I don’t know about you guys, but when it comes to capers, from swiping the Hope Diamond to cracking a bank vault, I like to envision some complicated, timed to the microsecond, Oceans 11/ Mission Impossible-type scheme. The one where you need 1000 ft of nylon rope, multiple pulleys, cat suits, space mirrors, and a contortionist just to avoid the lasers? What you don’t really expect is to be able to walk into an art gallery, grab a master off the wall, and stroll out. But that is exactly what happened.
This past July, while parts of the country were battling arson in the form of thousand-acre grass fires, a rather ballsy, albeit snazzily dressed, San Francisco man walked into a gallery, lifted a Picasso drawing worth about $200k, then returned to a waiting cab. Okay, so stolen art is hard to sell, and everything from the Mona Lisa to The Scream has been stolen and eventually recovered, but come on! Anti-climax! Theft is way more entertaining in books and movies, just saying. . .
Hat tip: San Francisco Chronicle
Smash-and-grab has always been effective; the New Yorker ran a great [url=http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/12/100412fa_fact_samuels]article[/url] on a Balkan jewelry-heist gang that was just that unsophisticated.
There’s a more interesting question. In the old days, the target was tangible: jewels, bullion, armored-car cash, etc. But now that vast wealth is ephemeral, mere data bits in the aether of electronic banking, how do you make a heist story dramatic?
Peter Spiegelman’s latest, THICK AS THIEVES, has a plot that turns on … inserting a computer virus into a PC. Via a USB stick. Um, exciting? Asked about this recently, Spiegelman pointed out that the drama came from all the activity leading up to this bit of nerd byplay — and everything that went wrong.
He’s right, and THICK AS THIEVES is a great story. But I think the challenge remains for all contemporary heist and caper novels.
You have a point Mike, when I was in Highschool in Dallas, there was an epidemic of people crashing into gas stations with their trucks, throwing a chain around an ATM, then driving off.
But walking in and lifting something off of the shelf? I mean this guy makes stealing art look like shop-lifting at Wal Mart…