Louis Shalako: My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Three. Armed Robbery and the Potential For Violence. Louis Shalako.

Stan (left), has a plan.

Louis Shalako

Armed robbery and the potential for violence. Fast forward to the early to mid-nineties. McNuggets, who considers himself to be a criminal mastermind, and Buddy Two-Shoes, an equal partner a lot of the time—well. He has some kind of a brainstorm.

It may have been chance, coincidence, a careless remark by a buddy, or a fellow-traveller. He got the idea from somewhere.

They had a friend, one who drove the mail trucks. That friend may have been the sort of person who had a good job, liked to smoke a bit of pot, and when the day came, they might have had a little hit on that good old crack pipe, right. And it’s pretty insidious stuff. Back in the good old days, the vast majority of Canadians received their unemployment cheques my mail. They got their old age pensions, by mail. They got their tax returns, disability pensions, fucking welfare cheques, all sorts of federal and provincial benefits by mail. People paid their bills by mail—we tend to forget that stuff now that it’s all electronic and we live in the 21^st century. We pay our bills with a couple of clicks on a mouse these days…

However.

That must have been what got them thinking. This is pretty serious stuff, but what if? What if, we could grab the whole fucking truck, full of sacks of mail, on just the right day, and what if there were hundreds, possibly thousands of cheques in those mailbags.

I mean, it’s a pretty big town right, and cheque day rolls around once a month.

What then?

What then, eh?

One has to wonder how much thought they actually put into this crime. One has to wonder, just what they planned to do next, for surely that is the really crucial part of the operation. What would be the point of grabbing a shit-load of cheques, if you don’t have any sort of a plan, in terms of how you’re going to turn all that paper into cold, hard cash. And you have to do it quick. There’s only so much time to do it. Were they going to go all over Ontario, cashing those stolen cheques?

How?

Your buddy down at the auto leasing place must be getting pretty warm by now himself.

That being said, these guys were known for fraud, stolen credit and debit cards, impersonating a card-holder and making purchases, and they probably did have at least a few ideas I am sure. What if they also, had a friend in the bank, or some other ideas on that score…maybe you could just sell a bunch of cheques to a much larger player. Laundering cash is one thing, cheques are another, and especially a big whack of personal, individual, government cheques.

I never heard much about that, but I wasn’t really hanging around with them all that much at the time. I heard some things at second hand—the fact that they were in jail, for example. Understandably, they didn’t want to talk much about it afterwards, and it’s not all that easy to press for such information…

There are certain questions you just don’t ask.

Like, what in the hell were you thinking—

So, with the cooperation of the driver, an employee of Canada Post, with some knowledge of the inner workings of the postal system, one of them, most likely McNuggets, cooked up some semblance of a plan.

Almost any criminal can be dangerous. These guys were not normally known for violence, but this was a big heist, at least in their own minds. McNuggets was not banned in the U.S., and so he went over the river to a gun shop and got himself an electric stun-gun. Not so much a gun, it more closely resembled an electric cattle prod, although it would absolutely put a man down, rather than just giving a 1200-pound cow a little buzz on the ass…I do recall him showing me, which shows that they must have (or I must have), been coming and going still. He even offered to let my try it, an opportunity which I politely declined. No, thanks—I’ll take your word for it. He smuggled that back over the river. There was some contact, in that they still sold me a bit of pot once in a while, although my cocaine days were either gone or going very, very soon now—

Yeah, what would happen if McNuggets, or Buddy Two-Shoes, or Zoomer, opened up a vehicle looking for a wallet, and found a firearm in there…what then.

Promise you will never tell. Thief's honour...

This is what I mean—sort of, when I say these guys, low-level punks that they were, could also be dangerous, not just to other people but to themselves as well. One thing led to another, in a logical progression of events. And a hot firearm can always be sold, for a little cash, to someone who might be even stupider, or maybe even just crazier, than you are. Selling someone a hot firearm, and they go off and use it somewhere, is that a whole lot different than the person who is just helping out a friend to find a vein, and pressing the plunger on that syringe, in all innocence, which results in the death, not of an enemy, but a friend—what then.

What then? The same holds true for a cheap taser bought in a pawn shop or whatever in a little town across the river, and no plan is completely foolproof.

Anyhow, the basic plan was pretty simple. Their postal driver friend was to pick up a load of mailbags, wherever that might have been. I’m thinking London or Toronto, some postal sorting facility in Mississauga, considering the load, and then bring it back to town, where these guys would be waiting at a certain time, at a certain corner. Their friend would have to stop at the stop sign, and then they’d leap out, pull open the door, climb in…and take him hostage, what with having a taser weapon and all.

A big sack of cheques, right...

