Either the moon is stuck on full or Steven Soderbergh has begun to rule the world.
It has been almost a month since the brazen heist at the European Poker Tour Berlin, where armed robbers stormed the Grand Hyatt Hotel and stole $329,000 from the prize pool. Bad things always happen in threes, and it seems as though the Berlin robbers were only the first in a string of recent poker robberies.
Early Saturday morning, an armed robbery took place at a middle-class residential home game in Austin, Texas. The dice games in the crack ghettos of Compton would be one thing, but hitting the heart of America touches a little too close for comfort. One witness had the following to say about the incident, with names being omitted with asterisks:
“3-4 black guys w/ AK 40’s (sic–he means AK-47s), shot their way in back door. **** was running game, 24 people there. Made us all go face down, empty pockets, took most wallets, phones keys. Gunshots were fired Inside. they kept yelling at us not to look up or move, so we didn’t know if people were shot. ****** saved our lives. he obeyed them, rationalized w/ them, showed them closet w/ money.”
One of the robbers was in custody just hours after the event unfolded, when police performed a traffic stop on a suspicious BMW seen locally just hours before the theft. A search of the driver revealed $1000 in cash, the amount of money reported as missing by the man quoted above, and a debit card of one of the victims. Oh yah, and a Glock pistol in a McDonald’s bag with a fully loaded clip laying next to it on floorboard. Something tells me the “I got it in my Happy Meal” defense didn’t work out for him.
As if this wasn’t enough, the Grand Casino Basel in Switzerland was hit by 10 professional thieves in the early morning hours of Sunday, dawning ski masks, automatic weapons, and pistols. Surgical with their breach of the building, the French-speaking crew demanded the 600 patrons and employees to stay on the floor, then proceeded to talk about baguettes and riverboat trading bear pelts with the Mohawk Indians on the great Mississippi.
The robbers split up in two groups, failing to open the main safe but raiding every register in site. It is estimated by casino director that the crew ran off with “several hundred thousand francs, less than one million.” To put this in perspective, one million Swiss francs is roughly $940,000. No leads have yet been reported.
If there is something reassuring about all of these robberies, it is that nobody has yet to be shot or killed. Large scores coupled with loaded weapons and criminals with nothing to lose typically equates to terrible crime scenes in world history. Reading about these robberies at the casinos seems like a movie plot, like some fanciful Hollywood summer blockbuster meant to be devious and action packed where you’re rooting for the bad guy. The sobering reality of these incidents hits when you consider the Texas home game robbery, which goes to show that nobody is immune to the forces behind greed and desperation. Something as natural as grabbing a six-pack and a bag of pretzels for your Saturday night with the guys and then in storms Shooty McGee with his armed cronies taking your prize pool. Can you imagine that? I’ll tell you what I can imagine–which luck boxes I’d use as the human shields.
