In 2010 Doug MacRay and a team of five took $3.5 million in cash during a Fenway Park robbery—on game day. Neil McCauley and a crew of three took down a Los Angeles bank and $12.2 million in cash in 1995. Hans Gruber and a team of 12, (nearly a platoon) lifted $620 million in bearer bonds from the Nakatomi Corp in 1988. In a 1977 raid, Luke Skywalker and three squadrons of stub fighters flew through a hail of enemy spacecraft and surface cannons to destroy the Death Star.
What do these four things have in common? They are all works of particularly well-written fiction. Which of the four is different from the others? Well, lets just say it is FAR more likely for a farm boy with no formal combat-flight training to destroy the ultimate power in the galaxy than for the accumulation of cash in any one place depicted in the other three.
For context, we’ll examine history.
In 1863 a Malden Massachusetts night-auditor was shot and the heister took $5000, ($155,000, 2021 dollars) in the first recorded bank robbery in North America. Fast-forward 140-odd years and a 2006 report by U.S. News article pegs the typical take from a bank robbery at around $4000. The available cash on hand has continued to trend down.
That trend is backed by events. Jimmy Burke and Lucchese crime family soldiers took $5.8mm ($23mm today) in the 1978 Lufthansa Heist. Allan Pace and a team of five took $18mm, ($31mm today) in the 1997 Dunbar Armored Robbery. Both were the largest robberies of their time. Both were outliers, resulting in global changes to industry security.
Armed robberies reached their zenith in the 1970s and 80s as thousands of men, (trained in high-risk-small-team tactics) transitioned from the war in Vietnam to the high-unemployment and cyclical recessions of civilian life. Cash-on-hand policies became an important part of security and loss prevention. By the time William Guess, (a.k.a. the Polo Shirt Bandit) robbed his first bank in 1985, the take was only $1000. Carl Gugasian, the most prolific bank robber in U.S. history, only netted $2mm in his 30-year career.
Back at the fiction section, there are folks who get it right. The late-greats Donald Westlake and George Higgins populated their worlds with bad men who pulled scores for brown-paper bags (opposed to duffle bags) of cash. Elmore Leonard also ducked the retire-to-the-islands-score trope. Most of his baddies fought tooth-and-nail for what would be an annual-middle-class salary in the straight world. In Michael Mann’s masterwork Thief, Frank’s paydays are delivered in manila envelopes, not suitcases.
Ironically enough, fact often follows fiction. Westlake and Leonard’s baddies have no other options. Reprobates of one stripe or another, they cannot function in the straight world. Their employment options are robbery or pushing a broom, if they can get that.
Back in the “real” world, Guess was a degenerate gambler with an alcoholic’s self-destructive tendencies. Gugasian was an engineer with advanced degrees and served with honor in the U.S. Army Special Forces but his addiction to adrenaline ruled him like DNA predisposition. Edward Green, who committed the first bank robbery in 1863 was the Malden Massachusetts Post Master. He was also heavily in debt.
The “reasons why” are the “but for the grace of God (along with allergies to group showers) go the best of us,”. The reason why is the story. The money is just a prop.
The photo above, By Revised by Reworked - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9563805, is in the public domain.
No comments:
Post a Comment