The jailed members of the Ioanid Gang acted out their own roles, either simply forced or possibly having been told that their death sentences would be commuted in return.
Although the persons on trial were accused of intending to donate the money to Zionist organisations that would send Romanian Jews to Israel, the stolen sum was in lei, which at the time could not be exchanged for hard currency anywhere in the world.
During many months preceding July 1959 (the date of the alleged heist), at least one of the members, Obedeanu, was aware of being followed and of being constantly watched through binoculars by the Securitate from a building across the street from his apartment.
It is, however, highly unlikely that a person living in Romania at the time, let alone such educated individuals, could have imagined being able to get away with such behaviour unnoticed by the surveillance apparatus.
Moreover, in Obedeanu's case for example, the crew making the Reconstruction film resorted to bringing furnishing props, including carpets, furniture and curtains, to his apartment in order to show how he had spent the money.
[8] The chief ideologue put in charge of the purge was Leonte Răutu who, in spite of his Jewish roots, had become a stauch Romanian national communist.
[9] Vladimir Tismăneanu sees the whole affair in the light of a typical Bolshevist show trial, with the Romanian national communists set out to remove Jewish intellectuals from the party.
As a parallel, in what was a highly unusual move for those times when nobody was allowed to leave Romania, another Jewish Securitate officer, Ion Crișan, incidentally described as "friend" of the Ioanid group, was permitted to leave the country with his family and go to Brazil around 1961,[8] shortly after the alleged incident; this has led some to believe that he may have been the agent through whom the government communicated its promises and made them credible.
The film Closer to the Moon (2014) by Nae Caranfil, starring Harry Lloyd, Vera Farmiga, Mark Strong and Joe Armstrong, is fictional and very loosely connected to the real events.