The Heists and Capers of 2023
It's the most wonderful time of the year
Everybody loves a heist, at least one done right—an ambitious prize, no casualties, and either an unsympathetic victim, or a detective who manages to track down the culprits while developing a grudging respect for their artistry.
Thus, it is time to return to my mostly-annual curation of the year’s bests heists and capers—2013, 2016 and 2019 still somehow survive on Quartz, at least for now. Not only is the material delightful, but the research is easy thanks to a decade-old email thread I share with a lovely group of heist cognoscenti. And thus, this feature returns as a gift to you, my beloved subscribers.
BEST MEDITATION ON THE ART OF THE HEIST
It’s almost always a European cat burglar who inspires the beau ideal of heist coverage—the sensitive and compulsive artist of larceny—and not the Romanian gangs typically involved with the biggest continental smash-and-grabs. The best of the genre is this magisterial 2019 profile of Vjeran Tomic. In 2023, we give the award to Stéphane Breitwieser, the subject of a New Yorker review and a book by Michael Finkel, himself a fascinating figure who also gave us the story of the Maine woodsman in 2014.
Representative sentence: “Unlike most art thieves but very much like a classic heist hero, Breitwieser steals art because he loves it.”
See also: Breitwieser’s advice on heists.
BEST HEIST WITHIN A HEIST
Arguably the best heist of 2022 was Sam Bankman-Fried’s work at FTX, siphoning billions in customer deposits into his money-losing hedge fund. But while FTX was spiraling into collapse, a hacker tried to steal even more money from the exchange—and WIRED has the behind-the-scenes details.
Representative sentence: “‘He took a huge fucking risk using his personal Ledger,” says the former FTX staffer. ‘He’s a total boss.’”
BEST MACRO HEIST EXPLAINER
Is it a heist when an enterprising #grindset believer crawls under your car at 4 am and uses a SAWZALL to chop off the catalytic converter? Maybe! The sudden rise in this crime here in the Bay Area always made me suspect that there was a bigger picture. Each summer, Bloomberg Businessweek publishes an entire issue devoted to heist features, and the cream of the crop in 2023 is Evan Ratliff’s contribution about the investigators who brought down a $500 million national fencing organization for stolen cats.
Representative sentence: “Hailey, the scrap car buyer, posted a group photo from the Khannas’ back porch to Facebook. “All In The Family DG Catalytic Family Millionaire Club,” he captioned it. “These Guys Lovin Khanna, Gagan Khanna … We Started Out As Workers And Quickly Became Family.”
BEST INSIDE JOB
An emerging scandal at the British Museum was uncovered by a mild-mannered gem dealer and former academic in the simplest way imaginable: He kept finding pieces of the Museum’s collection up for sale. And he figured out the name of the employee who was selling the pieces. But when he told the museum over a period of years, they did nothing—until he went to the trustees, and now it turns out something like 2,000 pieces of the collection (itself not exactly obtained innocently) are missing. Also, available as a podcast.
Representative sentence: “I just couldn't get these people to listen despite the fact that the evidence I had gathered was absolutely incontrovertible.”
BEST HEIST SUBCULTURE
Heist stories are often about passion for something unusual—painting, jewels, ancient artifacts—but it’s even better when they’re about something strange, like enormous snapping turtles. For Texas Monthly, our old friend Sonia Smith takes into the dark world of cajun turtle poaching and the lanky lawman trying to keep primeval reptiles out of the stew pot.
Representative sentence: “If it’s a turtle supper, everybody’s coming. You just can’t imagine the effect it has on people.”
CRAFTIEST POST-INCARCERATION HEIST
There may be no greater testament to the failures of the prison-industrial complex than the fact that incarcerated people are still pulling off massive heists. Now, you may say this is more of a scam or a con, but we can be generous with our definitions. The tale of Arthur Cofield’s alleged abilities to obtain millions of dollars from the bank accounts of the wealthy and respectable with a cell phone and a few co-conspirators is nothing short of incredible. And I love that all Cofield’s lawyers are also representing Donald Trump in his Georgia election interference case. A very specific practice area…
Representative sentence: “One night in June, just after 2 a.m., Blake landed on a private runway in Atlanta, during a heavy storm, with millions in gold coins in tow.”
BEST “HEIST ADJACENT” ACTIVITY
Running a Ponzi scheme is not necessarily a heist, depending perhaps on how you do it, but I did love this story about a sneaker head who had a lucrative “business” front-running drops of new shoes—at least until the Air Jordan 11 Cool Grey blew up his balance sheet and his enterprise.
Representative sentence: “He was running a weird, unregulated casino…[T]he problem is that he had to depend on buyers who were not that sophisticated in order to make money.”
LOWEST RETURN ON EFFORT HEIST
It’s gotta be these guys in Switzerland who climbed 2,941 meters to the top of the Dauberhorn to steal about $450 in donations left in a high-altitude lockbox.
Represenative sentence: “For the moment, the climbing club is hoping that whoever stole the money will suffer from ‘a guilty conscience’, and quietly return it.”
BEST FAMILY REVENGE HEIST
The heists in question here allegedly occurred more than half a century ago—but the Wildenstein family’s strenuous attempts to conceal a fortune in apparently ill-gotten art, only to see their efforts fail because of a stepmother scorned, is nearly perfect.
Representative sentence: “While Nathan was grooming his young grandson to enter the family business, he took him to see a silent film about a man who wore a hat that everyone initially mocked; by the end of the movie, the whole town was wearing one. Nathan explained to Daniel that this was their family’s calling: ‘Find the guy’s hat and wear it before the others.’”
BEST SHELLFISH HEIST
It’s a tie between these Philly roughnecks and these Aussie dolphins.
In December, I climbed Mt. Tam, a rather small mountain by most standards but one of the highest points in the Bay Area. A long walk with a good view at the end is my idea of a good mental cleanse, and with this attitude—slightly exhausted, unlimited horizons—I wish you a very happy 2024.
