Anyone want to help me plan a heist?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Here’s the setup for my latest novel: my main character and her brother, and three other thieves are planning a heist, and I would like to cover as many angles as possible.

The target: a vault inside a mansion owned by the head of a crime family
The reward: $12 million in diamonds and a painting worth about $13 million. Do you think a $5 million cut would be enough for most people?

Step 1: Information Gathering

What things do you think they should be looking for before they concoct their plan? I’ve thought of the following, but I would love it if you can come up with more things they should look for.

Blueprints of the house - how would they get these, either legally or illegally?

Layout of the grounds

Locations of cameras, guards, alarm systems

Whether the FBI is watching the house - Is this likely, if the man is the known head of a crime organization? What sort of monitoring would the FBI be doing? A pizza van across the street? Tapped phone lines? Anything at all?

Step 2: Planning

From a story perspective, I plan on showing the planning just in small vignettes, much the way movies do. The fun is in the execution of the plan, and much of it should be a surprise to the audience.

Step 3: Execution

The only rule is that no one can be killed. Knocking out guards is fine, but shooting them in the head is not. Other than that, I’m flexible.

What do you think are some of the skills the thieves should have? My main character is an excellent climber (like scaling walls); her brother can pick pockets, open locks, and is an excellent con man (the kind of talker who hasn’t had to buy his own drinks in a bar for ten years). One of the secondary thieves is an excellent actor; she can imitate any accent and play any part. These aren’t all set in stone. I’d be willing to change any skills around to accommodate the plan.

Is there anything you’ve always thought would be cool to see in a heist?

Anything else? I don’t have any particular layout for the bad guy’s place in mind yet, so feel free to make your ideas fit anything you’d like. If your ideas require the vault to be in the basement, cool; in the kitchen beneath the refrigerator, that’s fine, too.

2

First, knock out the cable so you can have a hot blonde,with a camera pin (posing as a cable repair person) case the joint. Then have the hot blonde take the mansion owner to dinner while you bust in with Mini Cooper’s. Yeah, that would make a great hiest.

3

Yes, but what happens when it’s revealed that she’s the daughter of the man the mansion owner killed?

4

Contrary to popular belief, it is very hard to jimmy open a window with a Mini Cooper.

5

Then you have Marky Mark jump in and punch the guy in the face. Ok, that would never work.

6

Yeah, but Mini Coopers are very small. Use them to pick the locks.

7

Sorry about that, I’m done with the hijacks.

8

Aren’t those public record, on file at the court house? (Lois Griffin got plans for the DeMico house that way.)

I doubt the FBI would sit out there unless there was some sort of big Crime Boss meeting expected. My Hubby’s not FBI, but when he goes on stakeouts, they use a regular car, parked down the block, preferably a bit hidden so they’re not noticible.

Phone taps are likely, if your homeowner is under investigation.

Here’s a suggestion about the alarm. When I was a kid, the roof leaked down onto the main box which contained the switchboard and backup battery. It shorted it out, so we disabled it temporarily. If your homeowner isn’t paranoid, you could short out the alarm and have a day or two window to do the robbery before the repairmen got out there to fix it.

The alarm rings into the alarm company (who contacts the police) through the telephone lines. If the telephone lines are cut (on our model, at least) the horn would blare after a short time period, but the alarm wouldn’t ring into the alarm company. Your thieves could cut the phone line and then disable all of the sirens in that short time window. Of course, it depends on what kind of alarm he has-- would a Crime Boss want the police to come, anyway? Likely, his wouldn’t be wired in such a way as to alert the police to a break-in.

Your theives could use dart guns with tranquillizers to knock out the guards temporarily. There could be this confusing scene earlier in the story where they rob a vet’s office to get the supplies. (Leaving the reader to wonder why they went there, of course.)

Do they have a way of selling the diamonds? It’s not like you can just walk into a jewelery store with a sack of them and hope to sell them, and fences usually don’t give you full value.

I think it would be cool if they were going to steal the painting to return it to its true owners or to a museum. Maybe it’s art that was looted by the Nazis and there’s some old man who will pay them big bucks as a reward if they manage to get it back for him. (Which your thieves will generously decline, giving them a bit of redemption in the minds of the reader.) Or, mail it to the museum, including photographic evidence that it belonged to the Crime Boss which gets him sent away to prison.

9

That exact scenario, down to the paintings being stolen and the repeated shorting of the alarm system, was used in a Dortmunder book. Actually, paintings being stolen happen a lot in Dortmunder books. I think it was in the one about the saint’s bone… Don’t Ask? Yes, Don’t Ask.

10

Thank you for all the suggestions, Lissa. I’m going to add those to my To Do notes.

Also, I’m not stuck on the idea of diamonds and a painting. If anyone has a suggestion for other valuable treasures, I’d certainly consider it, too.

11

This is not my idea, though I can’ t remember where I saw/read it. These guys were trying to break into an area that had the perimeter guarded by motion detectors. They went out to the edge of the perimeter with a bag of kittens. They let the first kitten out of the bag to wander on to the property and then concealed themselves off of the property. This set off the alarm and caused a guard to come investigate. The guard finds the kitten and resets the alarm.

They keep repeating this until the guard just gets frustrated and shuts the alarm off. They find this out because the last kitten released doesn’t set off the alarm.

Not only is it a clever way to get around motion detectors, but it is just really cute. You could also have a side story about how the mansion owner rescues abandoned cats so the reader knows that the kittens are going to get a good home.

12

What I’m saying here is, read Donald Westlake’s books, they’re great ‘crime procedurals’. Among other things, it’ll tell you what sounds ‘right’, and what not to repeat.

13

That was in the dearly departed Smith which lasted all of 3 episodes. :frowning:

14

Buy or otherwise acquire the rights to a neighboring or reasonably close property, and dig a tunnel to some place below the mark. If the compound has seismic detectors, have the utility company perform water or gas main work. Have a gangland crime committed out of state that will necessarily require a tutti-capi meeting, first to ensure that the principals are gone and second to create internecine suspicion. With principals gone, you can use some scientifically sound knockout gas to do in any guards. Covering yourself with a bedsheet extended into a sail will defeat the motion detectors, as I learned from Mythbusters.

15

I knew I could count on the devious minds of my fellow Dopers to come up with excellent ideas. Thank you, everyone.

16

Hm. What if the FBI thought Jimmy Hoffa was buried there? It happened recently, if you recall, and they dug up a whole barn area. So, have them go dig things up. And then either rob the place while the FBI is doing the dig, or after. If you do it while the feds are there, the crime family certainly won’t be, and the security systems will all be totally fried. After, you just have to time it right so things aren’t fixed yet.