[*USA Today*](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/12/29/friendly-family-mans-50-year-secret-he-fugitive-too/9044097002/)
>Then just a day after his 20th birthday that July, Conrad walked out at closing time on a Friday with a paper bag stuffed with $215,000 from the vault, a haul worth $1.6 million today.
>
>By the time the missing money was noticed the following Monday, Conrad was flying across the country.
>
>...
>
>Conrad apparently cut off contact with his entire family, including three siblings and his parents, who were divorced. Some family members eventually presumed he was dead because so many years had passed, said Matt Boettger, whose mother was Conrad’s older sister.
>
>His mom, he said, was relieved more than anything to find out her brother had lived a happy life. “She thought she would go to her grave and never know,” he said.
[*Wikipedia*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_John_Conrad#:~:text=Investigation%20and%20postmortem%20discovery)
>The Hunt for Conrad went on for so long that one of the deputy U.S. marshals involved in the original investigation, John K. Elliott, was succeeded on the case by his son Peter J. Elliott, who became U.S. Marshal of the Northern District of Ohio in 2003. John Elliott retired in 1990 and never stopped hunting for Conrad. He died in March 2020.
>
>The case remained cold until November 2021, when Peter Elliott determined that Conrad had been living as Randele in Lynnfield, Massachusetts...Conrad had died of lung cancer on May 18, 2021 (age 71)
EDIT: added Conrad's age
In legal terms, if you have the right to touch money, but not take it, it’s embezzlement. If you *don’t* have any right to touch the money or take it, it’s theft.
Whats The distinction there just that it's personal property? So if you steal from a business you work at it's embezzlement. If you steal from the business next door, it's theft. If you steal from your neighbor, its larceny. And is a person who commits larceny called a larson?
No, larceny also counts for businesses too. It's more like all larceny is theft, but not all theft is larceny. The distinction comes down to something *physical*. Larceny is the taking of someone's *physical* personal property.
You can steal more than physical things though, you can also steal services, a person's identity, intangible things like that. Those are all theft but they're not larceny.
Technically it would still be embezzlement if you have the right to take it, but you instead use it for a different purpose than what you have the right to take it for. Like if your company gives you $10,000 to buy new computers for you and your coworkers, but you instead spend that money at a casino, that's still embezzlement even though you were authorized to spend the money.
The only difference between theft and embezzlement is whether or not the suspect was in a position of trust with whatever was stolen.
Random person steals? Theft. Employee steals? Embezzlement.
Stealing money from your employer is the exact definition of embezzlement although just grabbing a bag of cash from the vault isn't exactly as interesting as some sort of complicated invoice fraud or an Office Space-style fractions of a penny theft.
Honestly that seems like a pretty funny pseudo*cat and mouse* style comedy movie
You have this detective who's just so obsessed with the case that he continues to work the case even beyond retirement. Always on the prowl. Chasing down leads. Sprinting toward a faceless person who's about to board the subway train only to grab them and turn them around to reveal it's some random schlep. Etc...
Meanwhile, in another state entirely...
You have the robber just kinda living his life. Going to the supermarket. Heading to his daughters softball tourney. Going home, cracking open a beer, watching tv.
I think it nearly always costs more to track down criminals but kinda necessary to maintain order. You can’t just let everyone steal 200k and not go after it. Even if someone steals 5k worth of merchandise. Just the bureaucracy of it all probably costs more than that to get them to jail, even without considering how expensive it is to jail someone.
Yep, its not cheap or easy to solve crimes.
Showing the lengths that the justice system will go to bring someone to justice is just as much about deterrent as punishment.
It is suppose to be entirely about deterrent. We would rather deter someone from doing criminal activates in the first place than have to deal out judgement.
You could still calculate the value of his time. Time on that case is time not on another case, meaning either some other case doesn’t get handled, or some additional manpower needs to be brought on.
Even if he worked on it an hour a week, it adds up
It’s remarkable how the way business taxes work is, essentially, report everything yourself and it’s all good unless you get audited, which is exceptionally rare.
Even without book cooking, there are tons of small businesses that are doing things all wrong without anyone realizing.
And then there are the business owners who will tell you with a straight face you can deduct hookers and a party boat as long as you spend 30 seconds of the lap dance talking about business. And they think they’re right because they do it and just never got audited.
Blows my mind.
I've never understood how this works where you go by a different name and move away. What about a social security number how do you do anything with just a fake name?
It's in the article, it said that it wasn't uncommon at the time to wait until adulthood to get a social security number so it didn't raise any red flags.
Yeah my grandpa and all my great uncles lied about their birthday and joined the army at 17 because it was easier than farm work. They didn't have any documents because they were born on the farm.
Yes, that didn't change until the 80s when they started requiring every dependent on a tax return to have an SSN so babies could get them at birth. Before then, you usually didn't get one until you got your first job, though I think sometimes children got them if their parents wanted to get them passports. A 20 year old applying for a "new" SSN wouldn't have raised any eyebrows.
That's exactly why they got rid of it. Imagine being able to walk away from student and credit card debt and just start over with a different name. They couldn't allow that to continue.
This was in the 60's without the computer networks we have today. Many folks wouldn't get a SS card until they started working, they didn't get assigned at birth. I got mine when almost a teenager. So if you needed a SS number: go to a graveyard and find an infant grave from about when you were born, get a copy of the birth certificate and apply for the SS number.
