Fred Pearlman as Mitchell Michael Clark as Grace George Fargo as Penn Dee Pollock as "Jonesy" Jones George Savalas as Mulligan John Heller as German Lieutenant Shepherd Sanders as "Turk" Karl Otto Alberty as German Tank Commander Production Origins The screenplay was written by British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin. He relied on a true story, featured as "The Greatest Robbery on Record" in Guinness World Records from 1956 to 2000. On 4 December 1968, Elliott Morgan, MGM's Head of Research, wrote to the Guinness Book of World Records requesting information on this entry: "The greatest robbery on record was of the German National Gold Reserves in Bavaria by a combine of U.S. military personnel and German civilians in 1945". On 10 December the editor, Norris D. McWhirter, wrote back to Morgan, stating that he had very little information and that he essentially suspected that there had been a cover-up, which required that the story should be subject to a "restricted classification". He closed by suggesting that until that security classification was changed, "due to death or eflux [sic] of time, "any film made will have to be an historical romance rather than history". In 1975 British researcher Ian Sayer began a nine-year investigation into the Guinness entry. The results of his investigation, which confirmed a cover up by the U.S. government together with the involvement of U.S. military and former Wehrmacht and SS officers in the theft, were published in the 1984 book Nazi Gold — The Sensational Story of the World's Greatest Robbery — and the Greatest Criminal Cover-Up. The investigation finally led to two of the missing gold bars (valued in 2019 at over $1 million) being handed over by German officials to the U.S. government in a secret ceremony at Bonn on 27 September 1996. The bullion was transported to the Bank of England where it was held to the account of the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold (TCRMG). The first disclosure that the Bank was holding the two bars (complete with Nazi markings) came from a press release issued by the bank on 8 May 1997 which confirmed that the two bars were those that had been identified as missing in the book Nazi Gold. Sayer had given information to the United States Department of State concerning the two bars (amongst other things) in July 1978. In 1983 they finally