Sunday, January 25, 2009

There's gotta be an easier way.

That, or we've got still more anecdotal evidence that spending too much time watching television and American action-adventure movies does bad things to the intellectual capacities of our populace.

In any event, on a lighter note (at least for me), I ran across a weird little news item last week about some investment guy in Indiana whose life was falling apart--he was up on charges of fraud (lotta that going around these days, or there should be), his wife was leaving him, he'd just been slapped with a half-million dollar lawsuit or something that had gone against him. Given how the gentleman in question responded to those stimuli, it would appear that he'd also been watching bad crime shows and action movies for some time, and had begun to confuse their plots with reality.

So this guy has a small plane--when he wasn't defrauding small investors in the heartland, apparently he was also an amateur daredevil stunt pilot (yes, I know, you can almost hear it being pitched as a series--I don't see how he could wind up fighting crime, but maybe it could be, like, a "Breaking Bad" for the financial services set). So. He got slammed with all this shit, and so what did he do? Get a drink? Shoot himself? Lawyer up? No. He got into his small plane, filed a flight plan for Florida, packed a parachute, and radioed in a distress call somewhere over Alabama or someplace. Said his windshield had blown in, he was bleeding, and going down.

Thing is, the folks he radioed to scrambled fighter jets to intercept him, found the plane empty and still in the air, windshield intact. Then it turned out the guy had stashed a motorcycle somewhere in Arkansas or wherever (flyover states, unless you're running from the SEC, I guess), and after he parachuted in, he drove off. Manhunt, blah and blah, they caught him.

I just wonder whatever happened to keeping it simple. Have however much money you think you need, in cash, in a duffel bag. Learn the bus routes that get you to your local airport. Take the bag, get on the bus, go to the airport (or the Amtrak station, or the Greyhound), buy a ticket in cash, and go someplace where nobody would ever think of looking for you. What's wrong with that? You might get caught, of course, but at least it winds up being a lot less labor-intensive than all the craziness with planes and motorcycles and parachutes and F-15's.

I dunno. Maybe the guy wanted to be D.B. Cooper. It does have that vibe about it, kinda. Thing is, once someone's been D.B. Cooper, it makes it harder for someone else to duplicate his feat. Anyway. Good times. Cheers.

7 comments:

  1. Ah, you know. If he kept it simple, it wouldn't have made the news. I mean, none of us would have ever known the name Lorena Bobbitt if she's simply shot her husband.

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  2. True enough. At the same time, though, my feeling was that this guy didn't want to make national headlines. He wanted to get away. Look at the Bernie Madoff model. I dunno. In any event, he did make the big-time, after a fashion. So.

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  3. The guy was pretty stupid. He actually approached a cop and asked him where the nearest hotel was - said he had been in a boating accident or something dumb like that. I watched it all unfold on CNN while I was at the gym.

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  4. Perhaps he had a subconscious yearning to make the big time. Or yeah, he could have just been dumb. I'll ask my muse.

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  5. Stupidity is the cause. Smart people keep it simple. Stupid people go for the glitxy option and end up dead / in jail / disgraced.

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  6. Unless...those going for the glitzy option are secretly very, very smart, albeit incredibly self-destructive.

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  7. I don't know, I think paranoia makes people do bizarre things. That guy who dressed up as Santa and blew away his ex-wife's family in Inglewood or wherever had a similar intricate getaway scheme. And ended up shooting himself. Sociopath logic, I don't know.

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