Meet the world’s most brazen, unrepentant ‘Jewel Thief’

Gerald Blanchard was a thin, bespectacled, nerdy child from Canada who stole tens of millions of {dollars} from ATMs — after which pulled off one of the memorable heists in historical past by parachuting onto the grounds of an Austrian fort to steal the priceless Star of Empress Sisi diamond.

Blanchard, now in his early 50s, is cocky, unrepentant and defiant. He tells his personal (oft-exaggerated) story — aided and abetted by interviews with family and friends — in “The Jewel Thief,” a brand new Hulu documentary directed by Landon Van Soest.

It traces Blanchard’s lifetime of crime in each Canada and the US and ends in a worldwide manhunt spearheaded by two indefatigable Winnipeg detectives.

“Not solely is he unrepentant, however as he says [in the documentary] he’s happy with it. He owns it,” Van Soest informed The Submit. “I see [his life of crime] extra as an obsession and an ambition; I feel he really needed to be nice at what he was doing, and he needed to be acknowledged for being nice at what he was doing.

“So, for him to seek out an viewers, with police prepared to chase him across the globe … he feels he’s earned it.”

Born in Winnipeg, and adopted as a child, Blanchard moved together with his single mom to Omaha, Neb.

It was a tricky, inner-city atmosphere and he had a tricky time becoming in — he was reed-thin, shy and very smart — however emerged from his shell in highschool by way of his newly acquired VHS digital camera.

Cash was tight; Blanchard nonetheless blames banks for his household’s precarious funds. In 1987, on the age of 15, he masterminded his first heist, cleansing out an area Radio Shack retailer, and, placed on probation shortly thereafter, he was incomes six figures via labyrinthian unlawful schemes.

On the age of 16, he purchased his first home; 9 years later, after a seven-year jail sentence was minimize to 4 years, he was deported again to Canada … and that’s the place his story actually kicks into excessive gear.

“I feel he has this nice capacity to revise historical past to type of make every part appear to be he had this nice vendetta towards banks,” Van Soest mentioned. “What appears very evident is that he had a really deep-seated need for respect; any entity or person who he felt disrespected him … he spent his complete life attempting to show folks unsuitable.

“He needed to present them that he was smarter.”

Blanchard was almost penniless when he landed in Winnipeg however not for lengthy. He used his electronics genius and painstakingly calculated a approach to steal money from ATMs. His targets included Scotiabank and a brand-new CIBC megabank by which he sauntered off with $750,000 in Canadian {dollars} — the night time earlier than the department, and its seven filled-to-the-brim ATMs, was scheduled to open for enterprise.

“He definitely sees the world otherwise than most individuals,” Van Soest mentioned. “It’s completely fascinating … it’s exhausting to consider that any rational individual, definitely somebody as clever as he’s, would try this stuff. But it surely doesn’t appear to faze him. I don’t know, essentially, how a lot of that’s bravado.”

Regardless of his brushes with the regulation, and time spent behind bars, Blanchard felt indestructible and, in 1998, launched into his theft of the Star of Empress Sisi on the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, which wasn’t found till two weeks later (he’d swapped the Köchert Diamond pearl with a duplicate he purchased in a present store).

He surrendered in Winnipeg, led cops to the diamond (hidden in his grandmother’s basement) and, in November 2007, was sentenced to eight years in jail. He was paroled after two years.

“It’s this really type of fairy-tale-like parachuting right into a fort in Austria and stealing crown jewels and this cat-burglar picture that’s intriguing to me,” Van Soest mentioned. “What actually put [‘The Jewel Thief’] in movement for me was … digging a bit deeper and realizing this was not an remoted incident, however a long time of an rising degree of ingenuity.

“He’d say to me, ‘Everybody needs to speak about [the palace heist] however I’ve finished far more attention-grabbing issues,’” Van Soest mentioned. “It’s exhausting to sum up, however a lot of it was about discovering that recognition, that degree of respect.

“He went about it in extraordinarily anti-social and nefarious methods.”