5 Examples of Ingenious Criminal Creativity
“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”
Creative thinking is everywhere.
It’s a form of leverage that you can apply to any domain. This fact is something that the criminal fraternity understands only too well.
They apply unorthodox thinking to expose vulnerabilities in any system or human behaviour.
The following examples are case studies in human ingenuity applied to the wrong side of the law.
1. Hired Hands
In 2008, an innocuous-looking ad appeared on Craigslist offering $28 an hour for roadwork in Monroe, Washington.
All the applicant had to do was wait outside the local Bank of America branch wearing blue work clothes, a hi-vis vest and protective eye wear.
They had instructions to wait for a supervisor who would brief them on the required task.
It was a compelling offer, and dozens of candidates showed up on the allotted day of September 30th.
Anthony Curcio, who had placed the ad, also showed up wearing the same clothes. He mingled amongst them, then calmly entered the bank and robbed it.
After leaving with around $400,000, he chose an unconventional form of escape: an inner tube to float down a nearby creek.
The police were left questioning the bewildered job applicants while the real perpetrator drifted away downstream.
Curcio’s use of the construction workers as a smokescreen makes it one of the most creative bank robberies of all time.
2. The Man Who Sold The Eiffel Tower (Twice)
Victor Lustig was not your average con man.
Born in 1890 in then-Austria-Hungary, he conducted scams across Europe and the United States and is considered one of the most adept con artists ever.
And for good reason.
In 1925, inspired by a newspaper article about the high maintenance costs of the deteriorating Eiffel Tower, he devised an extraordinarily bold con.
He forged government stationery and posed as a Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, convincing a group of scrap metal dealers that the French government wanted to sell the tower for scrap secretly.
Lustig identified André Poisson, an insecure dealer eager to climb the business ladder, as his target. He convinced Poisson to pay a hefty bribe for the deal.
After receiving 70,000 francs (about £1.2 million in today’s money), Lustig fled to Austria, assuming Poisson would be too embarrassed to report the scam.
Encouraged by the lack of publicity, Lustig returned to Paris to repeat the scam.
However, his second attempt failed when the police were informed, forcing him to flee to the US to avoid arrest.
4. Narco Subs
Drug cartels face the challenge of distributing drugs globally whilst evading detection.
They are constantly dreaming up new ways to traffic their product unnoticed.
In the 1990s, they settled upon a revolutionary idea of building their own submarines.
In reality, most of them were semi-submersibles travelling just below the surface, making them difficult to detect via radar or sonar.
Moulded out of fibreglass and crewed by a few men in cramped conditions, their hulls carried tons of cocaine across vast oceans.
On September 7th, 2000, authorities discovered one submarine under construction in Facatativá, central Colombia.
At over 120 feet long, it was capable of carrying 150 tons of cocaine with a street value of more than a billion dollars.
Officials noted it was of a sophisticated design, being fully submersible, suggesting possible Russian collaboration.
Most narco subs were much smaller, and whilst some were detected, the vast majority slipped through the net, making the cartels billions of dollars.
4. Smugglers’ Shoes
On January 17th, 1920, the US government banned the sale of alcohol.
It didn’t take long for a black market to materialise.
The trade in bootleg alcohol was a very profitable enterprise, making many people, like the gangster Al Capone, extremely wealthy.
The police worked hard to crack down on any illegal activity, and criminals went to great lengths to evade capture.
One of the simplest ideas to emerge was the ‘cow shoe’.
It was a pair of regular shoes modified by placing two wooden blocks shaped like a cow’s hooves on the bottom.
This piece of low tech allowed the wearer to go about their business, and the police would be none the wiser.
5. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist
In the early hours of St. Patrick’s Day 1990, two men, dressed as police officers, approached the entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
After convincing the guards to let them in on the pretext that they were attending to a report of a disturbance, they swiftly disarmed and handcuffed them, placing them in the basement.
Over the next hour and a half, they systematically removed thirteen priceless works, including Rembrandts and Vermeers, valued at over $500 million.
It’s a textbook example of psychological manipulation using the credibility of uniforms to convince the guards.
It remains the most significant unsolved art theft in history.
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