On January 20, 1976, a group associated with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) exploited the chaos of the country’s civil war and broke into the British Bank of the Middle East in Beirut. The robbers blasted through a wall which the bank shared with a Catholic church then cracked the bank’s vault and plundered its contents (anywhere from $20 million to $50 million in gold bars, Lebanese and foreign currency, stocks and jewels). Today the loot is valued at more than three times what it was worth in 1976.