I have met so many stupid sta-hoo-pid criminals in my line of work that I was beginning to despair of the lot of them.I was beginning to lose some of my sense of magic about the whole evil genius mastermind thing.
Then I ran across this story completely by accident today and I just had to post about it. It restored some of my faith in criminals.
Outside the zoo in Bristol, England is a parking lot that will hold about 150 cars and 8 buses.
For the last 25 years the parking lot fees have been taken and managed by a rather nondescript man who everyone recalls as being "very pleasant."
He was charging 1.40 pounds for each car and 7.00 pounds per bus for parking.
Then one day after 25 years of coming to work and never missing a day, the little man doesn't show up for work.
Nobody has a name or a phone number to call to ask about him so the zoo administration calls the city council and asks for another parking attendant.
The city council says the zoo parking lot is the zoos problem and they should provide their own attendant.
The zoo claims the parking lot attendant was a city employee.
The city does some research and claims that the attendant has never been on their payroll.
It turns out that this guy just showed up with a ticket machine one day about 25 years ago and started charging parking fees, raking in about 560 pounds a day for the last 25 years. The equivalent of about 7 million pounds over the span of time.
And apparently when he either decided he had enough money or that he'd been doing it long enough, he decided to retire.
And nobody even has a clue what his name is.
Freaking brilliant!
So granted, he's no Dr. Moriarty, but he devised and executed a plan which allowed him to live in comfort and rake in extra dough for very little work and got away with it clean.
And did anybody get hurt? No.
And did he really steal anything from anybody? Not really.
Of course, they would call that "theft by deception" and make it a felony here.
But in my books, I'll have to tip my hat to him, wherever he may be.
Today was National Sacher Torte Day. I had to look that one up. It's apparently some sort of chocolate pie/cheesecake thing from Vienna invented back in 1832.
Tomorrow is National Gazpacho Day and Mitten Tree Day. I'll let you look those up for yourselves.
