So the premise is these Arnold team guys steal money while making busts, enough to not cause suspicions but enough for themselves.
Now, in the scene showed, it looked like perhaps over $1bn was in the huge pile from and they stole 1% and blew the rest up.
Now, the main ques is how did FBI know that $10mn was missing, the amount they stole if no one talked? Surely, it was an inside job right?
In the post-bust internal interrogations the DEA honchos said there was a parallel FBI investigation.
It's still kind of weak, though. The team blew up the cash pile, which I assume would do enough damage to cause meaningful shortages in the total. $10 million is only 1000 $10k bundles of 100s, seems like that could easily get lost.
It's also not super clear that the FBI "total" they had been working with would ever be all that accurate. These pictures of nacro cash stashes always seem to be so much currency it's kind of beyond anything but rough estimates based on weight.
$10mn is a huge amount but still a rounding error in the $10bn or so that appeared to be there. Still the FBI might or might not investigate the DEA bust. Who knows.
And determining the amount to be $10mn from debris/ash is such a laborious process that it seems like a waste of time to investigate their own sister agency DEA.
Personally I think someone might've tipped them off. Maybe Arnold himself given he somehow was able to mysteriously steal all the money all by himself despite no evidence to how he actually might've pulled it off.
Seems implausible the whole setup unless he had an accomplice.
I found a web site that does cash stacks/piles/etc as props. Their "money pallet" is only $50 million.
If we're to believe they stole $10 million, then a pallet of $50 million would be missing a visually noticeable quantity of cash. But if a pallet of cash is only $50 million, there's no way they had the time to shove $10 million down the sewer.
I still think there's no way another undercover investigation would have gotten a super dialed-in total for the cash pile. I would have been a visual estimate or some kind of dubious "bookkeeping" entry, both of which have a zillion ways to be off by 10%. So mostly I call BS that they had an accurate way of knowing how much, if any, got stolen, even without the explosion that damaged and scattered the cash that was there.