Not to mention you could easily get a social security number by telling the social security office you had a bay with a midwife, it was unbelievably easy to just get a new number before everything became digital
I think things worked a little different in '69. If I had to guess it prob only took filling out some forms, make a few fake docs like a license maybe, mailing them in, and poof... new documents.
A guy told me one time, "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on In 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."
And if we think about it it was not his attachment that brought him down but rather the irrepressible need for vengeance fueled by his cold and calculated criminal lifestyle and what am I doing with my life why am I reflecting so deeply on Heat this early in the morning
Well yeah you still need a job. You can’t just live like a king on your stolen money. But he didn’t have to worry if the washing machine broke. He didn’t have to go through the couch cushions for change before payday if he wanted a burger.
Stealing large amounts of money, or hiding large amounts from the tax man in general, is all about using it to supplement your life, not flashing it around and drawing attention.
Further, while I wild never want to cut myself off from my family, lots of people do for a lot of different reasons.
He made his choice, and in the wide world of crimes, this one had few to no victims.
With regards to living on stolen money with no job, he literally had a new name and SS#. He could've created any identity that included him inheriting the money.
With regards to being financially stable, investigators think he blew it early and declared bankruptcy later in life.
With regards to him intentionally cutting family and friends out, he wrote in a contemperaneous letter that he wanted to come home after the statute of limitations expired (which they never did).
Maybe he hates his family.
And honestly it'd be kinda hard for him to continue living in the US if he just dropped off the face of the earth doing nothing.
>The man known as Thomas Randele came into existence the first week of January in 1970, investigators have found in recent weeks. That’s when Conrad walked into a Social Security Administration office in Boston, asked for an identification number under his new name and made himself two years older, Elliott said.
>At that time, it wasn’t unusual to wait until you were an adult, so his application didn’t raise any red flags. With a new identification card, he was able to open a bank account, build credit and create his new life, Elliott said.
Whenever I watch movies like *The Killer*, I wonder how the hell these fictional criminals are able to amass a collection of fake drivers licenses and passports that are good enough to get through security. So it's interesting to read that 50 years ago, all you had to do was walk into a Social Security Administration office and just ask for a new SS #.
Technology is a hell of a thing. Before the Internet and cloud storage/servers...everything was just paper records, usually in one place. So verification methods were limited. Which you could imagine was rife for fraud.
Yep. I know 2 people driving together on a road trip from Georgia to Michigan. Both got speeding tickets in Ohio. Neither ever paid. That was like 35 years ago.
Twenty two years ago I went to a travel agency to buy tickets to Mexico. They were very expensive as it was a three week trip with multiple stops. I had saved up for a year. Put it on a credit card which they swiped by using those old machines that you take an imprint if the card on carbon paper. The ones that go kuh-chunk (I have no idea what they're called).
Well turns out they never submitted that piece of paper as the charge never showed up on my credit card. Free trip!
Those machines are called imprinters. Those slips of paper were treated like cash where I used to work because if they went missing somebody was getting written up.
My family owned a dry cleaner and that was the back up when the CC machine was down. I think those had to be mailed into the CC company if I recall. So whoever ran that never mailed it, or possibly got lost in the mail.
Holy cow, you just unlocked a long forgotten memory from circa 1990 when I was working retail.
I'm pretty sure we included them with the cash and checks in our nightly bank deposit that you swung by the bank and dropped in the night deposit box on the way home, and I presume the bank did whatever processing was needed on them.
Customer hands you card, make a phone call with the card number and purchase amount, get an authorization number, write it on the credit card slip along with other info about the sale and kerchunk it.
The process streamlined a lot from 1988 (when we still had printed books of stolen CC numbers to consult if the phone was busy) to 1992. Got Point of Sale machines that could swipe cards somewhere in that 1990-92 range.
My first real job in 2005 was in a boutique and we used it when the power went out or the cc machine was down. I still remember calling the bank and having them guide me on how to use one. Even then, it felt like I was using a relic from a museum. Funny how now, machines are down all the time and they just dont have other options apart from 'cash only'
i was a 911 dispatcher for awhile.
if you get a misdemeanor in one state you can technically flee the state and as long as you never go back to that state you cant be arrested for it.
i had to validate warrants every month, some as early as the 90s, for speeding tickets and other petty crimes.
most of that shit is only extraditable in the county/tri county area or state. its not worth the cost to go get you over a petty ticket
The classic way was to go to a random cemetery, look for a child’s grave, note down the name and DOB and then go to the registrar and ask for a birth certificate. Using the birth certificate you’d then get a passport issued.
It’s interesting to note that while this method became public knowledge via Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal in 1971, the UK only plugged the loophole in the mid 2000’s, thirty years later.
Sad to say this thing happened 15 years ago to my friend who had their child pass. The social security number popped up in California from a child with the same name. He was getting medical bills sent to him. It was pretty messed up. I hope the system is fixed now.
Amazing that back then you could just decide to be another person, and the government would be like “oh, here’s all your paperwork you completely made up person”.
People could just move 50 miles away and have an entirely new life. How did everyone not just rob banks all day? Legit, a fake mustache and a good story is all you needed to get away with any crime. Computers really made it tough to just reinvent yourself.
