Do I care about Justin Bieber? No.

Do I think that what happened back in 2013 was one hell of a heist that deserves revisiting? For sure.

So if you’re not clued up then let’s backtrack, almost four years to the day, and revisit what happened at the FNB Stadium in 2013.

Off to EWN:

It was set to be a bumper weekend for Big Concerts. Rock group Bon Jovi had played the FNB Stadium on the Saturday night and in a first-ever, Justin Bieber played back-to-back on the Sunday. All the cash takings from the concession stands at both concerts were stored in a safe room in a cavity in the parking lot in the heart of the calabash. Not many people knew about the existence of the safe room – it had been used as an office previously and was really just a normal room with double bricked walls, alongside a bathroom, with a safe door.

According to the card reader, Foena Nel, who was in charge of concessions for Big Concerts, swiped her card to access the room on Monday morning at 08:11am. Officially, it was Nel who discovered the money had been stolen. At approximately 08:45am, Nel advised the on-site security manager that there had been a break-in at the cash office. Investigators would later raise concerns about why there had been a 35-minute delay but nothing would come of this. Nel’s card was swiped again at 08:52am.

She confirmed that she had left the stadium the night before after the concert at around 23:30pm. The keys for the cash boxes were left on the table in the safe room. A paramedic, who was in a room nearby the entire night, told cops he didn’t hear a thing and had no idea about the break-in.

Booysens Police Station officers arrived on the scene, closed off the site and put up barrier tape. The venue was placed on lock down. Everyone going in or out had to be searched. Detectives soon arrived. So too did stadium officials, the promoters and a variety of other security people. They each walked through the safe room, potentially destroying any clues that may have been left behind.

As you can tell, there’s a uniquely South African twist there with those on the scene unwittingly (or not) destroying the evidence.

Now there’s plenty to talk about here, but let’s skip ahead to what the man who was contracted to head up security for the promoters, Marcus Ferguson, wrote in his then confidential (and this week made public) 2013 report:

There were no signs of forced entry into the outer office door. We believe the bricks at the hole to the cash office had been removed over a period of time. The entire cash office is a solid wall, so they had to enter and leave via the basement outer door area, there is no other way to gain access according to our investigation…

Smells like an inside job, of course.

Ferguson is talking publicly about the crime that was previously veiled in secrecy, and he is still convinced that it was all planned out beforehand:

“It had to be an inside job. For them to remove the amount of bricks they removed, to remove the lintels, that door leading into the room had a key card. You actually swipe the card. We interrogated that lock completely. We had the last people to go in and there’s no ways that people could have gone in there without the key card,” says Ferguson…

“The security system itself all went back to the maintenance office. That’s where the cards were made so it’s like the wolf looking after the chicken run. Somewhere along the line it doesn’t make sense. They are the guys implicated in this whole thing. The maintenance [team was] working in that area and yet they are the guys who issue the cards. Next minute we start finding guys with three or four cards. It was a huge nightmare. So one card issued to a guy as a master card could open anything in the stadium. And that’s where the integrity of that system was questioned. So I lose my card, I just go and make another one. There was no recourse.”

They did search the house of the then maintenance manager, with those on the scene describing him as visibly agitated during the raid, but they didn’t manage to find anything:

“We went into the house, we were knocking on the doors, he was following us. You could see he was visibly upset about us coming into his house. There was nothing there. Gut feel now, on hindsight, we were probably at the wrong house. The house next door was probably the house where we should have been. The information we had was that it was behind a false wall. Information then came out that it was buried in the garden under a tree…” he trails off. Another dead end.

Let’s go to the video screen for some one-on-one time:

Dead end after dead end thus far, and whilst it hasn’t been officially confirmed the general consensus is that the cash stolen was in excess of R3 million.

If you’re up for a treasure hunt you might just be in luck:

For Ferguson, the mystery of the missing millions still eats away at him and his military precision of getting to the bottom of a case.

“Obviously I would have liked to have seen it come to a head and caught someone. I would have loved to have seen that. The story goes that he’s buried the money and now that he’s passed away no one knows where it is. That’s the last I’ve heard and it’s quite possible.”

We’ll cream 2% off the top for alerting you to this story – that’s R60 000 which is fair – so bust out your treasure maps and get digging.

[source:ewn]