How To Rob (An ATM)
Early Friday morning, I noticed that our front door looked like this:
“Has the door always been blacked out like that?” I thought, as I rushed away. “Yeah, probably.”
It hasn’t.
It had been spray-painted sometime after midnight the night before, when I got home. This is assuming that my sub-par observational powers hadn’t failed me then.
Some enterprising—and small!—thieves had come to our building to rob this ATM:
To do this, they ripped our mailboxes from the wall and shimmied through the hole into the Middle Eastern restaurant the ATM backed into.
Through the mailboxes!
They emptied the aptly named cash machine (plus the restaurant’s register) and made off with about $20K.
The nerve of dudes doing that, especially when any of the residents in the three apartments in our building could have come in or out at anytime, is scary. But seeing as how everyone has insurance, I’ll get to the best part.
Around 11PM Friday night, two detectives who could have been ripped out of “Law & Order” arrived at my front door. Unmarked car? Check. Mixed race pair? Check. Dressed a little too nicely for the neighborhood? Check.
They asked me some questions: Had I heard any banging? Noticed any lookouts? Pointless. No, of course not. I would like to add here that,
A. Justin was NOT HOME on Thursday night, leaving me WITHOUT backup, bro.
B. Probably as punishment for that, he was asleep when the awesome detectives showed up.
Before they left, the smaller one said, “The door’s not safe like that. You should ask your landlord to fix it.” The bigger one turned to his partner and said something like, “Lenny, you know it wasn’t always like that, right? The perps did that.”
Duh, I knew that.
