Wikipedia Deep Dive

GardaWorld

14 min read

The Easter Sunday Heist That Nobody Noticed

On the morning of March 31, 2024, while families across Los Angeles gathered for Easter brunch, thieves were making off with thirty million dollars in cash from a vault in Sylmar. They had cut through the roof, cracked open a safe, and carved an escape hole through a concrete wall. Alarms had rung multiple times. Police had responded, written reports, asked neighbors questions. And yet somehow, GardaWorld—one of the largest private security companies on Earth—didn't discover the theft until they opened their vault the next day.

Thirty million dollars in cash weighs approximately 7,500 pounds. That's nearly four tons of currency, spirited away from a company whose entire business is keeping other people's money safe.

The Sylmar heist wasn't just the largest cash theft in Los Angeles history. It was a darkly ironic capstone to a company whose trajectory from a $25,000 investment to a global security empire has been marked by ambition, controversy, and a pattern of incidents that seem to undercut its core promise of protection.

From Trans-Québec to Global Empire

GardaWorld began its life in 1995 with a much humbler name: Trans-Québec Security Inc. Its founder, Stephan Crétier, invested $25,000 to start the company in Montreal. The international division had actually been operating since 1984 under different ownership, but Crétier's leadership would transform it into something far more ambitious.

The company grew through acquisition—the classic private equity playbook of buying competitors to build market share. By the mid-2000s, GardaWorld was on a shopping spree. One of the most significant purchases was ATI Systems International, a deal worth $391 million. But acquisitions rarely go smoothly, and this one ended in lawsuits. GardaWorld sued ATI's former chief executive officer, alleging he had misrepresented the company's financial health. The CEO countersued, claiming wrongful dismissal. The deal that was supposed to strengthen GardaWorld instead dragged it into costly litigation.

Still, the company kept buying. In January 2006, it acquired Vance International from SPX Corporation. By December of that same year, it had purchased Kroll Security International from Kroll—a name that carries significant weight in the security and investigations world.

Then came 2008.

The Crash and the War Zone Revival

The global financial crisis hit GardaWorld hard. Its stock price collapsed by more than ninety percent. The company was forced to sell off its United States and Mexico guarding operations to Andrews International for just $44.25 million—a fire sale that reflected how desperate things had become. Debt restructuring kept GardaWorld afloat, but barely. Investors looked at the company and saw weakness.

What saved GardaWorld was war.

As American and allied forces expanded their presence in Afghanistan and across the Middle East, demand for private security services exploded. Governments needed contractors to guard embassies, protect diplomats, secure supply routes, and handle the countless security tasks that military forces were too stretched to manage themselves. GardaWorld was positioned to fill that need, and its financial results gradually improved as contracts flowed in from some of the most dangerous places on Earth.

The recovery emboldened Crétier to return to his acquisition strategy. The company's debt climbed to $639 million—more than four times its operating profit. Rather than pull back, Crétier doubled down. In 2012, he partnered with Apax Partners, a British private equity firm, to take GardaWorld private in a deal worth about 1.1 billion Canadian dollars. Going private meant no more quarterly earnings calls, no more stock price to worry about, no more public scrutiny of every decision.

The Shadow Security Industry

To understand GardaWorld, you need to understand the private security industry itself—a sector that operates largely out of public view despite touching nearly every aspect of modern life.

Private security companies fall into two broad categories. The first handles what you might call domestic security: the guards at your office building, the armored trucks that transport cash from your local bank, the uniformed personnel checking badges at corporate headquarters. The second category is far more exotic: providing security in conflict zones, protecting diplomatic missions, guarding oil installations in unstable countries, escorting convoys through territory where governments have little control.

GardaWorld operates in both worlds. In North America, its armored trucks pick up cash from businesses and transport it to banks and processing facilities. In places like Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq, its personnel have guarded embassies and protected foreign workers in environments where a mistake can be fatal.

This dual nature creates an unusual corporate culture. The same company that hires guards to watch over suburban strip malls also employs personnel who operate in active war zones. The skills, risks, and rewards are wildly different, yet they exist under one corporate umbrella.

In 2015, GardaWorld made a major move to expand its international footprint by acquiring Aegis Defence Services for $131 million plus performance bonuses. Aegis was a British company with deep experience in Africa and the Middle East—exactly the markets GardaWorld wanted to dominate. The acquisition strengthened GardaWorld's position as one of the handful of companies capable of providing security in the world's most dangerous places.