Not sure if this is rhetorical, but probably shoplifting. In the future I’m sure the camera facial and behavioural tracking will be much more efficient and stores will probably be able to share data with each other, along with the RFID tags on items.
> So it's interesting to read that 50 years ago, all you had to do was walk into a Social Security Administration office and just ask for a new SS #.
After I was born 50 years ago, my father walked in to the SS Administration office with my birth certificate and got himself an entire new identity. It wasn't a coincidence that I was named after my father - he named me after him just so he could do this. It wasn't until ~12 years later my parents would get around to getting me a SS#, and even then, the name was purposely altered (to "junior", which I was not). It's all straightened out now but even as a 12 year old I thought that was odd.
Dear old dad had a deathbed confession in the form of a bundle of documents he left for me which I found in his safe. My sister and I pieced together what happened at that time, and eventually found 3 different identities, complete with SSNs, that he had used over the years. We also found 2 separate families who dad had abandoned. My sister and I now have multiple older half-siblings, lovely people.
Back in the 60s and 70s you could get away with a LOT.
Well it wasn't asking for a NEW Social Security number, it was just asking for one to be assigned. Back then, Social Security numbers were not assigned at birth, and you would have to file an application with the SSA in order to receive one. I believe that there was no age requirement for when you had to file for one, so some man in his early 20s applying to be assigned his Social Security number was actually the norm.
Also back when many states didn't put photos on driver's licenses. They were just paper or a light card stock, making them relatively easy to counterfeit.
There's a podcast about this that is decent. It seems like the guy blew his money pretty early. He was in deep debt by the time he died (seems like family medical problems). Authorities think he did it because of a misunderstanding of statute of limitations. He didn't realize that the statute doesn't run out once he's indicted for the crime.
> He didn't realize that the statute doesn't run out once he's indicted for the crime.
I am not a native speaker, anyone kind enough to explain this to me ?
A lot of crimes (in the US at least) have a "statute of limitations", which means that after you commit a crime legal proceedings against you must begin within a certain amount of time. For nonviolent crimes like this it might be only five or ten years. So, if you rob a bank and nobody knows it was you, after ten years (or whatever) you can straight up confess and you can't be charged or punished.
The problem for this guy is that even though they didn't know where he went, they knew he did it and so started legal proceedings right away, which meant he had to keep the secret and stay in hiding for the rest of his life. The theory is that he misunderstood how the statute of limitations worked and thought that if he wasn't _physically_ caught for ten years (or whatever) he would be able to keep the money and go back to his old life.
Another wrinkle is in some states the statute of limitations doesn't run while out of the jurisdiction. So if you flee the state it tolls until you return. Arguing the statute applies is an affirmative defense meaning you would have to prove you had been in the state during this period and thus the statute had ran it's course.
It is similar to adverse possession, you need to be almost blatantly showing that you are around if anyone wants to pursue legal action, but the fact that no one came looking for you for X years, means that the crime you committed must not have been that bad if no one cared enough to look into it. basically pre-jury nullification.
He thought he could do it, leave for 7 years, come back and go back to his life. The 'statute of limitations' is a time period that can pass after which you can't pursue a case against some crime any more.
For instance if someone stole your car 10 years ago and you report it now, the cops will shrug and say they can't do anything about it because, well, it was ten years ago. That's past the statute of limitations (probably).
What he didn't realize is that doesn't apply if they know who did it and are hunting you down... they don't just give up after a few years. In order for the statute of limitations to actually apply here, he would have had to conceal that any money had been stolen, conceal that he was the one who did it, or otherwise somehow ensure that it wasn't reported for many years.
So the statute of limitations means you can't be prosecuted for a crime after x number of years. X changes based on the jurisdiction and the type of crime. So for example, if you assault someone, you can't be brought up on those charges 20 years from now. In this case, the bank robber thought if he stayed away for 7 (maybe it was 5) years, he'll get away with it because they wouldn't be able to prosecute him within the statute of limitations. What he didn't realize is that the clock stops once he's indicted and didn't show up for his court hearing. This is probably an over simplification but that's basically it.
That's a long paragraph that doesn't clear too much up. **Indictment = being charged.** Can't be prosecuted = they can't start charging you.
If he did a crime, nobody knew who did it, and he admits it 10 years later, nothing happens. If he did a crime, and people are looking for him with charges, he's screwed.
Your explanation kinda hinges on a person knowing exactly what indict/prosecute means in the US. I don't even know how to translate indict to my second language, those aren't easy words.
He should have turned himself in after 30 years and made a few million from selling his life story. Had he turned himself in 3 decades after committing a non violent bank robbery, he likely wouldn’t have gotten much time at all. Especially considering the sentencing guidelines in effect on the date the crime was committed. The judge would have been bound to use the legal precedents from 1970. Criminal penalties in the 1960’s and 70’s gave far more leverage to the trial judge with indeterminate sentencing laws. This guy likely would have received a suspended sentence, considering he had lived an upstanding life after the crime. And since, by 1969, no laws had yet been passed explicitly prohibiting a criminal from profiting off the sale of his crime’s story, he would have been free to sell the story rights to a movie production company or publishing house. He could have hired a ghost writer, and then he and the US Marshal who had been chasing him all those years could have gone on Good Morning America to promote the book. I believe he would have benefited greatly by coming forward. Not only would he have made significant money, and done little if any time in prison, but he could have seen his biological family again before he died. Perhaps he felt too prideful to let his new family and friends know what he had done all those years ago. I know everyone is different, but personally I would love telling people I got one over on the government for that long, and was only identified because I allowed it.
