A Heist Unfit for Hollywood

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,682552,00.html

Last Saturday in Berlin, a heist of epic proportions took place. Four men, a machete, a pistol, and 250,000 Euros. That's right, four dudes ran into a "big poker tournament in the center of Berlin" with a gun and a haggard machete and stole all the cash. While making off with a pile of dough, almost $340,000 in USD, these poor criminals didn't really wow their audience or portray their superb planning as well as they should have, as police at the scene described the robbery as "chaotic and amateurish." They also apparently left behind a mountain of evidence, including being filmed by many of the people attending the tournament, and one of the guys was tackled by a security guard before he could even escape. In their defense, though, the timing was very good: The whole robbery only took five minutes, and had they waited just a little bit longer, the money would have been in a safe and out of their grasp. Also, the private security who was guarding the cash was unarmed. Holding heists is harder these days with improved security measures and electronic locks and the such, so these four masterminds at least get an A for effort.

This was easily my favorite current event to read for German yet. When I imagine a heist, I imagine some grand bank with patrons in Gucci clothes withdrawing thousands of dollars, then a squad of guys in jumpsuits or uniform busting in with automatic rifles and taking the place down. These guys did it with a pistol and a freaking machete that you could probably buy at a flea market or Home Depot. If nothing else, they have my respect for scraping together enough weapons to take advantage of the security flaw on such short notice. I'm sure they will all be caught very soon though, especially if one of their buddies got tackled and arrested before they even got to the getaway car... or bike or whatever they had. And it would have been so much cooler had they dressed up like the heist in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.