Man who stole $1M bucket of gold details escape from US
nbcnewyork.com
nbcnewyork.com
1) Ego
2) I have no scientific evidence for this but it feels humans want to confess and unless death find them first everyone will confess every crime they have done. It could be through a joke, or to a complete stranger or some other way.
Assuming they could identify him from camera footage, he'd have limited options to keep an existing car or buy a car and stay in the US? It'd be a risk even buying a car in a friend's name.
Best bet might be to forgo a car, rent somewhere remote and informally with cash, and sit tight for a while.
I can only speak from personal experience, but ...
As someone who has driven into, and through, Mexico many, many times (one trip was Colorado to El Salvador and back) I can tell you that it's all smiles and waves and thumbs up as long as you are driving south.
As long as you're driving south, nobody cares what you're doing or what's up or where you're going or who you are.
The moment you turn around and point north everyone cares.
Or, as I said, get to a more remote area, make friends, rent a room cheap, befriend the landlord and try to borrow their car for cash, and then slowly develop a lifestyle where you can make careful use of the money without divulging your identity too much.
Drove over in a camper van with European plates, didn't even realise had left the US until got to the Mexican side and went and sorted papers for the vehicle. No search, no check, just passports
I've been to Mexico dozens of times and only once was anything checked at all.
I'm pretty sure his Russian gold fence could have set him up with bitcoin instead of cash in the first place, though.
You wonder why the guy would not handle himself better? Well, if he was smart, then he would never think of it. He has access to the US and countless opportunities. He'd have been probably better off financially.
And he has access to NYC, he doesn't need a girlfriend.
Many Ecuadorian people are comfortable about stealing from Americans, or ripping them off, and there's a sense of "these Americans won't miss it." Partly, this idea is imposed by the government, which charges different prices for some services (including airfare) to Europeans, Canadians and Americans. I've encountered (and sometimes lost money to) attempted ripoffs by taxi drivers, laundry services, restaurants, and even a surgeon.
Yet I haven't had much stuff stolen from me in Ecuador, and in fact a local acquaintance felt so bad to see me lose the only item that was stolen, she bought me a replacement.
To be fair, they’re probably right. Besides, if you’re traveling in Central America with any more than the bare necessities, you deserve to get robbed. At least you should assume all your belongings could be taken from you at any time.
I guess it would be better if tourism didn't exist and rural Mexico continued being cripplingly poor?
I suppose a few million dollars is enough to guarantee a lifetime of middle-class living. Maybe that's what they meant.
But this all assumes you can invest it. If you've got $1.6 million in gold bricks and the police in the country all these investment figures are based off of know you have it, you're probably not going to be able to do that.
Maybe he did receive the bitcoin...
That'd be the bonus point after touchdown.
Sometimes I’m concerned about dragnet surveillance and the police state, but then I realize how incompetent the government is at doing its job. Honestly that might be the scarier part than the surveillance...
These are fucked up incentives.
Otherwise it wouldn't be stealing.
This article from Australia suggests it's illegal in that country, I wonder if it's the same in the US.
>Orders may also be made to seize the proceeds of the commercial exploitation of a person’s notoriety from criminal offending, literary or otherwise (but often described as “literary proceeds”).
http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-proceeds-of-crime-l...
So in theory OJ could have profited if he didn't also, independently, owe the Goldman's a lot of money.
Surely, it you choose a life of crime, you'd do that anyway? Kind of a burn the bridges get out fast plan, for when things go wrong. Which they will, eventually.
I know we live in a world where this guy is going to make a better, more clickable story than somebody finding and returning somebody's purse but where do we draw the line. I guess if it weren't such a large quantity of gold plus being stolen from an armored vehicle in broad daylight it might have been seen as more of a terrible crime. As it stands it's almost more laughable that he was able to pull it off than anything. The dude was such an idiotic thief after he actually got away with the goods that there is a story in that itself.
- First, I'm sure many people view it as a "robbing the rich" type situation, and it was completely non-violent. Those gold bars certainly were not from some small business owner making his nightly deposits. With economic disparity such as it is these days, I'm not surprised at all that people would find that amusing and root for the criminal in this case. (Of course, the problem with such "robbing the rich" situations is that the rich often recoup their losses at the expense of the not-rich. But many people either don't know or don't think about that when they see a "rob the rich" situation.)
- Also, it was a pretty brazen broad daylight robbery itself, due to the weight of the gold, and the video of it was pretty amusing to watch, with all the effort and breaks needed.
- Finally, this story is from an local NYC news channel, and NYC is the US metro area with the most Ecuadorians, by a long shot. That is not to say that Ecuadorians should or do necessarily feel pride when following this story, but it's at least a local (to a subset of NYC) interest piece because of his nationality.
"Poor" people stealing from the faceless "rich" (especially in a non-violent fashion) has been the heroes of stories and legends of centuries.
Also, how come he wasn't arrested? The story starts with "he was in jail and now out". How? The crime happened in 2016 and it's less than 2 years later now.