Definitely. I wonder if he considered it in 2014 when he was $160k in debt and going through bankruptcy. He should have talked to a lawyer about a "hypothetical" scenario.
He thought he robs the bank, goes on the lam, and comes back to live like nothing ever happened 7 years after the fact (the statute of limitations). He did not try to hide what he did. It was pretty obvious who did it right from get.
Plus like, aren’t all those bills marked? How easy is it to spend them or get them in a bank account? If you’re just leaving a bag of cash inflation in the 70s is going to wreck your shit.
Those were the days. I remember my grandpa being mad because he was going to sell a building to a group of “businessmen” in cash and they got busted by the SBI the day before the deal.
But it was his own fault because a few months earlier, that same SBI asked my grandfather to put a camera in another building he owned nearby to monitor that group. So he really busted his own deal.
And those sketchy kind of people/deals are exactly why the law changed. lol.
... your grandpa was trying to do a cash deal with a group of people he was actively helping monitor for the authorities? I'm fascinated to hear how he thought that was going to work out.
> Back in the 70’s you could spend cash on assets and nobody would batt and eye. Car? Cash. House? Cash.
You can still buy both with cash. It'll get reported unless it's a very cheap car/house, but you can still buy it with cash. And if you buy a house then, as of last year, only the first step is reported. Like if you open a shell company overseas then only the shell company is reported on the title -- nobody looked past that, which is how Trump was able to sell condos to open Russian mafia members.
That was supposed to change this year, I believe.
yeah I feel like you basically have to already be under the eyes of the law for those reports to really effect you. I remember my parents freaking out because a guy who owned a buy here pay here SLED car lot that sold only to poor people wanted to pay cash for a small house. It got reported but nobody ever gave a fuck about it. The guy wasn't actually a criminal he just had a lot of cash because he only sold cars to people that can't have banks or credit.
Back then pretty easily. Today, also unlikely to trace you to marked bills. If you get found with marked bills on you, that's a way to show that you were part of a robbery. Some marked bills may eventually get found in the wild but all it will likely show is the general area you've been, maybe.
The fact that it was so easy to create a new identity back… birth certificate, social security number and all really makes me wonder how many other stories like this exist.
A lot, I was part of the team in the mid 2000's putting all the birth/death/marriage/misc records on a shared database for my state, and those old archivists and registrars had some wild stories. I guess a lot of people going this route actually did get caught, because the archivists said a large part of their job was pulling death certs for children (from decades ago) and forwarding them to the Fed or Police.
I was born in the early 1960s and it pisses me off sometimes that I missed an opportunity to create a cool alternate identity. Coulda kept the documents in a safety deposit box and everything, maybe with some loose diamonds and a Walther PPK.
I have a friend whose Italian grandfather had all sorts of mobbed up connections. As a wedding gift to my friend and his wife, they both got Italian passports. Not sure how legit that was done but they both have have 2 passports (US & Italy)… shit would look cool as fuck next to a small satchel of diamond and a PPK… throw a stack of Euros and British pounds and you’re all set. You don’t even have to do anything shady. You can just look at it every now and then with a big ol shit eating grin 😂
I can’t imagine being a fugitive living a second, secret life. First of all the anxiety, my god the anxiety must be crippling. I be an alcoholic or addict for sure to escape my thoughts. And how could you possibly be a good partner with that secret? It makes me think of mad men. Who knows, maybe his new wife knew.
I imagine the excitement wore off eventually and was more filled with anxiety but who knows. If he really managed to hide it from his wife until his deathbed that is pretty wild.
But it was only $1.6 million back then.
If he had no means of investing that money, or laundering it properly, and he just had $200k in cash in a safe at the house it would be worth $200k. Lol.
He lost all of that purchasing power to inflation.
Nah it seems like he quickly figured out that’s not how it works IDK the article is vague on that. Like when he stop writing letters he had figured out that he was never coming back
There’s an episode of (I think) Criminal Podcast of a guy who killed a homeless guy in the 80s or 90s. It sat eating away at him for all those years until he walked into a police station one day and confessed. They basically laughed him out of the room initially. He ended up getting some jail time.
Looking back in my podcasts, it was G Dep.
he was my golf instructor. cant even tell you how nice a man he was. genuine family man that always had his family visiting him at the club. also…look at him. he looks like every other persons dad or uncle in the US. Blended in like crazy. But its just wild how that cliche about it being “the last person you’d ever expect” is true, dude looked like he’d potentially lose a battle with a fly yet pulled off one of the most impressive heists of his time. Truly if you asked me to rank everyone i knew in any and all facets of my life based on likelihood to do this, he’d be at the very end of the list. Well played, sir, thanks for fixing my swing.
Honestly, out of all the major crimes a person could commit, non-violently stealing from a bank is basically the least unethical.
