Brother, can you spare a quarter?

Hey, everybody! Following the official hiatus, CCB is back with a vengeance. Oh sure, we missed a lot, but we’ll more than make up for it in the coming weeks. Besides, we were only gone for a bit over two weeks.

Curiously, in the time we were gone, there was a lot of people banging on the door. So I opened the site back up so readers could peruse the archives. We were able to maintain a decent level of traffic after that.

As you more loyal readers probably already know, we’re coming up on the one year anniversary of CCB. One year, feels like ten. Haha…just kidding. I actually enjoy getting up at 3:30AM every morning to ensure you have fresh (no hormones added) stuff to read. You can thank me later.

Those of you more astute readers will notice that we’ve changed the look of the site. Web site theme trends shift every now and then and I figure I’ll try to keep up. If you have any problems navigating the site, please let me know.

Okay enough with the Monday morning homily…

Friends, have you ever heard the old Johnny Cash tune, “One Piece at a Time”? Of course you have.

Just in case you’re a heathen unfamiliar with Cash’s catalogue of music, I would strongly encourage you to give it a listen. Great tuneage in there. I think the song in question was released sometime in the early 70’s. It’s about a guy who left home in Kentucky and moved to Detroit where he finds work on the Cadillac assembly line.

His idea is to start sneaking an entire Caddy out the door one piece at a time. In fact, the hook in the song is “I’d get it one piece at a time, And it didn’t cost me a dime…” Problem was, after sneaking parts out one piece at a time over decades, when he decided to put it together, nothing was an exact fit. In fact, I guess he got more than he bargained for because he said that the title weighed sixty pounds.

But, I digress. Beyond inspiring greedy, ambitious employer theft with a big supposedly big payoff in the end, I guess it also points to being careful what you wish for because you’ll likely wind up with a pain in the ass…now how’s that for a Monday morning moral?

I came across an article on the Huffington Post web site yesterday that made that song pop into my head.

It seems there was this fellow who worked for Brinks – you know, the armored car and facility security guys. He was with their Birmingham, Alabama office, which handles and stores coins for the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta. Our criminal idiot of the day, we’ll call him “Spare Change McCoin”, was Brinks’ process money manager, which meant he was in charge of counting coinage. And you think your job sucks?

At this point, I should tell you that he is facing Federal time for stealing $196,000 in quarters from the U.S. Govt. There’s a lot we don’t know about this story, likely because the USG doesn’t want other coin entrepreneurs to get any bigger ideas, but the facts that are known follow.

And, by the way, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who announced the charge of bank theft against Spare Change last Monday deserves an award for the most cringe-worthy clichés outside of this blog. In commenting on Spare Change’s crime, she was quoted as saying that he must have thought he’d made quite a haul stealing $196,000 in quarters, but that he “now carries a greater load.” Or, the one that followed in which she said that what poor ol’ Spare Change (bless his heart), must have “thought was a nickel and dime theft was, in the end, a major bank theft.”

What do you bet Ms. U.S. Attorney had an intern writing her stuff for her?

Apparently, quarters are stored in huge ballistic bags (containing $50,000 worth of frigging quarters each) that are on “skids”. You have to have some means (presumably the skids) for moving the damned bags, because by my calculations each of those $50,000 bags of quarters weighs in a 2,500 pounds.

Stay with me here…

So Spare Change decides it’s time to leave Brinks and move on to bigger and better things. In mid-February 2014, he steals four empty ballistic bags and skids. He returns the stolen bags with beads (really?) inside and to cover his numismatic scheme he placed $1,000 in quarters in the neck of the bags so that they would pass a visual inspection. And then somehow he managed to get 10,000 pounds of quarters out of the building…that’s the part that has me stumped. What did he do, back a Brinks armored truck up to the loading dock and drive away with the loot? That’s some secure facility there, I’m telling ya!

In April of 2014, during an audit of quarters at Brinks, the theft was discovered. What we don’t know is why it took so darned long to track down Spare Change McCoin as the crook.

What an idiot. What a numbskull. What a maroon! And no, I’m not talking about the U.S. Attorney this time…

First of all, what the hell do you do with that many quarters? It’s not like you can dump them on the counter at the bank announcing that your great aunt passed away leaving you her quarter collection. Someone is going to get suspicious!

Maybe he planned to open a coin-op laundry or car wash and was looking for something to fill the coin changer machines with. Nah…Spare Change isn’t that smart.
Seriously…how the hell do you get rid of 784,000 quarters? This is the stuff of which nightmares are made!

Now here are some things that we don’t know. Brinks, upon discovery of the theft, promptly paid the USG for the missing loot…$196,000. As part of his plea deal, Spare Change has to provide restitution to Brinks in the amount of $196,000, which hints that Spare Change’s purloined coins are gone. How do you get rid of that much $$$ in quarters?

Oh, in addition to paying restitution to Brinks, he has to pay a $250,000 find to the Federal govt and is facing a 10 year sentence. Nothing in the plea deal about fixing the hernia he undoubtedly got moving five tons of coins.

Yet another example of how crime does not pay!

Me personally, I would have driven a large U-Haul truck to Vegas, Baby and put it all in quarter slots…but, that’s just me.

You can be assured that since CCB is back from official hiatus now, we’ll be on this case. We’re deploying a team of investigators (okay, probably just Cousin Fred) with metal detectors to Birmingham…the loot is there somewhere, we’ll find it. And then, it’s on to Vegas, Baby!
 

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