The Weight of Responsibility

In March 2020, the Tampa Bay Times published an investigation that painted a troubling picture of GardaWorld's domestic armored truck operations. The newspaper documented what it called "a decade of dangerous behavior," finding that the company's trucks had been involved in crashes that killed at least nineteen people since 2008, including three in 2019 alone.

The investigation drew on internal company data—documents that GardaWorld argued were stolen, though courts dismissed the company's attempts to suppress them—along with ninety interviews, including fifty-six with current or former drivers.

What emerged was a portrait of an operation where safety seemed to take a backseat to speed. Drivers described trucks with unreliable brakes, missing seat belts, and sometimes missing seats. Training was minimal. Pressure to work long hours was intense, even for drivers with histories of accidents.

The internal database showed staggering numbers: more than one hundred crashes per month on average during one period, with over 320 people injured during a two-and-a-half-year span.

A former employee who helped expose these conditions claimed the company offered to pay for her silence. She refused. "I know I made the right decision by not accepting the money or signing a release," she said. "I believed in the truth prevailing—and am grateful to be able to share my story to help others."

The contrast is jarring. Here was a company entrusted with securing embassies in war zones, yet apparently struggling to keep its domestic armored trucks from crashing into civilians.

Left Behind in Kabul

On August 19, 2021, as the Taliban swept into Kabul and the Afghan government collapsed, the 125 guards who had protected the British Embassy found themselves in a desperate situation. They had worked for GardaWorld, providing security for British diplomats in one of the world's most dangerous postings. Now, with the city falling, they needed evacuation.

The British government said no.

The guards were told they weren't eligible for asylum because they "were not directly employed by Her Majesty's government." They were contractors, not civil servants, and that distinction—bureaucratic though it might seem—meant the difference between escape and abandonment.

Meanwhile, across town, American-contracted GardaWorld guards at the United States Embassy were being evacuated. The American government had made a different calculation about its obligations to the people who had protected its diplomats.

GardaWorld attempted its own evacuation effort, gathering 185 families—about 1,000 people total—for an extraction that ultimately failed as Kabul's airport descended into chaos. The company promised to try again "once things calm down in the coming months."

The episode highlighted an uncomfortable truth about the private security industry. When companies hire guards to work in conflict zones, those guards assume enormous personal risk. They may be shot at, bombed, or targeted for assassination because of who they protect. But when the situation becomes untenable, the guards' fate often depends on decisions made by governments that never formally employed them, and by companies whose primary obligations are to shareholders, not security personnel.

The Sophistication of Easter Sunday

Which brings us back to Sylmar, and what investigators have called one of the most sophisticated heists in American history.

The thieves clearly knew what they were doing. They disabled the security cameras. They shut down the alarms—or at least the ones that mattered. They cut off the building's connection to nearby WiFi networks, presumably to prevent any backup systems from phoning home. They entered through the roof, a route that required planning and equipment but avoided the more heavily monitored ground-level approaches. They cracked open an internal safe and removed nearly four tons of cash. They cut an escape hole through a concrete wall and disappeared into the night.

What makes the heist remarkable isn't just the amount stolen or the precision of the operation. It's the way the thieves seemed to have studied the building's security systems and found them wanting.

In the year before the heist, the Los Angeles Police Department had responded to thirteen alarm calls at the GardaWorld facility. Every single one was logged as a false alarm. With hindsight, investigators wonder whether some of those alarms were actually the thieves testing the building's defenses, probing to see how quickly police responded and how thoroughly they investigated.

On the night of March 30—the night before the theft was discovered—an alarm rang at 11:30 in the evening. Police responded and found nothing. The thieves may have been in the building at that very moment, or they may have been watching to see what would happen.

More alarms rang on March 31. At 4:36 in the morning, police came to the scene, notified a supervisor, and wrote a report. The report's contents remain unclear, but the police apparently suspected something—they asked a nearby resident the next day if she had "seen or heard anything suspicious around 4 a.m." She had been asleep.

Another alarm at 7:22 a.m. brought police back. Another at 3:51 p.m., logged once again as a false alarm.

All the while, thirty million dollars was missing from the vault, and nobody knew.

What the Heist Reveals

Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell offered a blunt assessment: "To be able to get in undetected, to be able to get into an internal safe, to be able to remove that much property requires some knowledge of the alarm system, the layout of the place, the camera surveillance equipment."

In other words, the thieves had inside knowledge. Whether that came from a current employee, a former worker, someone who had studied the facility from the outside, or some combination of sources, the heist was not a crime of opportunity. It was planned by people who understood exactly what they were up against and found the gaps.