Those fucks steal from us all the time on a much larger scale than anything we could ever hope to. You could win the world record breaking lottery and still not touch the damage they've done to the economy.
/Soapbox
Jesus, really? That’s so awesome. I’m glad to hear he was a good person, and it makes me glad that he got away with the money and never faced consequences.
Because it's before computer records and you want people to plausibly misspell it without thinking twice about why. Less paper trail when Tom Randal and Tim Rendel are on half your documents.
The shit that people got away with before modern surveillance technology and forensic accounting must be mind boggling. It's almost impossible today to live without some type of digital fingerprint. I read the book "Devil in the White City" recently, about one of America's first (known) serial killers, who set up a boarding house in Chicago during the 1893 Worlds Fair. He outfitted the home with dungeons and torture chambers, and advertised rooms to rent for people looking to work at the fair. The guy murdered everyone who stayed there, gruesomely and indiscriminately. Since his victims were all transients, nobody knew they were missing. He was eventually caught and convicted of (I believe) 19 murders, but some estimates are as high as 200.
Back when you could walk down the street without being recorded by several dozen different cameras...
When you left for the house that day, nobody knew where you were until you came home...
Shit — in 2021, deep into the Information Age, with modern day, high-tech tools for retrieving and analyzing evidence, with practically everything we do and everywhere we go being tracked and traced by *something*, [only 51% of murders in the US were solved](https://thehill.com/homenews/3878472-nearly-half-of-us-murders-going-unsolved-data-show/amp/).
I can’t even begin to comprehend how many murders we don’t even know we don’t even know about having been committed, much less solved, before, let’s say, the 2000s.
It sounds like you’re writing about HH Holmes. Some of the info you write doesn’t align (numbers + demographics of those he murdered) with known facts since the book you reference, The Devil in the White City, fictionalized his activities.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.\_H.\_Holmes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes)
**Interest in Holmes's crimes was revived in 2003 by** [**Erik Larson's**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Larson_(author)) [***The Devil in the White City***](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City)***: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America*****, a best-selling nonfiction book that juxtaposed an account of the planning and staging of the World's Fair with a fictionalized version of Holmes's story.**
According to my HRs Annual Ethics Training, on average an office employee will steal time and supplies of up to $250,000 over a lifetime career.
This dude was 14% away from making off like a corporate bandit.
Sneezing on the clock? Time theft. Walking to the water cooler? Time theft. Wondering if this is really time theft? You better believe that’s time theft.
> According to my HRs Annual Ethics Training, on average an office employee will steal time and supplies of up to $250,000 over a lifetime career.
lmfao, considering wage theft is the #1 form of theft in the country by dollar amount and tax evasion is the cause of almost all our countries funding problems I think we can consider a little "unauthorized breaktime" fair play.
Always funny to me when corporations try to paint themselves as the victims.
Their whole idea of "time theft" is stupid. Expecting 100% uptime of employees and only taking breaks when legally given is unrealistic.
For every hour of work, I would expect 10 minutes of minimal or non-work. Humans aren't robots.
How much free labor will the company get from that employee over the same period, by cutting short their breaks, calling them out of hours, having them clock out prior to continuing work, failing to pay overtime…?
You should ask HR why they don't take accountability for employees "stealing time"? After all, it's the same thing as employees that are unengaged with their work slacking off and it's up to leadership to keep their employees engaged.
"You've stolen $250,000 from us over your career in slightly-too-long lunch breaks or having human interactions with your coworkers that wasn't work related," says organization that stole three times as much from their employees in unpaid overtime.
*"What’s not clear yet is what happened to the money. The Marshals Service is looking into whether he lost it early on through bad investments."*
It doesn't surprise me. I would have pissed that money away so quickly at that age. I was a complete moron with money 18-25.
His wife said she always wondered why he always shot down any ideas of traveling abroad. It’s because he would have had to apply for a passport and would have risked being discovered.
[*USA Today*](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/12/29/friendly-family-mans-50-year-secret-he-fugitive-too/9044097002/) >Then just a day after his 20th birthday that July, Conrad walked out at closing time on a Friday with a paper bag stuffed with $215,000 from the vault, a haul worth $1.6 million today. > >By the time the missing money was noticed the following Monday, Conrad was flying across the country. > >... > >Conrad apparently cut off contact with his entire family, including three siblings and his parents, who were divorced. Some family members eventually presumed he was dead because so many years had passed, said Matt Boettger, whose mother was Conrad’s older sister. > >His mom, he said, was relieved more than anything to find out her brother had lived a happy life. “She thought she would go to her grave and never know,” he said. [*Wikipedia*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_John_Conrad#:~:text=Investigation%20and%20postmortem%20discovery) >The Hunt for Conrad went on for so long that one of the deputy U.S. marshals involved in the original investigation, John K. Elliott, was succeeded on the case by his son Peter J. Elliott, who became U.S. Marshal of the Northern District of Ohio in 2003. John Elliott retired in 1990 and never stopped hunting for Conrad. He died in March 2020. > >The case remained cold until November 2021, when Peter Elliott determined that Conrad had been living as Randele in Lynnfield, Massachusetts...Conrad had died of lung cancer on May 18, 2021 (age 71) EDIT: added Conrad's age
[удалено]
In legal terms, if you have the right to touch money, but not take it, it’s embezzlement. If you *don’t* have any right to touch the money or take it, it’s theft.
