Yes, They Can Trace Yahoo E-mails:
That and other lessons were learned by some pretty clueless college students who stole rare books from a college library and tried to sell them to the Christie's auction house. The fact section of the opinion, written by Judge Batchelder, is hilarious. Thanks to Howard for the link.
"Once the robbers had escaped, the police were called, but before the police could document the crime scene, some librarians collected the discarded objects and returned them to their proper places."
Ah, good to see that Homo Librarianus is the same all over the country.
Aha!
"Thus, on Thursday at 3:30 p.m., the robbery was finally at hand and after months of planning, this was the plan: all four men would enter the library, take the books by force, and run for it."
"semi-hidden room"
I think these students took my class, once. j/k
And though it is never nice to make fun of a person's name, isn't "Gooch" a very fitting last name for a librarian to have?
Damn, those guys are geniuses!
I'm guessing they weren't majoring in astrophysics.
Interesting, by the way, that the name of the place is "Transylvania University"
Somehow, one doesn't expect librarians to be so aggressive.
Have you ever failed to shush when the librarian said, "Shush!"? (I haven't either, and now you know why.)
8-)
Titus, 18 USC 1951(a) (a/k/a the Hobbs Act) reads:
I'm not an expert on the caselaw, but my guess is that these fools' conduct satisfied the federal jurisdictional requirement because they called Christie's in New York and transported the stolen objects there from Kentucky.
I noticed the opinion called the books "items of cultural significance." I'm guessing it had something to do with that.
And how did they miss Dr. Frankenstein's diaries?
Lipka said the friends felt liberated. And Reinhard said he "loved" that one of his paintings, A Plan to Fail, which is about the crime, has been made into a screen saver on an FBI computer, according to Falk's article.
"In a few years we'll be released," Lipka says in Vanity Fair. "We'll all be ... still young. We will be stronger, better, wiser for going through this together, the three of us. Before, in college, growing up, we were being funneled into this mundane, nickel-and-dime existence. Now we can't ever go back there. Even if we wanted to, they won't let us."
Yeah, I think we can pretty much rule out any learning from this experience.
These guys make those hardened criminals in Office Space look like geniuses.
Additionally, I believe that Yale did try to trace the IP user of one of the e-mails it received, but that the trail came up empty because of savvy Web-track covering, something the amateurs in this case apparently didn't consider. (They had the wigs, though!)
My favorite part is the heroic librarians. Good for them.
I love how they put the books back before the police arrived.
+1 on the suggestion to make a movie out of this. We've got 21, an action/drama about brilliant MIT students hatching a scheme to count cards. How about a farce about idiotic TU students -- complete with hilarious old-man-costume gags and Cheech and Chong moments in the "bud basement" -- hatching a scheme to steal rare books?!
Hehe, I guess when he heard that "youthful mistakes are forgiven," he forgot to read the fine print. (Hint: they're talking about your marijuana closet, not your attempt to steal millions of dollars worth of rare books!)
That said, given their IQ at the time of the robbery, he almost has to be right about getting wiser. Hey, when you're at the bottom, you can't help but go up!
"Hee hee hee. 'Get her.' That was your whole plan, huh, 'get her." Very scientific."
Dr. Peter Venkman, "Ghostbusters"
HARDENED CONVICT (to Allen, Borsuk, Lipka, or Reinhard): What are you in for?
Yes, but only because the government appealed too. The government can't appeal acquittals, but it can appeal sentences.
I kind of get that. They were already going to have these guys for armed robbery and the books were way too valuable to be dusted for prints or any of that CSI-type stuff, likely to be endangered by being out of climate-controlled storage, and in places where they could be damaged.
My guess is that this isn't quite as unlikely as it seems. The items in question are rare, but they aren't one-of-a-kind or nearly so, like a Gutenberg Bible. People without advanced education do end up with rare books and art from time to time, e.g. by inheritance.
A friend of mine, the daughter of an immigrant from England and a local Indian woman, grew up in a tiny hamlet out in the middle of nowhere in northern British Columbia where her father ran a gas station. He did not have an advanced education, but read vociferously. After he passed away, she went through his cabin. She brought me two books in languages she could not read to identify. One was a Chinese book on music published in the 1920s, of no particular value. The other was a Latin missal, the great thick one used by the priest, published in 1635 by Plantin in Antwerp.
That is a real collector's item, worth quite a lot.
Transylvania University was founded in 1780. The rare works in question are from the 19th century, so they need not have been purchased at great expense or donated by a wealthy donor. They may simply have been acquired at the time of publication, before they became so valuable.
According to the Inflation Calculator, $1000 in 1830 was equivalent to $19,224.69 in 2007. Considerable, yes, but not out of the range of what a university library might spend for an important work.
You couldn't really make a movie out of this because the movie would have to be believable.
That aside, my favorite part of the opinion the line, "They also abandoned other volumes, later, while fleeing from the librarians."
As a native of Louisville and a graduate student in Information and Library Science, my reaction is a bit mixed. I keep vacillating between groans and hysterical laughter.
Oops. I meant "voraciously".
Reminds me of the story about the witness who referred to his brother-in-law and was asked his name. He thought and thought but couldn't remember. Finally, he jumped up, pointed at his brother-in-law, and cried out: "Nathan, Nathan, for God's sake, tell them your name!"
Guys, guys... that pink bed sheet that you bought to for your fraternity's drag show toga party should have been discarded immediately afterwards.
Don't try to use it for anything else, especially not the high-tech part of your robbery plan. Please.