My Plot To Rob 50 Banks At Once

Oh boy, this is going to be big money for me and the Organization! Hi, Machine Gun Ricky Wayward here, crime boss of the Skids gang...

There's no stopping crime, thank God. We just keep going, ever going, ever accruing more, greater and greater wealth. Diamonds, jewels, truckload after truckload of stolen merchandise, and, of course, cash, anything we can lay our hands on. It's all so satisfying! Which we will continue doing as long as we get away with it, which at this point might be forever...

My latest plot involves banks. In particular -- and no one's ever done this before -- I'm going to use peer pressure to raid a number of banks and, I hope, make off with everything they've got. It took some doing to conceive of this plot, and it's going to take some doing to carry it through. Wish me luck, OK?

I started thinking, What bank job has never been done before? What's the perfect bank job? Then it came to me, pick on the rural, backward banks. Not just a hold up. That's been done to death. No, I thought of something deeper, something that involves questioning their self-image, then taking advantage of them to wipe them out.

It seems that these particular banks have not updated their basic facilities in over a century. Meaning, you guessed it, they're dealing with some serious inferiority complex issues. An underlying issue with each of them is the realization that they're backward and behind the times. Because each of them has at least one bank officer -- if not the president himself -- who has visited the big city. They understand what's going on out there.

Now, what do you think is the most obvious, biggest backward thing about them? If you said "round vaults," you are exactly right. Nearly every rural bank, believe it or not, has a round vault, which, inexplicably, was all the rage in the 1890s. Times, however, have changed. And now the rest of us can't imagine anything more ridiculous than a round vault. 1) They're ugly; 2) They're old fashioned; 3) They're space-inefficient; 4) You always hit your head on the sides, and, 5) I've personally never trusted the mechanisms in round vaults, which may be more an irrational prejudice on my part than a real objective problem.

Anyway, here's where my expertise in human environmental science and psychology comes into play. I submit, I put it forth as a virtual given, that if someone goes in and so much as chuckles at their round vault, they'll be ready to do something about it, anything, to make you stop. Just like that, you'll have a contract to take it out and install a square or rectangular one. And that's where we get 'em!

I called in my team of crack underlings and put my plan before them. What if, instead of just one bank, we take on 50 of these rural banks at once? Of course it would take logistics on the most massive scale. No one's ever robbed 50 banks simultaneously. We'll be the first. We'll be the greatest bank robbers of all time. And we'll be rolling in money, perhaps more money than can physically be spent, short of being a governmental entity looking for hammers and toilet seats.

Fleshing out the plan, I typed a list of common numbers into the computer, "1 through 50," then started filling in the blanks, listing every bank within a 100-mile radius that has a round vault. Where do you find this information, you ask? Admittedly, it's old, but I still have a copy of the 1943 U.S. Almanac of Bank Vaults, that of course being the last year the Almanac was released to the general public. Then, just to be safe, I added another 10 numbers to the list, because possibly a few of the prouder banks have updated since '42. (The '43 Almanac came out in October 1942.)

With every background detail fully explained, the underlings nodded, hit a few high fives around the room, and grinned. One overzealous asshole even shot a hole in the ceiling, prompting an angry admonition from me: "Put that gun away, you raving lunatic! What kind of moron..." As that unpleasant moment passed, I called them in closer, much closer, saying, "Here's how we'll do it," at which point I muttered the rest, and in some detail, so only they would be able to hear.