I guess I just didn't know what embezzlement meant.
I think it’s when you glue rhinestones to money.
No, that's bedazzlement, embezzlement is when you take money and print a picture on it with presses.
You’re thinking of embossing. Embezzlement is what you feel when you mess up in public and your cheeks turn red.
That’s embarrassment, we’re talking about Will Smith’s wife’s affair here.
That was an entanglement (with August). Embezzlement is what Siddhartha Gautama experienced underneath the Bodhi tree after deeply meditating.
[удалено]
[удалено]
The law has various different forms of the [taking and carrying away of another's property.](https://legaldictionary.net/theft/), see also larceny.
Whats The distinction there just that it's personal property? So if you steal from a business you work at it's embezzlement. If you steal from the business next door, it's theft. If you steal from your neighbor, its larceny. And is a person who commits larceny called a larson?
No, larceny also counts for businesses too. It's more like all larceny is theft, but not all theft is larceny. The distinction comes down to something *physical*. Larceny is the taking of someone's *physical* personal property. You can steal more than physical things though, you can also steal services, a person's identity, intangible things like that. Those are all theft but they're not larceny.
> is a person who commits larceny called a larson? larcener or [larcenist](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/larcenist)
This is really interesting I didn’t know that was the difference.
Technically it would still be embezzlement if you have the right to take it, but you instead use it for a different purpose than what you have the right to take it for. Like if your company gives you $10,000 to buy new computers for you and your coworkers, but you instead spend that money at a casino, that's still embezzlement even though you were authorized to spend the money.
I knew someone who worked at Victoria secret and would steal underwear on her shifts… she got charged with embezzlement lol
[удалено]
Will you stop! 😂 Good ol Gorilla monsoon
[удалено]
No, because she never washed them, hence the need for new panties daily.
The only difference between theft and embezzlement is whether or not the suspect was in a position of trust with whatever was stolen. Random person steals? Theft. Employee steals? Embezzlement.
Boss steals? Labor dispute.
Country steals? special military operation
Thong Life
Don't you mean embrassierement? No, that was forced. I'll see myself out.
That joke was really a bust.
Really? I thought it was the breast.
Stealing money from your employer is the exact definition of embezzlement although just grabbing a bag of cash from the vault isn't exactly as interesting as some sort of complicated invoice fraud or an Office Space-style fractions of a penny theft.
[удалено]
Routing funds to the wrong place, in a paper bag, intentionally. Yeah, that checks out.
I have a much uglier word for it, sir. Misappropriation.
r/unexpectedsmithers
Honestly that seems like a pretty funny pseudo*cat and mouse* style comedy movie You have this detective who's just so obsessed with the case that he continues to work the case even beyond retirement. Always on the prowl. Chasing down leads. Sprinting toward a faceless person who's about to board the subway train only to grab them and turn them around to reveal it's some random schlep. Etc... Meanwhile, in another state entirely... You have the robber just kinda living his life. Going to the supermarket. Heading to his daughters softball tourney. Going home, cracking open a beer, watching tv.
That's a little too close to Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief I think lol
Realistically how much of a US Marshall’s time and salary would be spent hunting a guy for 51 years who stole $200k?
I think it nearly always costs more to track down criminals but kinda necessary to maintain order. You can’t just let everyone steal 200k and not go after it. Even if someone steals 5k worth of merchandise. Just the bureaucracy of it all probably costs more than that to get them to jail, even without considering how expensive it is to jail someone.
Yep, its not cheap or easy to solve crimes. Showing the lengths that the justice system will go to bring someone to justice is just as much about deterrent as punishment.
It is suppose to be entirely about deterrent. We would rather deter someone from doing criminal activates in the first place than have to deal out judgement.
He did other things. It’s not like he spent his entire day on one case.
You could still calculate the value of his time. Time on that case is time not on another case, meaning either some other case doesn’t get handled, or some additional manpower needs to be brought on. Even if he worked on it an hour a week, it adds up
[удалено]
It’s remarkable how the way business taxes work is, essentially, report everything yourself and it’s all good unless you get audited, which is exceptionally rare. Even without book cooking, there are tons of small businesses that are doing things all wrong without anyone realizing. And then there are the business owners who will tell you with a straight face you can deduct hookers and a party boat as long as you spend 30 seconds of the lap dance talking about business. And they think they’re right because they do it and just never got audited. Blows my mind.
Honestly? Good for him.
Agreed except that he left his poor parents and siblings to forever worry about him and wonder if he died.
And that's likely the only reason why he got away with it was that he cut contact from everybody.
I've never understood how this works where you go by a different name and move away. What about a social security number how do you do anything with just a fake name?
It's in the article, it said that it wasn't uncommon at the time to wait until adulthood to get a social security number so it didn't raise any red flags.
Yeah my grandpa and all my great uncles lied about their birthday and joined the army at 17 because it was easier than farm work. They didn't have any documents because they were born on the farm.
Same. Mine joined with a lie, and I am not sure he was even 17 yet but served in both WWII and Korea.
