In one case of a gypsy fortune teller, the amount that was filched from the victim reached the stratosphere of three-quarters of a million dollars. Heavy going.
The amounts are not usually that high. Purloined fruitcake would have been hard pressed to crack the $1,000 level needed for the crime to be classified as a Class E Grand Larceny felony. And even then, it has to fit inside the range of $1,000 to $3,000. The perpetrator can always work there up through the penal code, however.
The most recent incident involving a theft that hit the 'Crime Scene' column is the lifting of seafood, specifically sacks of clams, oyster and mussels, from the back of a delivery van. Also the hand truck. Value declared in the police report: $350.
The delivery van was making its rounds through the restaurants of Tribeca when the driver realized a delivery earmarked for a specific restaurant was no longer in the van. The driver admits to not locking the van when making the deliveries to restaurants, which often require him to take the sacks of seafood on a hand truck and enter the cellar of the restaurant. He's working alone, so the truck is left unattended.
His initial working theory is that some junkie might have seen an opportunity to take something and perhaps fence it. Maybe they were inspired by the fellow who reached into the back of an armored truck who made off with a bucket of gold flakes weighing nearly 80 pounds and worth $1.6 million. He certainly could have used a hand truck. (That perpetrator was later apprehended; the gold was not recovered.)
The junkie theory certainly has merit. If anyone can remember the very early Al Pacino movie,'Panic in Needle Park,' you might recall that Pacino, with a killer heroin habit, simply reaches into the back of an unlocked van and pulls out a television set. This is a 70s movie, so the set is small, and likely a black and white set. Seen in today's context, the value of that TV seems to be less than a weekly MetroCard.
Back in the 60s, at the family flower shop on Third Avenue and 18th Street, we sometimes had spring plants on the sidewalk, usually pots of geraniums. These sometimes proved tempting for some of the Bowery bums, as they were known then, who happened to wander north of 14th Street, to scoop up a plant or two and head for the gin mill down the block to convince the bartender that the plants were worth a drink or two. It usually fell to me to follow the poor soul down the block, confront him, and get the plants back. Always without drama.
The driver of the seafood van shakes his head at the fencing theory, wondering who in their right mind buy shellfish that "fell off the truck," without knowing how long it's been away from refrigeration. Of course, the perpetrator could be advertising it as "fresh" off the truck.
Another theory that later occurred to the driver was that he was the victim of a planned heist. Weeks before he spotted a Jeep that was surely following him as he was making his deliveries in the area. Their tailing of him lasted three hours, certainly longer than any 'Homeland' episode as Saul Berenson tries to evade hostiles in Beirut. The driver became so suspicious of the vehicle, thinking it might be someone who was trying to poach the route, that at one point he took a picture of the vehicle and the two men in it.
Perhaps the men in the Jeep were reasoning that oysters always had valuable pearls in them, so a heist of a sack of oysters might be like scoring some pearl necklaces. Who knows what they might have been thinking. That clams, as a slang for money, meant that the guy was really driving an armored car?
After the reading the story I immediately thought of a cartoon I saw in 'Playboy' eons ago. It showed a very hippie looking duo, one with a gun holding the driver of a FINK bread truck at gunpoint and his partner coming out of the back of the van telling the other the bad news: "Hey man, it really is bread."
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