the little touches designed specifically to throw investigators off his tail. I had put false clues, you know, I put cigarettes in the cars, I put beer empty, I put a ring, that was bought in Copenhagen, that has not been in the newspapers, you know.
Such things. He revealed those details for two reasons.
One, since they'd never been made public, the police would understand that only the real robber would know them. Two, they're sublime.
Martin was creating characters. Bank robbers, all of them.
But still, each one a character with a backstory and habits and quirks. It was inevitable, really, that he would confess it all.
I was in the theater, but I wanted more to be an actor. I've been acting lots in theater since I was a little boy.
I was in the theater. Martin had written and directed 19 performances, almost all of them flawless.
And if one wasn't flawless, he improvised, never broke character. And yet no one had ever applauded.
Confessing was his curtain call. And I had to show them the roots I had been driving and such.
And then they understood, Jesus Christ, it's true. The prison guard came one day and said, you have to come with me.
And I did. And there was this library there.
But in the middle, there was this long table, at least 10 meters long. And it was white linen.
There was Coca-Cola, nice food. The head of the police all around nowhere here.
They came to me and said,

thank you so much, Mr. Peterson,

for telling us the truth.

We are so happy now.

And then we sat down and they laughed a little

that I had dressed up as a woman and such.

And then the head of them said,

what are you going to do now?

Now I have to do my time, of course,

but I'll become a jurist, a lawyer.

They smiled over the mic and promise you from one ear to the other, because this they don't believe. And I'm not sure I believe that story.
Still, it's a nice scene. Martin and his no-longer stumped pursuers having a chuckle and a meal together.
The Coca-Cola's a nice touch. Bjorn eventually was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in prison, though he was released after less than three.
As for Martin, he was convicted on multiple counts of bank robbery in the spring of 1982 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. With time off for good behavior and such, he served only eight.
He made very good use of those years.

Scandinavian attitudes towards crime and punishment are considerably more pragmatic than, say, American ones. Martin went to school, university, then law school.
He became the lawyer his mother always wanted him to be. you rob 19 banks but somehow

don't

don't seem to have been seen as a bad guy no I got a I was in some sort of a hero in a way then also why? because I did it a little gentlemanly even Even some of the bank managers that I robbed came to visit me in prison. And I said, I'm so sorry.
And I hugged them. Did you consider yourself a criminal? Not really.
No. Of course, I was a criminal.
I was a super criminal. But I wanted to get out of it.
I planned it only once. I threw the gun away, you know, out into the sea.
But I was very weak, weak for beautiful things, for having parties, for being a good man, you know? And then I feel that I was, in a way, forced on, forced on, forced on. But then, at the end, I decided to sell my house and then invest in real business.
And I did, in a way, but I was too late. About the time Martin was getting out of prison in 1990, his mother bought a three-story building in the center of Osgutztrand, a little village on the fjord south of Oslo, and only a few miles from Tonesburg, where he grew up.
Martin moved into the top two floors, which left the ground floor vacant. Then I got an idea.
What if I make that into a restaurant or coffee shop and call it the Munch's Café? Because Edvard Munch is famous all over Norway, and he has been living here in Oskarland. That's true.
Munch had a small house overlooking the fjord. That would be smart to use the name Edvard Munch.
I had to ask the Munch family for Munch. They said you have to say Munch.
That is to pronounce it. And you have to buy all the paintings from us.
All the work. And also originals, of course.
And I did. And then I gave them permission to call it Munch's Cafe.
There's a fair amount of cheek in that name, considering Martin began his former life of crime by stealing Munch lithographs from a wealthy widow. Those pieces were eventually returned.
But he did hang copies of at least two of those, one called Madonna, the other Jealousy, in his cafe. He also had a wall of framed newspaper clippings about his exploits.
Come in, welcome to my humble restaurants. And then I said, who are you? I know you.
Yeah, I'm the bank robber. What? That's how I heard about him.
Two of those tourists are friends of mine, and they told me about this charming gentleman they met in this Norwegian village. Martin still lives above the cafe with his fourth wife and their toddler son.
But he sold the cafe last year. He's 71 years old now, and his knees are shot.
He started running marathons in prison with a Soviet spy, and you know what? It's a good story. But it's at this point, when you're being charmed by this man and these stories, that you have to remind yourself, just for the record, that robbing banks is very bad.
Especially when you're pointing guns at people. Martin, of course, knows this, just as he knows that he badly traumatized some people in his outlaw days.
And yet, all these years later, he's still playing a bank robber. The character has evolved.
He's kind of a scamp now. And Martin brings him out whenever it seems appropriate, which is more often than one would think.
One afternoon, Martin and I, along with his wife and son, went to Oslo to tour the Munch Museum. It's in a new building by the Opera House.
We saw only part of it because it's enormous, and because Martin was a week away from getting a knee replaced. We took photos in front of some of the original paintings that he stole lithographs of all those years ago.
It was fun. We got separated on our way out.
I found him after a few minutes near the gift shop with four befuddled German tourists. Martin was chuckling.
They don't believe me, he said. Go on, tell them.
I didn't have to ask what he was talking about. It's true, I told the Germans.
Norway's biggest bank robber.

Their eyes got a little wide, and they smiled,

as if we'd pulled off some mildly amusing party trick.

And it seemed, just for a second, like they might even politely applaud. Next week on Big Time, how 50 million bees go missing.
This has been Big Time, an Apple original podcast produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. It's hosted by me, Steve Buscemi.
This episode was reported by Sean Flynn. Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.
Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer. Our production team includes Amy Padula, Rajiv Gola, Morgan Jaffe, and associate producer, Dania Abdelhamid.
Fact-checking by Mary Mathis with translation support by Jessica Robinson. Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviron.
Our theme was written by Nicholas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.