This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: In and Out
I have a confession to make. I love a good heist movie. The planning montage, the impossible vault, the crew of specialists who each have one very specific skill, the clean getaway set to a jazzy soundtrack. As a criminal lawyer I probably should not admit that I find any of it charming, but there it is.
What the movies never show you is the scene that comes after the getaway. That is the scene where somebody has to actually sell a priceless painting that the entire planet is now looking for. It does not make the final cut, and that is a shame, because it is the most realistic part of the whole story. The getting is fast and dramatic. The keeping is slow and miserable, and it is usually where the wheels come off.
Every story this week has the same shape. Each one was over in a matter of minutes, sometimes in under a minute. The thieves were quick, organized, and gone before anyone could lay a hand on them. And in almost every case, the speed was the easy part. The hard part, the part that tends to end with someone sitting across a table from a lawyer, is everything that happens next.
Eight Minutes at the Louvre
We have to start with the big one, even though it is the oldest story in the bunch, because everything else this year is living in its shadow.
In October of last year, thieves dressed as construction workers walked into the Louvre during normal opening hours, went straight to the Galerie d’Apollon, and left with eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels worth roughly 88 million euros. The whole thing took less than eight minutes. They spent about four of those minutes inside the museum itself. Visitors were standing nearby. It was, by any measure, a spectacular piece of work.
Here is the part that should comfort anyone who worries about the state of the world. As of this month, the jewels are still gone, but the people are not. Several suspects have been arrested, some of them already well known to police from earlier burglaries, and the crew has been slowly identified one member at a time. In a detail that I find almost too perfect, the thieves dropped the Crown of Empress Eugénie on their way out and damaged it, and earlier this year the Louvre quietly began the process of [hiring someone to repair it](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/louvre-france-crown-jewels-heist-arrest/).
So they pulled off one of the most famous heists in modern history, and what they have to show for it is a pile of jewellery so recognizable that nobody on earth can buy it, plus a growing number of friends in custody. The eight minutes were the easy part.
Three Minutes Near Parma
If the Louvre crew set the standard, the next group beat it on time.
In March, four men entered the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, a private museum in a villa south of Parma, Italy, and walked out with works by Renoir, Cezanne, and Matisse. Renoir’s Les Poissons, Cezanne’s Still Life with Cherries, and Matisse’s Odalisque on the Terrace, gone together in under three minutes. The combined value sits at around nine million euros.
The reason it was three minutes and not longer is the reason I keep telling people to test their alarm systems. The alarm went off mid-heist and the thieves had to run for it. They were in such a hurry that they grabbed a fourth piece, thought better of it, and abandoned it at the scene on the way out the door. No arrests yet, and the Carabinieri are on it.
I want to flag the lesson buried in this one. The alarm did not stop them from taking three masterpieces. What it did was turn a calm, professional theft into a panicked sprint, and a panicked sprint is how mistakes get made and evidence gets left behind. In my line of work the single most useful thing a person can do, criminally speaking, is slow down. These four did the opposite, which is good news for everyone except them.
Thirty-Nine Seconds in Brentwood
Now we come down from the world of Renoir and Cezanne to a strip-mall shop in Brentwood, California, and I promise the connection is real.
Three masked people ran into a store called The Card Lab, leapt over the display cases, and made off with about 15,000 dollars worth of Pokemon cards in roughly 39 seconds before driving away in a Nissan Altima. The shop had been open for two months. A manager was upstairs at the time and never had a chance to react.
If you think a children’s card game is a strange target, you have not been paying attention. There is now an international crime spree built around trading cards, with smash-and-grabs at hobby shops across several countries, because rare graded cards trade for sums that would have sounded insane a few years ago. The Card Lab job is the same crime as the Louvre job, just with a smaller budget and a better soundtrack of breaking glass.
And it comes with the same catch. The most valuable cards are graded, slabbed, and assigned serial numbers, with public population reports listing how many of each exist. Dumping a stack of stolen high-end cards into the market is a bit like trying to sell the Mona Lisa at a yard sale. Somebody is going to notice. Thirty-nine seconds to grab them. Considerably longer to figure out what on earth to do with them.
And For Dessert
I will leave you with the heists that tell you where all of this is actually heading, because they barely involve running at all.
On Christmas Eve, thieves picked up a truckload of Costco lobster worth about 400,000 dollars from a cold storage facility in Massachusetts by pretending to be a legitimate trucking company. Spoofed emails, fake credentials, disabled GPS trackers, and then gone. A few months later, somewhere near Turin, a crew posing as law enforcement stopped a truck, tied up the driver, and stole 413,793 limited-edition Formula 1 KitKat bars.
I include these two because they are the modern heist in its purest form. There was no vault and no leap over a display case. The real theft happened earlier, on a computer, when someone stole the shipping data needed to intercept the right truck on the right road. The dramatic part has moved offstage into a spreadsheet.
It also has the most satisfying flaw of the lot. Half a million chocolate bars have batch codes. Lobster has a shelf life measured in days. You can steal the most liquid, fast-moving goods imaginable and still be stuck holding a refrigerated trailer full of evidence that is actively going bad while you try to find a buyer who will not ask questions.
The thread running through all four cases is the oldest lesson in my business, dressed up in increasingly clever clothing. Getting your hands on the thing is rarely the problem. Keeping it, selling it, and not getting caught is the problem, and it always has been. The crews keep getting faster, and the awkward silence that follows the getaway keeps getting longer.
When I get a chance, I’ll explain the role of Nissan Altimas in the crime world.
See you next week.
