I’m currently reading the Parker novels by Richard Stark, starting with the ones from the mid-1960s. Parker was a ‘heister’, he always worked with small groups of independent heisters who would come together to plan a robbery of a cash-rich target. Like armored cars, company safes holding the money for weekly paydays, casinos, concert and football game ticket takes and so forth.
But it occurs to me that mostly such don’t exist any more. Payrolls went to checks, then mostly to direct deposit. Tons of tickets are bought on line, not just for sports games and concerts but even just regular movie tickets. I’d guess the vast majority of store sales are credit/debit, too, even piddly amounts at fast food places. There just don’t seem to be reasons for significant puddles of cash to accumulate.
Well, casinos, yeah, they probably still have a lot of cash on hand. And, of course, drug dealing and such is by cash. But in those cases you’re dealing with equally hardened and armed men on the other side, unlike robbing clerks or bank tellers or whatever.
So has that type of crime faded out significantly? Not druggies doing a hit & run robbery of a gas station or 7/11 type place, but professional gangs getting enough money to make the risk worthwhile for six men or so?
I’m huge fan of the Parker novels. Read them all, twice.
I believe there are still heists, albeit in different forms than described by Donald Westlake, with the exception of jewelry and art robberies that still continue.
Look at the McMillions documentary on HBO, which describes the theft of millions from McDonalds Monopoly game over several years.
Ransomware used by hackers.
Phishing thefts from unsuspecting companies.
I’m sure there are a lot more.
Thefts of funds by rogue military member invading countries, etc.
I know the pot shops we’re getting robbed frequently when that started off. I’m not sure if you would classify it as a heist but there were stories about gangs in full body armor breaking into the shops.
I love the Richard Start novels. I’ve read them all a few times. For those who do not know, Richard Stark was a pseudonym used by Donald E. Westlake, who wrote under several names.
As an aside, I think it’s not so much heists that have disappeared as a result of the rise of credit cards and other forms of electronic payments as old-school check fraud. Just recently I read the memoirs of Frank Abagnale (of Catch Me If You Can fame). Everyone remembers him as a fake airline pilot, which adds colour to the story, but first and foremost he was a fraudster who would forge checks (the pilot story helped him get them cashed). The whole scheme relied on the time delay of at least several days between the check being cashed and it bouncing back as bad, by which time he would have disappeared to another place. I can’t see things like that happening today, when checks are declining in use and verifying the balance or even existence of an account would be a matter of seconds.
None of those involved cash, though, which is what the OP was asking about. It does seem that there are fewer of those, since companies don’t hand out pay in cash, and so much is transacted via credit/debit or electronic funds transfer.
(Plus, a pile of cash has much less buying power today than fifty or a hundred years ago.)
Casino robbers can also take valuable chips. It was a one man job but a guy got out with over a million bucks worth In 2011 after a successful earlier robbery of $19k cash. He got caught later but would have probably gotten away with it had he made some better choices.
Read this very entertaining Rolling Stone article for more:
It’ll never die out completely, because there will always be a select few for whom the action is the juice; who are cowboys looking for anything heavy; who don’t let themselves get attached to anything they’re not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if the heat is around the corner. And unfortunately, sometimes they have to get it on.
Well, if we’re specifically asking about cash: Banks, cash transports, gas stations, liquor stores and the like are still getting robbed. But these are often badly conducted operations by small-scale criminals; the spectacular Hollywood-style heists are more about jewellery and art. I would think that is because the value-per-cubic-foot density of such items is much higher than for cash.
A few years ago the bank branches near my home closed. Before then I’d see an armored truck come by (apparently) once a week to each branch to service them. It could have been more often, but I had better things to do than watch banks. The time of day varied, presumably to avoid robbery. I’ve been told the guards are armed with pistols (this is Canada, so that’s a bit hard to believe).
Cash-using businesses still get robbed. Stores that take small purchases, such as convenience stores, will likely have a decent amount of cash. I believe there’s only a small amount of money in the till, with the rest kept in a time-locked safe (not as elaborate as with a bank, but nothing a typical bandit could break through in a few minutes). Donut/coffee stores seem almost immune to this, if only because there are so many witnesses. I see many cash-only fruit and vegetable stores that don’t appear to have any security, but fortunately those don’t seem to get robbed. Check-cashing places probably have lots of security (though I’ve heard nothing protects customers after they have left the store).
I suspect muggings are down. Most people probably carry a bit of cash on them but not as much as before. Muggings probably focus on taking cell phones and ID (for identity theft) because threatening someone for $20 is just not worth the risk.
Tangentially related, “Money Heist” a Spanish series on Netflix is a great show with a twist on the heist concept. Fairly suspenseful, it was certainly a creative way to get around many of the potential roadblocks to other methods for taking large amounts of cash.
It seems like the ‘classic’ heist of money has passed it’s ‘best by’ date, replaced by hacking/computer crimes, I guess. They just mostly aren’t as fun to read about.
The problem I see is volume. To live a comfortable almost-high-life let’s say takes $100,000 after taxes.
Due to money laundering rules, it’s hard to simply deposit your millions in a bank and invest it.
So now what - you need several million to live comfortably in $100,000 a year for the rest of your life.
Worse yet, the heist movies tend to have 3 to 11 people involved, thus multiplying the necessary take - or requiring a similar heist every few years, multiplying the risk of being caught.
the less plain cash you steal, the harder to convert (and poorer the take, to convert to cash).
Most such heists nowadays are less freelancers and more part of organized syndicates with plenty of other income.
Or… people doing life sentence on the installment plan, 10 years here, 5 years there. So what to do when the money runs out is not in their radar.
So I see two issues -
-there’s not enough free cash to make a one big heist worthwhile.
-money laundering rules make it harder to liv a life using illicit cash.
Interestingly, the move to digital transactions for movement of wealth gave rise to BitCoin, a completely virtual currency that is based on cryptokey generation that are very long alphanumeric strings…
…Which due to the risk of storing such data online, where it could be hacked, has led to the return of using printed out slips of paper stored in a vault:
“The safest way to store virtual currency is offline, in computers unconnected to the internet. To get its depositors bitcoin offline and then back on, Coinbase has devised an elaborate ceremony that generates encryption keys and prints them out on paper, which are then hidden in a reimagining of the bank vault.”
So that could now become the physical target of a heisting crew. They’re essentially “bearer instruments” like the heist target was in Die Hard!