IQ and the Big Heist

I heard about this the other day so I looked it up. I have a thing for true crime. I guess those years in Boston when the Bulgers were active got me hooked on true crime. Who knows. I think what interests me in these sorts of stories is their rarity. I remember a time when robbing an armored truck was more common. At least in seemed more common. I went looking for some annual stats to see if robberies are up, down or otherwise, but there’s not a lot of great data on armored truck robberies.

This story from an industry site suggests the number of robberies has declined, but it is short on statistics. Digging through the FBI crime tables, I don’t see where they track armored car robberies. There’s a category under bank robberies, but the numbers are so small I think that’s for robberies that occurred at a bank getting a armored car service. The robbers hit the truck while it was at the bank. This story indicates there are only about 35 armored car hits a year.

From the story:

Shortly after dusk along a lonely stretch of Interstate 95, armed robbers hijacked an armored truck, tied up the two guards and disappeared into the night with 275 pounds of gold bars.

The guards working for Transvalue Inc. of Miami reported pulling off to the side of the interstate about 6:30 p.m. Sunday after their vehicle began having mechanical problems in eastern North Carolina, according to the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office.

The guards told police they were surprised by three armed men driving a white van who ordered the guards to lie on the ground, tied their hands behind their backs and then marched them into nearby woods.

The robbers then helped themselves to barrels filled with about $4.8 million in gold before making their getaway. Transvalue said its employees were not injured during the heist.

Transvalue chief executive officer Jay Rodriguez said the truck carrying the gold bars left Miami about 4 a.m. Sunday. The load was headed to Attleboro, Massachusetts, a town south of Boston nicknamed “Jewelry City” for the large number of manufacturers based there.

There’s some chance the robbers just got hilariously lucky, but that seems unlikely. It also seems unlikely that the truck broke down as stated. It’s possible, but it would be an amazing coincidence. I would not be shocked to learn that the guards were involved in the heist, maybe taking a bribe to tip off the robbers.

That would be the weak part of the plan. In these cases, the authorities will submit the drivers to intense examination, including a polygraph. You don’t get the job without  thorough background check so these are not men used to dealing with cops. That’s why amateur crooks get caught. They don’t know how to handle cops and they eventually talk themselves into trouble. Once the Feds can put the pressure on the guards, whatever they know the Feds will know.

Even so, the planning to take out a truck like this requires an above average IQ. It also takes big balls and some experience in crime. The robbers had to pick the right truck on the right day. They had to be willing to put a bullet in the guards, who are armed and trained to shoot first. They also had to know the route and have scouted the highway to know the best place to pull the job. It may have been a whole lot of dumb luck, but I’m betting this was not a job pulled by hillbilly meth heads.

That’s probably why these jobs are rare. In the 70’s you had college kids pretending to be revolutionaries robbing armored cars. You had organized criminals pulling complex jobs. Then you had bank men who were not members of crime families, but they were familiar to organized criminals. Anthony Shea, a mutt from Charlestown Mass, was not good at anything other than robbing banks and armored cars. In other words, you had more smart people in the crime business forty years ago so maybe that’s why there were more big jobs being pulled.

When you think about it, there are maybe 10% of males willing to commit a serious crime if the circumstances are right. By serious crime, I mean the sort of caper that gets you a long stretch in the penitentiary or requires you to use violence. Research says 40% of males get arrested by 23, but the overwhelming majority of those crimes are petty. It’s a different breed of cat robbing armored cars from the guy selling a few joints at his high school. I don’t feel like getting into the numbers, but my guess is 10% is a good number.

Of those, half will have a below average IQ and incapable of doing complex jobs. Given the vibrancy of the criminal population, I’m being very generous. Two thirds are probably on the left side of the bell curve. What percentage of those are well above average in IQ to the point where they can plan a big job like the gold heist above? My guess is a very small number and only some of them are willing to risk life in prison to pull the big heist.

That’s what makes this stuff interesting. The crooks are either very lucky or very rare examples of high IQ, risk taking professional criminals.

 

12 thoughts on “IQ and the Big Heist

  1. For those who read an occasional novel I have a suggestion. Read a novel from the series of Parker novels by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake). There are about 25 of them of which I have read about twelve. After my new hip surgery January, 2014 I had a lot of time and could not concentrate so I read the Parker novels, Kindle editions, beginning with the first but one could read then in any order.

    Parker is a smart sociopath, a criminal, who eludes the law and succeeds in spite of working with many really stupid criminals who screw things up. Cops are portrayed as plodders generally and politicians as the slime balls they are in reality. These novels are well written escapist writing at its best.

    Dan Kurt

  2. Yep. But for gold they will get more than 20%.

    People in the US are buying more gold coins of the non-collectible variety as a store of wealth. It seems to be a new thing that UPS trucks are getting hit for gold deliveries. Coins are easy to exchange for their true gold value.

