An excerpt from Revenge of the Tipping Point, a book I found to be good but somewhat overpriced:
They were now on notice. History was being made. They waited. Could the Yankee possibly strike yet again? At 5.30, the phone rang. An unknown white male – slender, Southern accent, Yankee cap – had just robbed the First Interstate Bank in Encino, fifteen minutes north on the 405 freeway, for $2,413.
“Bill, it’s the Yankee.”
One man. Four hours. Six banks.
“It was a new world’s record,” Rehder would write later in his memoirs, “still unbroken.”
—
In the 80’s and 90’s, bank robberies very suddenly became much more common, particularly in LA. There’s a certain vision of this type of criminal that was only enhanced by increasingly cool names given to these robbers – Gasoline Bandit, Yankee Bandit, Cyclops Bandit, ect. Bank robbery is one of those crimes that can be tremendously simple or complicated. In the 80’s it was often just a guy with a gun holding up the desk and running out, but that didn’t stop movies like Heat from acting like these needed to be these complicated planned crimes. Hollywood would have you believe the bank robbery that started The Dark Knight was how they were all done – ziplines, giant vault, and all.
For almost certainly the better, bank robberies are a whole lot rarer now. It seems to have joined a set of stories left in the 20th century like going to rent a movie, grand passenger ship voyages, or dramatic payphone conversations. Sure, we still have contemporary media depicting great heists – Baby Driver comes to mind – but these are more and more fiction and singularly that. The advent of CCTV and coordination amongst police departments has almost extinguished the heist from even being possible.
Almost.
About a year ago, I was visiting my preferred star market that sits precariously between South Boston and Dorchester. I got out of my car and I could see even from the far end of the parking lot that the metal stalls hugging the building were empty – not a shopping cart to be seen. Luckily – more so than I knew – I found a stray cart in the lot and proceeded in. As I approached the door, there was a homeless man having an animated argument with himself in my way. I carefully (but masterfully) maneuvered my cart around him, walking by a handful of concerned star market staff as I passed into the store. I did my shopping as usual. As I finally checked out and exited the doors to the parking lot I immediately felt a presence over my right shoulder, walking up to me.
For a brief but vivid moment, I expected to be stabbed in the side by the same homeless man, perhaps with a toothbrush or other makeshift shank. After my life flashed before my eyes, I locked eyes with a middle aged woman already beginning to walk with me. I took an airpod out.
“CAN I WALK WITH YOU TO GET YOUR CART WHEN YOU’RE DONE?”
A pause while I tried to rationalize — “SURE”
Without me asking, she began to explain that Star Market was extremely low on carts because the vast majority of them had been stolen. I was so eager to escape the situation that I didn’t question this woman’s intimate knowledge of grocery store happenings. As I finished unloading my groceries under her watchful eye, I noticed the same scenario happening in the parking spot across as another man handed off a cart to a waiting woman. They really had no carts.
As I drove home I couldn’t stop thinking about it. A typical grocery store has between 200-300 carts and this star market was on the larger side. Someone stole all of them? I hesitate to write ‘someone’ because I can’t envision this happening without a team. A pickup truck can hold 10-15 carts, a box truck 30-50. That’s a minimum of 6 trips, and as many as 30 with one vehicle. Or – More vehicles? A fleet? A semi truck? A team to load carts in? Where did they take them? Clearly they had a game plan with these.
If you’ve read my previous posts, you can see where this is heading. I need to email someone. The issue is there is not currently a tenured position at any major university dedicated to stealing shopping carts, a failure of our higher education. My emails to people who are sort of adjacent to that failed miserably. There are, however, companies that make a business out of preventing this kind of thing. So off the email went to the COO of a major player in this space – and then, a response:
“There are groups that steal large volumes of carts, resale to small retail, used / refurbished resale, scrap, and export although export has become less common due to cheaper cart options and high freight costs of transporting carts. Often it is under-reported, especially when they disappear in smaller groups over a longer period of time.”
So it’s true. This is happening. The more I google the more sense it makes. Shopping carts are not generally tracked, they’re typically worth $50-$100 each (!) and can be as much as $250. These are seasoned, coordinated criminals potentially reaping $25,000+ from a single evening loading up a set of trucks repeatedly. It’s much more under the radar than the bank robberies of old, you rarely see a news story about this kind of thing. Robert De Niro could hardly imagine the real robbery opportunity 30 years after Heat would be in the Star Market parking lot, but it is.
Heists may have become rarer, but they are not gone. We just need to rethink what is worth conducting a heist for in the 21st century: the more unglamorous and overlooked, the better. In 1906, Harry Houdini wrote a cheeky book called The Right Way to do Wrong. It’s a great read. In it, he describes criminal best practices of the time in extreme detail. He defends the purpose of this book as ‘warning’ readers about the ‘dangers of criminals’, but from his sardonic tone, I’ve always had the impression he just got a kick out of it. About 25 pages in, he talks about the rising cohort of burglars in the new 20th century:
“The burglar of to-day is a very different fellow from his predecessor of a generation ago. Then it was mainly a question of brute strength and audacity. Now it is a science… Every burglar nowadays is a mechanic.”
As was true for Houdini, the criminal of our time is different than those before. A scientist of the grocery store lot. Also as was true for Houdini, I’m not encouraging you to commit any crime. I’m just saying it’s beneficial to appreciate that movements of culture and society much more often metastasize or transform than they disappear. It’s a lot easier to assume something is gone forever than to do the legwork of understanding how its changed. Street crime is an enduring example of that. Now we just need some cool names.
Colin