The neighborhood itself may have helped. Sylmar, in the northern San Fernando Valley, has a reputation for crime. A cash storage facility in such an area presents an unusual target—valuable contents in a location where suspicious activity might not stand out.

Within weeks of the heist, Hollywood producers began circling, eager to turn the story into a film. The narrative has everything: a massive score, a mysterious crew, a security company caught flat-footed, and a crime so audacious that it almost seems like fiction.

The Business of Trust

GardaWorld's history tells a larger story about the private security industry and the nature of trust itself.

The company has grown from a $25,000 startup to a global enterprise valued in the billions. Along the way, it has acquired dozens of competitors, expanded into some of the world's most dangerous regions, and built relationships with governments and corporations that depend on its services to keep people and assets safe.

Yet the company's track record includes armored trucks that crash with alarming frequency, embassy guards abandoned to the Taliban, and a cash vault that was emptied without anyone noticing.

These aren't necessarily contradictions. Large organizations fail in specific ways even while succeeding in others. A company can be excellent at high-stakes diplomatic security in Baghdad while simultaneously running a troubled domestic trucking operation. The skills, management structures, and cultures required for each business are different.

But the pattern does raise questions about what it means to be in the security business. When clients hire a firm like GardaWorld, they're not just buying guards or trucks or monitoring systems. They're buying peace of mind. They're paying for the assurance that someone else is handling the risks they'd rather not think about.

The Sylmar heist punctured that assurance in spectacular fashion. Whatever security measures GardaWorld had in place—the cameras, the alarms, the safes, the walls—proved insufficient against thieves who had done their homework.

Private Power in a Complex World

Today, GardaWorld employs approximately 120,000 people worldwide. In the United States, it operates under the name United American Security, doing business as GardaWorld. The company is owned by Rhône, a private equity firm that acquired it in 2017 alongside founder Stephan Crétier and members of management, in a deal valued at $2.2 billion.

That private ownership means less public disclosure of the company's operations, finances, and incidents. Unlike a publicly traded company, GardaWorld doesn't have to file quarterly reports or hold shareholder meetings where uncomfortable questions might be asked.

This opacity is common in the private security industry. The companies that guard embassies in war zones, transport billions in cash across continents, and provide security for critical infrastructure often operate with minimal public scrutiny. We know they exist. We see their logos on armored trucks and the uniforms of guards. But the details of how they operate, how often they fail, and what happens when things go wrong often remain hidden unless journalists or lawsuits force disclosure.

GardaWorld's journey from Trans-Québec Security to global security giant mirrors the broader growth of private security as an industry. In 1995, when Crétier invested his initial $25,000, the idea of private companies providing security in conflict zones was still relatively novel. The massive expansion of private military and security contractors came later, driven by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the realization by governments that they could outsource security tasks that would once have been handled by military personnel.

That expansion created companies like GardaWorld—large enough to bid on embassy contracts, diverse enough to run armored trucks in California and guard diplomats in Kabul, and private enough to avoid much of the accountability that comes with public ownership or government employment.

The Unanswered Questions

As of this writing, the Sylmar heist remains unsolved. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Los Angeles Police Department are investigating, but the thieves have not been identified or apprehended. The thirty million dollars has not been recovered.

Whoever pulled off the heist demonstrated capabilities that should concern anyone who relies on private security. They understood the target's vulnerabilities. They neutralized multiple security systems. They operated undetected despite multiple police responses. And they escaped with enough cash to fund comfortable retirements for a small army of co-conspirators.

The heist also demonstrates something about the limits of security itself. No matter how many cameras, alarms, safes, and walls you deploy, sufficiently motivated and knowledgeable adversaries can find ways through. Security is not a state to be achieved but a constant competition between those protecting assets and those trying to take them.

GardaWorld knows this better than most. Its personnel have operated in places where adversaries are not just clever thieves but armed militants, where failure means not just financial loss but death. The company has presumably learned hard lessons about security from those environments.

And yet, on Easter Sunday 2024, someone walked away with thirty million dollars from one of their vaults.

Hollywood may eventually tell this story, dramatizing the heist and the investigation that followed. When they do, they'll have plenty of material to work with—not just the crime itself, but the company whose vault was breached, with its history of acquisitions and controversies, its presence in war zones and suburban strip malls, its promise of security and the moments when that promise has fallen short.

The thieves of Sylmar found a gap in GardaWorld's defenses. In doing so, they illuminated something about the entire industry: the gap between the security we're sold and the security we actually get.