I enjoyed Heist and Oceans Eleven, but I can't help thinking of the comparison with real criminals, and sadly, they never seam to measure up. I love those stories of romantic, intelligent and cool bad guys. These stories appeal to some dark side of my personality; it feels like you are rooting for the underdog when you watch them. But the reality is that there are far more stories of true idiots in crime than there are stories of ones that got away with it. This is particularly true in the modern age, with video cameras, DNA testing, computer records, and national fingerprint databases. Generally speaking, people can get away with a particular kind of theft once, or even twice, but if the guy uses the same pattern over and over, he will eventually get nabbed. And the problem is just that...they have one bright idea (if that, many never manage one) and use it over and over again until they get caught.
To paraphrase the Gene Hackman character in Heist "the hard part is not getting the goods, but getting away."
The type of crime that I hear about most is cases of fraud. (because of where I work) And again, the people who commit these kinds of crimes also keep doing it until they have bled a company into bankruptcy. At which point...guess what...people go over the books with a fine toothed comb and find that money has gone to buy things like condos in Aspen. These idiots...they stick around stealing until the bitter end and they and buy non-portable things like houses. Stacking up a couple million in a numbered account in the Cayman Islands... sure that makes sense. However, to do that successfully you have to be willing to quit your job at the firm you've been embezzling from at some point prior to their discovering it and having you arrested.
Thankfully for the forces of good, they rarely do that. Now, I know some of you are probably thinking that my sample is biased towards the ones that get caught, because after all if they did get caught, they clearly messed up somehow. This is true; there may be some pool of as yet undiscovered fraud --of people getting away with it. However, they have only really "gotten away with it" if they quit and get out of the game before they get caught. And it is very much human nature for people to feel more invincible once they have gotten away with something once...So they keep doing it.
That is the only explanation I can think of, for the tendency to not just embezzle once, but to continue until it becomes a virtual certainty that someone will figure it out. And also the only explanation I can think of for the marked tendency to buy expensive immovable things like condos in Aspen or Miami, or spend it all on an expensive mistress (another common use for ill-gotten gains). For people to spend it on these kinds of
things, they have to believe that no one will ever catch them. They set up lifestyles that they can't really support except with the help of additional infusions of ill-gotten gains, and which tie them to a place. Then even when it begins to become obvious that they are about to be discovered, they stay and try to bury the records (One lady did this literally by burying the company's records in her back yard.) Then they wind up in court trying to explain how they could possibly have afforded all these really nifty cars, houses, and jewelry on $40,000 a year.
Anyway, I suppose I should be pleased that the forces of good tend to prevail in the end. Meanwhile I'll keep going to watch those intelligent and dashing criminal types that only exist in the movies.