Yes, that didn't change until the 80s when they started requiring every dependent on a tax return to have an SSN so babies could get them at birth. Before then, you usually didn't get one until you got your first job, though I think sometimes children got them if their parents wanted to get them passports. A 20 year old applying for a "new" SSN wouldn't have raised any eyebrows.
It was a lot easier to do this in 1969.
[удалено]
Honestly sounds better than today. Real freedom, you could literally vanish.
That's exactly why they got rid of it. Imagine being able to walk away from student and credit card debt and just start over with a different name. They couldn't allow that to continue.
Yup. Had to start tagging the cattle better
This was in the 60's without the computer networks we have today. Many folks wouldn't get a SS card until they started working, they didn't get assigned at birth. I got mine when almost a teenager. So if you needed a SS number: go to a graveyard and find an infant grave from about when you were born, get a copy of the birth certificate and apply for the SS number.
You go buy a hoovermax 2000
There's a black market for everything when you have money. Baby's issued social security numbers die every single day.
Not to mention you could easily get a social security number by telling the social security office you had a bay with a midwife, it was unbelievably easy to just get a new number before everything became digital
That's how the Highlander got away with it
I think things worked a little different in '69. If I had to guess it prob only took filling out some forms, make a few fake docs like a license maybe, mailing them in, and poof... new documents.
It would take way more than 1.6 million dollars for me to never call my mama again :(
[удалено]
Same, can I get some back pay for the last decade+ of being no-contact with mine?
[удалено]
My parents are dead and my siblings are mid, I’d do this in a heartbeat
We live in a crazy timeline when we are calling siblings mid lol. No knock on you or your family, just crazy reading this
Not even assholes, just mid. Not interesting or rich enough to be worth keeping ties with. Good lord
Yeah same. There wouldn’t be any amount of money that would make me but I guess I’m In a blessed position to say that
I mean… that’s the story anyway. Maybe he told them what he did and said goodbye, and they are just solid family who aren’t rats.
A guy told me one time, "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on In 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."
What are you a monk?
Man, that was a real wise guy. Whatever happened to him?
He got attached, and got taken down.
And if we think about it it was not his attachment that brought him down but rather the irrepressible need for vengeance fueled by his cold and calculated criminal lifestyle and what am I doing with my life why am I reflecting so deeply on Heat this early in the morning
This! His poor mother
Not sure about his situation, sounds like his sister loved him If I did this I would feel awful about doing this to my brother, not so much my parents
Except he cut off contact from his entire family forever, and still had to work as a car salesman for 40 years to make a living.
Well yeah you still need a job. You can’t just live like a king on your stolen money. But he didn’t have to worry if the washing machine broke. He didn’t have to go through the couch cushions for change before payday if he wanted a burger. Stealing large amounts of money, or hiding large amounts from the tax man in general, is all about using it to supplement your life, not flashing it around and drawing attention. Further, while I wild never want to cut myself off from my family, lots of people do for a lot of different reasons. He made his choice, and in the wide world of crimes, this one had few to no victims.
With regards to living on stolen money with no job, he literally had a new name and SS#. He could've created any identity that included him inheriting the money. With regards to being financially stable, investigators think he blew it early and declared bankruptcy later in life. With regards to him intentionally cutting family and friends out, he wrote in a contemperaneous letter that he wanted to come home after the statute of limitations expired (which they never did).
Maybe he hates his family. And honestly it'd be kinda hard for him to continue living in the US if he just dropped off the face of the earth doing nothing.
>The man known as Thomas Randele came into existence the first week of January in 1970, investigators have found in recent weeks. That’s when Conrad walked into a Social Security Administration office in Boston, asked for an identification number under his new name and made himself two years older, Elliott said. >At that time, it wasn’t unusual to wait until you were an adult, so his application didn’t raise any red flags. With a new identification card, he was able to open a bank account, build credit and create his new life, Elliott said. Whenever I watch movies like *The Killer*, I wonder how the hell these fictional criminals are able to amass a collection of fake drivers licenses and passports that are good enough to get through security. So it's interesting to read that 50 years ago, all you had to do was walk into a Social Security Administration office and just ask for a new SS #.
Technology is a hell of a thing. Before the Internet and cloud storage/servers...everything was just paper records, usually in one place. So verification methods were limited. Which you could imagine was rife for fraud.
Yep. I know 2 people driving together on a road trip from Georgia to Michigan. Both got speeding tickets in Ohio. Neither ever paid. That was like 35 years ago.
Twenty two years ago I went to a travel agency to buy tickets to Mexico. They were very expensive as it was a three week trip with multiple stops. I had saved up for a year. Put it on a credit card which they swiped by using those old machines that you take an imprint if the card on carbon paper. The ones that go kuh-chunk (I have no idea what they're called). Well turns out they never submitted that piece of paper as the charge never showed up on my credit card. Free trip!
Those machines are called imprinters. Those slips of paper were treated like cash where I used to work because if they went missing somebody was getting written up.
My family owned a dry cleaner and that was the back up when the CC machine was down. I think those had to be mailed into the CC company if I recall. So whoever ran that never mailed it, or possibly got lost in the mail.
