The Secret to being a Successful Armed Robber

By Nicholas Stix

One of the perks of being a reader of NSU is picking up practical tips for navigating the world we live in now. And so, I now provide you with an NSU exclusive, based on a breaking crime story.

Just after 9:30 this morning, the branch at 397 First Avenue of M&T Bank, in the peaceful, wealthy, Kips Bay area on Manhattan’s East Side, was the site of a $330,000 armored car heist. Typically, such a caper requires weeks of planning, and several experienced men armed with guns. And yet, the lone robber does not appear to have put much planning into the caper, and though an afternoon TV flash said the robber had brandished a knife, the offender was apparently unarmed. Was the robber a criminal genius? Lucky? No and no.

The misleadingly titled Associated Press story, “Cops hunt gunman in Manhattan armored car heist,” tells us that the robber approached the Dunbar Armored (“The most trusted name in security”) guard, who was armed with a pistol, from behind, got the guard in a headlock, and robbed the guard’s gun and the sack containing the $330,000, which the guard was delivering to the bank.

Headlock? Robbed the guard’s gun and money sack? Surely, I jest, you say. Again, no.

The robber’s diabolically ingenious plan was this: He was a man—armed with a penis!—and the armed “guard” was not. It was a he-on-she crime.

It was as easy as that.

The AP did not report on whether the act qualified as a bias crime.

The Associated Press reporter, who wrote on condition of anonymity, gave the following description of the assailant: No race, no age, no height, no skin tone, no weight, but a penis and a non-descript gray, hooded sweatshirt.

No wonder the robber was able to disappear into the East Side’s crowds, which at that time of day were peopled with thousands of raceless penises in non-descript, gray “hoodies.”

According to ABC-TV News, New York City police added, helpfully, that the robber was “large.”

Thus, the secret to being a successful robber—in Manhattan, at any rate—is to be armed with the ultimate weapon, a penis, and target those who lack this weapon. It is also a good idea, if one should wish to elude capture, to be raceless.

For updates on this story, please check the Web site of the Associated Press Society for the Protection of Raceless Robbers Armed with Penises.

Dunbar Armored’s previous claim to fame occurred on September 13, 1997, when Allen Pace III, a raceless security guard from Compton who had been fired the previous night, and five friends who worked elsewhere as security guards robbed its Los Angeles depot of $18.9 million. According to the FBI, that was the biggest “armed takeover robbery in American history.”

Pace & Co. were surprised by the amount of money they took, which according to Los Angeles Times reporter Josh Meyer, filled a U-Haul truck’s 14-foot cabin up to their thighs.

It took authorities almost four years to solve that crime and prosecute and imprison its perpetrators, all of whom robbed Dunbar wearing masks and armed with guns, even though at the time they were all also in possession of penises. The guns were apparently necessitated by the fact that the guards at Dunbar were also armed with penises, a sexist practice that, as today’s robbery shows, Dunbar has made great strides towards reforming.