Criminals do not take a vacation or fight against St. Patrick Day ‹Crimereads

Criminals, real and celluloid, do not seem to take on vacation. In real life, holidays offer great cover for crime. And add an additional level to the story in films. Whatever the reason, crimes and public holidays often happen together.

The article is continued after the display

Easter seems to be particularly popular with real criminals. On the Easter weekend of 2015, a gang of older criminal (with the nickname “The Over-The-Hill Mob”) put diamonds from the London Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company. In the Easter Sunday attack of 2024, a gang grabbed $ 20 million from the Gardaworld facility in Los Angeles.

But it's not just Easter; Valentine's Day is also popular.

In 1979, an unknown thief grabbed a 20 -pound marble head Hermes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Crooks prepared for two years before spending Valentine's Day 2003 and robbed the Antwerp Diamond Center of an estimated 100 million US dollar. (We can only assume that criminals choose Valentine's Day because they were single and had no other plans, or the feeling that their partners would prefer Bearer bonds towards chocolates and roses.)

Meanwhile the attack in Die Hard (1988) takes place on Christmas Eve. (We don't discuss whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas film, but it takes place absolutely before Christmas.) In inclusion (1999) Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones plan their attack on New Year's Eve. And the Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon characters dress in Some like it hot (1959) because they witnessed the massacre for Valentine's Day from 1929.

For Steal timeWe knew that we needed an attack and decided that the goal would be the fictional desert sun, a huge yellow diamond who was the heart of a new exhibition in the American Museum of Natural History. The robbery and the gang behind it were inspired by Jack “Murph the Surf” Murphy and his crew, which on October 29 on October 29 on October 29^TH In 1964 actually broke into the museum and made headlines worldwide for the theft of the star of India and other gemstones.

We moved the attack in our book to 1980, but had to find out the day to determine the crime. A random day in October that is not Halloween – well, randomly And therefore Bla. We decided against Halloween – his creepy associations would be a distraction. And we didn't want to set it on Christmas Eve because it had already happened.

We wanted to compensate for several variables. We wanted a vacation that was not presented too often in films, one that real criminals had chosen, but not so often that the vacation or a certain crime would overshadow what we did.

So we landed at St. Patrick's Day. In retrospect, we found only a few significant crimes in real life from March 17th.

1. The massacre at St. Patrick's Day, Chicago, March 16, 1926. Almost three years before the more famous massacre for Valentine's Day, which was possibly mastered by alphonse “Scarface” Capone, another alphonse “Scrickface” sound faache named Lambert from the Schwalbe-In-Law-Schwalbe in St. Patrick's Day in the Schwalbe.

2. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist, Boston, March 18, 1990. In the greatest art overall overalls in modern history steel thieves, which were disguised as police officers, 13 priceless paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, Manet and others who have not yet been recovered. The frames of the stolen paintings remain empty as a memory, and the museum's website contains a page dedicated to the paintings and offers a reward of 10 million US dollars.

3. The massacre of St. Patrick's Day, Wilkes-Barre, PA, March 17, 2002. This time the rival gangs were the Wilkes-Bar Scranton Penguins and Syracuse Crunch, two teams in the American Hockey League (AHL), The NHL's Development League. At least four players from every team started to fight. If the dust settled – well, that's not exactly; It took place on an ice hockey track, so it was probably ice chips – RefS distributed 286 penalty minutes among the players. From 2022 the 20^TH The WBS website found that WBS Penguin Steve Parsons “still hold the record for most eleven minutes in a game with 64 PIM (penalty violations) from St. Patrick's Day from the day of St. Patrick's Day”. (Regulatory hockey games consist of three 20-minute periods, which means that Parsons have crossed an official game.)

4. Overall robbery, Gallatin, TN, March 17, 2010. A man who is dressed as a Kobold with “Green Top Hut, West and Shorts and a fake brown beard and wig” robbed a CBS News article in a suburb in Nashville. The police followed the goblin and an accomplice that fired shots at the police, which led to this actual heading from the register: “Cops in Nashville act with Kobold.” So that they did not believe that this was an isolated crime, according to the CBS article, reminded “of the robbery on December 22nd in Nashville when a man in a Santa suit – including hat, beard and mustache – held another bank.

The attack by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum served as a precedent for St. Patrick's Day for our fictional robbery in Steal time. With its massive crowds and leading law enforcement, the New York Parade in St. Patrick's Day offers the perfect cover for an attack with high commitment. Ultimately, it salbed novelty with realism and made it an ideal backdrop.

***