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Thursday, October 7, 2010

The professional Criminal



The professional criminal lives in a nice neighborhood. Chances of getting caught being less than 3% in Argentina, a smart criminal will make a lot of money. He has a nice house, sends the kids to a good school. Of course he does not steal from his neighbors, but any piece of intelligence he can gather he will use as long as it doesn’t compromise his cover. The people that live next to him consider him polite, he claims to be in the import/exports business, logistics, consulting or construction business.  He may have a legit business as well.
The professional criminal has partners who are also like him. You wont see him hanging around bums or low lives wearing gang clothes. 

He knows his tools of trade, he has good weapons and knows how to use them, he’s very determined. He wears armor when “working”, he has several cell phones but never talks directly about what he does, uses common language codes so that the true meaning of the conversation can go unnoticed to anyone recording it, or denied by his lawyer. Oh, he has one of the best criminal lawyers in town too. He has vehicles that are adequate for the job, fast and effective but common models easy to forget. If the job requires it he will get hold of armored vehicles too, either by contacts working in cash in transit companies, stealing them from diplomats or buying it himself. He also has safe houses where to keep the stolen goods or places to keep a kidnap victim. The selling of what he steals is done by a 3rd party broker. He knows other professional criminals as well and can sometimes associate with them for jobs that require more people or other skills.

He does intelligence work on his targets, and he practices how everything will go down with his partners, doing it again and again until they get it right. They go over the area and the escape routes several times.
Before the job, he will purge himself so as to not have any food waste left in his intestine, no food or water in his stomach either: This increases his chance of surviving a gun shot wound in the gut.
His clothes will depend on the job, when working around banks he might wear a suit, if not other casual yet comfortable clothes. Hair is usually cut short.
 The professional criminal hides among the sheep. While good guys worry about other things, he’s exclusively focused on stealing from them.

FerFAL

10 comments:

Maldek said...

Where did you learn this?

Maczeta Ockhama said...

It's a very good description. The same as 90'es in Poland. But with some experience one can always recogize such guys. These are always a small differnces. P.e. preffing BMW with not white collar look and strange meetings habit. Easly to recogize for neihgbors and home observation/car following is not very hard to spot. I know, US readers don't have such an experience - but you will learn. Now it's free and some day you have to pay with your home belongings or even life.

Jack said...

Ferfal, sounds like you're describing politicians!

FerFAL said...

Maldek said...

Where did you learn this?

Several places. You know some of this just be living in Argentina where 1/2 time you worry about the economy and the other 1/2 you worry about crime. Some I learned from a book called "Mi life as a Thief" by a (thief of course) called Pedro Palomar. The big about bag guys purging themselves I learned from a forensics doctor, while he told us this a cop in the class nodded in agreement, he knew about this too.

FerFAL

Jada said...

Ferfal is absolutely right. The professional criminal, as opposed to the common crackhead looking to score some easily flippable merchandise to support his habit, will carefully plan out his attack and leave nothing to chance. This includes blending in perfectly with the very people he wants to target.

I probably should not cop to this, but....

When I was considerably younger, I and a very select group of close friends had a game in which we would stake out a building, carefully study and assess it's security system, possible points of entry, blind spots, etc, and best times for access. Then the game began. The object was for one player to gain entry into the building, obtain a select item that had been chosen ahead of time, and get back out and to a safe house without getting caught. The items varied, anything from a vase off of the CEO's desk to the TV from the guard shack.

We did it because we were bored, highly intelligent, and prone to mischief. We played the game dozens and dozens of times. We were never caught. We were 15-17 years old.

NO ONE EVER SUSPECTED US! People in the US think criminals are scruffy, shifty, thugs, crackheads, or someone "not like us". We were upper middle class, Honor Roll, front row of church kids. Eventually we grew up and grew out of our wannabe master criminal phase... but make no mistake, the pros fit in among us every bit as well as we did back then, and of course they're a whole lot more dangerous than a bunch of teenagers intent on stealing the guard's 13" black and white TV out from under his sleeping nose.

DaShui said...

Que Pasa,FerFal?

The smarter criminals here in the US are more into identity theft. Last month my doctor's office was broken into-they did not want drugs, but only patient information. It has been a little headache, for me, contacting my bank and credit companies to keep an eye out.Criminals can get credit cards or open loans in my name, much better than robbing banks or kidnapping, penalties are much lighter, don't worry about gut shots.

ghpacific said...

This also sounds like the training the Mossad uses. See the book Vengeance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance:_The_True_Story_of_an_Israeli_Counter-Terrorist_Team There is a test where an agent must get to a stranger's balcony and be seen drinking a glass of water and it's up to the agent to figure out how to do it without raising suspicion or threatening the apartment owner. It shows how terribly vulnerable we are when we believe everyone is what they say they are and we believe them and even help them.

Maldek said...

FerFal - thank you for the posting and clarification.

Gives me a new perspective to my personal perception. I will keep the picture in mind.

Anonymous said...

States often require medical professionals to report gunshot victims to the police. So the professional criminals arrange to have their own hospital setup:
Medical tools may have been intended for injured criminals

A.H.A. said...

Jada: please contact me. editor at interestingtimesmagazine dot com