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| 20th Century Fox |
Up until Joe and Daniel get their asses handed to them by a Warner Brothers-trained kid who's already had to fend for himself for a week, they're actually quite the professionals. Joe brazenly impersonates a police officer to get potential victims to reveal their holiday plans, and they methodically hit a list of homes on the list. But...
Burglars aren't always the brightest bulbs in the bunch, both in fiction and in real life. Daniel Stern decides to stop up the kitchen sink in each house and leave the water running. He says it's their calling card. "We're the wet bandits!" Uh huh. You're leaving a trail of evidence, my friend. Never mind the kid in one of your target houses who would grow up to have a fine career in Acme's R&D department. All they needed was the attempt to clog little Kevin's kitchen sink before the kid unleashes cartoon Armageddon on them, and police can go back to every house with flood damage in the neighborhood.
But it seems to be a regular occurrence. Full crews of burglars work with amazing precision. Recently, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow was burglarized while he was playing. Here in Cincinnati, where he lives. I've been by his house before, long before he owned it. The houses in that particular neighborhood are not easy to get to nor easy to penetrate. But penetrate they did. And this crew worked methodically. They had already gone through homes in Indian Hill, where Cincinnati's wealthy live. Burrow was a ripe target because it's a big house. But...
Joe Burrow is a high-profile target. Rob the vice president of marketing for Proctor & Gamble, and while the Indian Hill Rangers will do their best to catch the culprits, it's not going to make the news. Rob a Bengals player who played in a Superbowl and is frequently featured nationally on ESPN and Fox Sports, and all four local news stations and probably national news outlets, and suddenly you find out why La Cosa Nostra has a strict code of silence. Attention brings the law.
Worse, we are in an era hostile to foreigners. The burglars in question were from Chile. Make of that bit of nonsense what you will. But now, in a case that might have involved a state bureau of investigation or a sheriff's department to coordinate among difference forces, and probably the FBI, you have now attracted ICE. Good or ill, that's most definitely unwanted attention.
And then they took selfies with all the swag they stole from Joe Burrow. Nice. Because posting to social media means you don't have to pay for all that flood damage.
I'm currently working on a short story where a drywall crew is robbing homes in a tony lakeside village. They have access to their victims' homes, so they use the victims' own tools to raid the houses, then lock the doors behind them. But...
Most of the victims have Costco memberships, and a lot of recent hauls from the warehouse store disappear, along with all the beer in the fridge. It unravels when one crew member tries to disable an electrical substation on the night of a thunderstorm to cover their shutting off the power to the houses. Unfortunately, there's this thing called arc flashover that can reduce a person to a blackened cinder while another is pulled over with boxes of snacks in nice Costco-sized boxes and several cases of beer. Oops.
Burglary is proof clever and smart are not exactly the same thing.