They had a story all cooked up for the guy, and all that person had to do was to stick to it. This would be all the more convincing, if they were actually injured, when you think on it.

Now, this guy (or girl, which is barely possible), must have wondered. But they were to go somewhere out in the country. Tie them up, gagged and blindfolded, steal the truck and dump him or her out into the road…

There was no guarantee that they weren’t going to get zapped with that taser. There was no real guarantee of success, there was no real guarantee of the proceeds of the crime being properly distributed, in any sort of equitable manner, and the truth is, they got cold feet.

Where in the fuck are you going to hide a Canada Post truck for any length of time.

These guys were bound to get caught, one way or another. They just didn’t see that.

The reader or listener may be able to guess what happens next. The cops had been tipped off. The boys were waiting, and their friend pulls up to the exact spot, right on schedule.

It must have seemed like they had it made. All the cops had to do was to remain in concealment, all they had to do was to wait, to pounce, and to catch them red-handed.

Which is exactly what they did.

It’s a funny thing about McNuggets, who had his pride. He was never caught in the commission of a crime. No, ladies and gentlemen, he was always betrayed. He was always ratted off by a friend.

This is one of the things that made him dangerous. He couldn’t accept that he had simply bitten off more than he could chew.

He didn’t take into account that that other guy had a wife, a kid, a home, and a good job, and he’d just been talking in his cups, as the saying goes. That other guy wasn’t prepared to do hard time for him, in spite of the criminal code of honour, or whatever ludicrous ethical and values system one subscribed to—

It never occurred to him that the other guy had no reason to trust either one of them, or that they wouldn’t, in fact, taser him, take all the money, and if he didn’t like it, he could go fuck himself.

What’s he going to do now? Call the cops and confess to a federal crime?

Enough to put a man down...

Interestingly, McNuggets was the only guy I ever heard of who waived bail. That might have been smart, start early on your sentence and just get it over with. He’s the only guy I know that entered a plea and headed off to the penitentiary, where at least they had a library, recreation facilities, and the opportunity to learn some kind of a trade…poor old Buddy Two-Shoes, in a separate trial, didn’t stand much of a chance once his accomplice had copped a plea. McNuggets did four years and Buddy, two and a half, one must assume he made some kind of a statement of fact. McNuggets was the only guy I know, who literally showed me a set of lock-picks. McNuggets was the only guy I know who bought some kind of plastic card-printer or embosser, paying a couple of grand for that off of Ebay. What was he thinking of? And McNuggets, as you may recall, had that grow-op in his basement, which he showed to anybody who came by the house, but only after swearing them to an oath of secrecy…McNuggets waived parole.

When he was out, he was out. He didn’t owe anybody anything. There were no conditions, once he’d served his sentence and allegedly, paid his debt to society.

As for Two-Shoes. Maybe he caught the benefit of the fact that his buddy had a worse, or maybe even just a longer, record. A record as long as your arm—how often have we heard the expression?

Hell, maybe McNuggets just had longer arms.

He told me an interesting story. When he was really young, and fearless, he’d broken into a home. He’d hit the jackpot—he’s found a stash of weapons. Jamming them all into a pillowcase, having read a book or two on burglars, safe-crackers and the like, he got the hell out of there.

It didn’t take too long before he realized he couldn’t take them home. He said he’d taken them ‘out in the woods’ and buried them. When he went back some time later, he did find them, but they were all rusty and he still didn’t really know what to do with them. One wonders what to make of a story like that, or what eventually happened to those weapons.

This might also account for some of that paranoia, when I was talking about writing about small town criminals.

As for Zoomer, there was a story where a couple of cops grabbed him off the street one day. They did not take him downtown. They took him to some empty apartment in the south end of town and tied him up in a chair…they beat the living fuck out of good old Zoomer, and considering the person, one wonders what exactly they hoped to achieve.

You’re not likely to reform a guy like that.

The story goes, that he had stolen a cop’s hat out of a vehicle.

A fucking hat, really?

So, there is such a thing as honour, there is such a thing as humiliation, wounded pride and the like.

One wonders if there was also a weapon, a handgun, of official issue or otherwise, and whether such a weapon had ever been recovered.

Pure speculation on my part, but it is what it is, ladies and gentlemen.

God knows there’s enough weapons out there.

Looks like he scored.

***

It has been said that the average person can unknowingly walk past 36 murderers in their lifetime. Think about the stranger who you brushed shoulders with on the bus, the person standing in front of you in line to grab a coffee or the passenger who sat down next to you on a plane. – New York Post.

END

Poor old Louis Shalako has books and stories available from iTunes.

See his art on Fine Art America.

Check out One Million Words of Crap, an audio essay on independent, digital publishing, in celebration of fourteen years here at Long Cool One Books.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content. 18+)