    • The trouble they will run into is finding someone to buy a gold bar. The standard gold bar is called a Good Delivery Bar and weighs 400 troy ounces. That’s ~$400K in the spot market. Not a lot of people with that kind of money sitting around who are also willing to buy gold bars from a couple of knuckleheads who knocked off a Brinks truck. Moving it through the above ground economy is impossible due to the reporting requirements.

      If they are never found, then I would assume they are international thieves with the resources to break down and move the gold over time. There was a rink in Europe that hit a bunch of places for gold that was believed to be based in the Balkans.

  3. re the Apple store robbery. The car ending up in flames is no surprise: It gets rid of all traces of humans, especially DNA.

    I sometimes go past a scum area of a UK city and it isn’t uncommon to see a column of oily smoke marking where a car has been driven off the road and ‘finished with.’ Usually they are stolen cars (in the UK the police class car thefts with the minor tag of Taken Without Owner’s Consent. This is known as Twocking and Twocks happen all over, with the vehicle burnt out as a matter of course. Even if the cops haven’t got the Twockers DNA on file it is still done.)

    I have a relative who teaches teenage kids from poor areas and they often talk about Twocking as if it just part of life’s rich tapestry. As always, crime is rated down to stop the police being inconvenienced and courts get a chance to breathe. If all crime ended up being treated seriously, and the perps could be found and not protected by fears of racism, then the courts would be bursting at the seams.

    Anyway, there isn’t room in jail because of all the immigrants who came here to fall foul of the law. One thing we have learned from the EU; non-existent borders are very useful for east European criminals who see easy pickings in a bloated, complacent society like the UK.

    • Where do they fence the gold bars?

      That’s an interesting question. In America, taking gold into a pawn shop leaves a record. Pawn shops also have an incentive to work with the cops so they would alert the police if someone comes in with a gold bar and no plausible story for how he got it. Jewelry and precious metal brokers are a little less scrupulous, but they have reporting requirements too.

      Subsequent reports suggest the truck was carrying valuables other than gold, but those were left behind. It could be that the thieves knew enough to take the gold and leave the much harder to sell stuff. Odds are they can find someone to give them 20 cents on a dollar for the gold. That’s how this stuff works.

  4. My recent favorite was the Apple store robbery, where during the 2014 iPhone 6 launch event in Berlin, three armed men cleaned the joint in broad daylight in front of hundreds of waiting customers! They jumped the security guard when he was taking the daily takings to the transporter. The getaway car was found later in-flames nearby, with the men are nowhere to be found. It is speculated that they took of with hundreds of thousands of euros.

  5. There are some crimes that are very well organised. Reporting is thin on those as they tend to be the ones who get away with it and no one likes saying: “Yes, we were cleaned out and we have no idea who did it and very little idea of how it was done.”

    My all time favourite robbery though was when stores would take their cash in leather bags to a bank after hours and drop the bags, which had identity marks on them, into a safe deposit drawer accessible from the street. These drawers aren’t seen nowadays but they had a simple security device whereby if you opened it you couldn’t reach past the tray into the vault inside. One way traffic here.

    Anyway, one evening an inventive robber attached a paper bag to the street side of a bank deposit drawer and wrote on it that the drawer wasn’t working and would people mind putting their bags into the paper bag. They would be collected by the bank and their accounts credited.

    As rational people, I bet you would think this is laughably poor. But, it worked. The man apparently scooped up half-a-dozen leather bags and guess what? The accounts weren’t credited at all.

    Perhaps people were more trusting then, but maybe the gullibility of people simply extends in other directions nowadays.

    • Thinking about it, the brighter criminals are stealing credit cards, personal data and skimming from ATM’s. A few years ago I went to use my ATM card and it was rejected. I subsequently learned my account had been cleaned out. I only had a few thousand dollars in that account (for exactly that reason) but it had been stolen. The bank was sure someone must have gained access to my card, even though I had it in my possession and the charges were done in the Ukraine. I later learned that a data breach had given the crooks tens of thousands of cards, which they sold to other crooks.

      Despite what they show on TV, cops are mostly morons so they solve few crimes without the help of the criminals. Even the FBI is not very good at solving crimes without help from the crooks. That’s why they make such a big deal of nabbing guys “signing up for ISIS on line.” Those are the sorts of idiots they catch. The guys who breach banks and get access to credit cards and checking accounts are never caught so the crimes are not discussed much in the American press.

  6. Most armored car robberies are inside jobs. The companies know that. They tell their guards if you are getting held up, your partner is probably in on it.

    No, they don’t have to be bright to pull it off. They have to be bright to get away with it.

  7. Must see (in light of IQ/armored car hold ups) – “Palookaville”…incredibly funny take on losers taking down armored car. Thought the same thing re
    “Inside job”.

    Cheers

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