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Do professional thieves exist?

Are there professional thieves?

  • Yes

    Votes: 54 85.7%

  • No

    Votes: 1 1.6%

  • If I told you, I'd have to kill you

    Votes: 1 1.6%

  • Yes but they only steal carrots

    Votes: 7 11.1%
  • Total voters
    63
#21
If you're asking a serious question, then - like you see in the movies? No. Serious planned heists involving multi-talented professional criminals physically taking stuff? No, not so much anymore. Before there were computers, electronic fund transfers, high-tech security systems; yeah, every once in a while. Now, it's much easier (and safer) to do it on-line. In fact, at one time (early/mid 1800's), a seriously planned heist involving many people was about the only way to steal large sums of money (other than the ever-popular fraud schemes and/or embezzlement). Read Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery sometime. Or the accounts of the other English "Great Train Robbery" in the '60s. But, like the movies? Fun as they are to watch, they're just movies...:)
 
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#22
Jim Nazium said:
You know, like the guys in the movies "Heat" or "Ocean's Eleven". Sophisticated, professional thieves with elaborate plans. Are they real?
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Yes. There have been various big money robberies where a lot of planning goes into it. There are a lot of open police cases on big money robberies that were elaborately planned.
Sometimes, it isn't just money but it could be valuable assets, like jewelry or artwork where the owner has more security than the average person.
 
#24
Profession isn't really the word, in the sense that they pride themselves on a job well done, but they are in sense that they feed their families through thievery & scamming people.

Some call them grifters, & sometimes they're called gypsies.

There's a movie with Bill Paxton where their whole family are grifters.

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#26
The geezers that knocked off the London diamond vault recently were probably likely suspects from the 70's. I don't know how they caught up with them but the planning was intense. Boring several ft of concrete from the basement of the bank next door takes a few smarts.
 
#30
Gorn Captain said:
You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me. Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.
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image.jpg
 
#31
steamthief said:
The Lufthansa heist. Tommy and Carbone were gonna grab the outside guard and make him get us inside the front door. Frenchy and Joe Buddha had to round up the workers. Johnny Roast Beef had to keep them all tied up and away from the alarms. Even Stacks Edwards got in on it - he used to hang around the lounge and play guitar - everybody loved Stacks. What he was supposed to do was steal the panel truck, and afterwards, compact it by a friend of ours out in Jersey. Only Maury was driving us nuts. Just because he set this up, he felt he could bust Jimmy's balls for an advance on the money we were gonna steal. He didn't mean anything by it, it's just, that's just the way he was.
Click to expand...
Aren't you supposed to be in witness protection?
 
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#32
Jim Nazium said:
...Sophisticated, professional thieves with elaborate plans. Are they real?
Click to expand...

Yes. What can I get you?

Slightly more realistically, I write murder mysteries for a living and study this stuff, so you've picked something I can answer. You're talking about small groups of talented individuals who pull off one big job. Check out the Riviera Bank Heist of 1976. A classic of its kind. (It was made into a movie but don't be fooled...it really happened.)

There's a huge range in thieves, from the drug user doing dumb street crime, up to some incredibly sophisticated organizations. Most of the big organizations have moved into cybercrime because it's relatively easy and very, very low risk. Look up for example the Russian Business Network.

There are also international thieves who wear dinner suits and stay in swank hotels. A lot of these deal in stolen art and antiquities. The antiquities black market is far larger than most think. A lot of these thieves steal to order, which makes sense because passing on unique items is high risk. As one example, look up an art dealer named Subhash Kapoor whose trial is currently underway. He was a New York art dealer who was arrested in Germany, extradited to India, and is accused of sending excavation teams to steal stuff overnight from sacred sites across South America and India.

Needless to say, the most successful of these guys are the ones you haven't heard about.
 
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#37
Yes. News about robbery's on money-transports with military precision, comes into mind.
Professional thieves with rocket-launchers & bazooka's, escaping from the police in fast cars.
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Shootouts with heavy arms and all that, Molotov's, dead guards.

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Netherlands, Belgium, France and Northern Italy seems to be their territory.
 
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#38
While small time petty thievery usually doesn't involve rocket scientists, the common street thief can be pretty crafty at removing ones personal belongings long before they realize they've been hit. There was a local crew that was robbing suburbanite teenagers by basically luring them to what they thought was a trap (house where drug sales are made) where they would have them wait in a room for the dealer to show. One hour later, they'd find themselves standing there alone, with no dealer in sight. It wouldn't be until they finally gave up waiting that they'd realize one or all of them had been somehow relieved of their cash (pickpocketed?), with the thieves making an exit out a back room window. This group got busted when they pulled it on an undercover cop conducting drug surveillance.
 
#39
Yessir. Last year I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Kennedy, a former professional-thief-turned-drug-smuggler who has since reformed. The stories he told, the things he did as a professional thief (I think he preferred a different term) seemed straight out of The Italian Job.
 

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