Criminal Brassiere

St. Petersburg, Florida

Until the Miami Police Department contacted them in 1950, the Southern Bell Telephone Company didn't have a clue about what had been going on right under their noses.

Several young female employees had been stealing thousand of dollars at their workplace, undetected, for years. The women, who toiled in the pay phone coin counting rooms, hid rolls of coins in their bras. At the peak of the Brassiere Brigade's heists, they were "toting up to $150 a day in rolled coins stuffed into their lingerie," according to the sign in the St. Petersburg Museum of History's bra exhibit. The women were arrested and charged, and the sensational case made the headlines for an amused nation. It was known as, "the case of the clinking brassieres."

The Criminal Brassiere displayed behind glass at the museum is not claimed to have been part of the heists, but it has its own street cred as the garment "featured in the Travel Channel's 'Mysteries at the Museum' Season 6, Episode 1."