Official News page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR INSPIRES ROBBER

by Hazed

Have you seen the film The Thomas Crown Affair? The remake with Pierce Brosnan, not the original with Steve McQueen - this is one of the very few occasions where a remake is superior to the source material!

In it, Pierce plays an art thief who orchestrates a very clever getaway from an art gallery by recruiting a crowd of men dressed exactly the same as he is: suit, bowler hat and umbrella. Security guards and police are completely unable to identify the real thief from all the decoys, so he gets away with a valuable painting.

Now life has imitated art, as a bank robber made his getaway by recruiting a crowd of men dressed exactly the same as he was: this time not in a suit and bowler, but in workman's gear.

The robbery happened at the end of September, when the perp, wearing a dayglo vest, safety goggles, a dust mask, and a blue shirt sprayed pepper into the face of a security guard and snatched a bag of cash. He fled, and the pursuit was hampered by a dozen others with the same unusual outfit showing up in the area. The crowd had been duped by an ad in Craiglist for road maintenance work, which had told applicants to show up near the bank wearing vest, goggles, mask and "if possible" a blue shirt.

Now, police have caught up with the robber despite his ingenious getaway. Last week, 28-year-old Anthony Curcio was nabbed in a Target store parking lot on suspicion of robbery of the first degree. Police say they fingered him because of an earlier police report which had been filed three weeks before the robbery where a witness had allegedly spotted a vest, two-way radio, wig and a large can of mace stashed behind a trash bin near the bank. The spotter saw a man drive up to the bin and take the gear, and he took down the license plate number and passed it to police. When the cops made the connection between that earlier report and the robbery, they traced the car to the suspect's wife. They also say they have a DNA match from evidence left behind at the site.

Curcio apparently posted the ad on Craigslist using someone else's wireless signal from his laptop, believing it would help hide his identity. Well, that part probably worked, and the plan was no doubt very ingenious (even if it was ripped off from a movie) but in real life, people notice things that are out of place and its often the simplest things that betray crooks in the end.

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