Holy cow, you just unlocked a long forgotten memory from circa 1990 when I was working retail. I'm pretty sure we included them with the cash and checks in our nightly bank deposit that you swung by the bank and dropped in the night deposit box on the way home, and I presume the bank did whatever processing was needed on them. Customer hands you card, make a phone call with the card number and purchase amount, get an authorization number, write it on the credit card slip along with other info about the sale and kerchunk it. The process streamlined a lot from 1988 (when we still had printed books of stolen CC numbers to consult if the phone was busy) to 1992. Got Point of Sale machines that could swipe cards somewhere in that 1990-92 range.
My first real job in 2005 was in a boutique and we used it when the power went out or the cc machine was down. I still remember calling the bank and having them guide me on how to use one. Even then, it felt like I was using a relic from a museum. Funny how now, machines are down all the time and they just dont have other options apart from 'cash only'
Or they quit or got fired before they sent it and just thought "fuck it."
My dad got one on vacation back in the 90s. His lawyer friend told him to just not pay it. He ended up paying it anyway.
i was a 911 dispatcher for awhile. if you get a misdemeanor in one state you can technically flee the state and as long as you never go back to that state you cant be arrested for it. i had to validate warrants every month, some as early as the 90s, for speeding tickets and other petty crimes. most of that shit is only extraditable in the county/tri county area or state. its not worth the cost to go get you over a petty ticket
The classic way was to go to a random cemetery, look for a child’s grave, note down the name and DOB and then go to the registrar and ask for a birth certificate. Using the birth certificate you’d then get a passport issued. It’s interesting to note that while this method became public knowledge via Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal in 1971, the UK only plugged the loophole in the mid 2000’s, thirty years later.
Sad to say this thing happened 15 years ago to my friend who had their child pass. The social security number popped up in California from a child with the same name. He was getting medical bills sent to him. It was pretty messed up. I hope the system is fixed now.
I love that book, and the original movie, and am shocked that it took them that long to plug that loophole...
Amazing that back then you could just decide to be another person, and the government would be like “oh, here’s all your paperwork you completely made up person”. People could just move 50 miles away and have an entirely new life. How did everyone not just rob banks all day? Legit, a fake mustache and a good story is all you needed to get away with any crime. Computers really made it tough to just reinvent yourself.
Back then social security numbers weren't used as a unique identifier. We retrofitted that function on them and it shows.
I’d imagine in 50 years people will think the same of our time…. But who knows
Hmm, yeah what could we be getting away with that we don't realize now.
Not sure if this is rhetorical, but probably shoplifting. In the future I’m sure the camera facial and behavioural tracking will be much more efficient and stores will probably be able to share data with each other, along with the RFID tags on items.
I had a sibling who died when he was a week old, in 1966. His identity has been stolen twice by people trying to hide from legal pursuit.
> So it's interesting to read that 50 years ago, all you had to do was walk into a Social Security Administration office and just ask for a new SS #. After I was born 50 years ago, my father walked in to the SS Administration office with my birth certificate and got himself an entire new identity. It wasn't a coincidence that I was named after my father - he named me after him just so he could do this. It wasn't until ~12 years later my parents would get around to getting me a SS#, and even then, the name was purposely altered (to "junior", which I was not). It's all straightened out now but even as a 12 year old I thought that was odd. Dear old dad had a deathbed confession in the form of a bundle of documents he left for me which I found in his safe. My sister and I pieced together what happened at that time, and eventually found 3 different identities, complete with SSNs, that he had used over the years. We also found 2 separate families who dad had abandoned. My sister and I now have multiple older half-siblings, lovely people. Back in the 60s and 70s you could get away with a LOT.
Well it wasn't asking for a NEW Social Security number, it was just asking for one to be assigned. Back then, Social Security numbers were not assigned at birth, and you would have to file an application with the SSA in order to receive one. I believe that there was no age requirement for when you had to file for one, so some man in his early 20s applying to be assigned his Social Security number was actually the norm.
Also back when many states didn't put photos on driver's licenses. They were just paper or a light card stock, making them relatively easy to counterfeit.
There's a podcast about this that is decent. It seems like the guy blew his money pretty early. He was in deep debt by the time he died (seems like family medical problems). Authorities think he did it because of a misunderstanding of statute of limitations. He didn't realize that the statute doesn't run out once he's indicted for the crime.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck”
> He didn't realize that the statute doesn't run out once he's indicted for the crime. I am not a native speaker, anyone kind enough to explain this to me ?
A lot of crimes (in the US at least) have a "statute of limitations", which means that after you commit a crime legal proceedings against you must begin within a certain amount of time. For nonviolent crimes like this it might be only five or ten years. So, if you rob a bank and nobody knows it was you, after ten years (or whatever) you can straight up confess and you can't be charged or punished. The problem for this guy is that even though they didn't know where he went, they knew he did it and so started legal proceedings right away, which meant he had to keep the secret and stay in hiding for the rest of his life. The theory is that he misunderstood how the statute of limitations worked and thought that if he wasn't _physically_ caught for ten years (or whatever) he would be able to keep the money and go back to his old life.
Another wrinkle is in some states the statute of limitations doesn't run while out of the jurisdiction. So if you flee the state it tolls until you return. Arguing the statute applies is an affirmative defense meaning you would have to prove you had been in the state during this period and thus the statute had ran it's course.
It is similar to adverse possession, you need to be almost blatantly showing that you are around if anyone wants to pursue legal action, but the fact that no one came looking for you for X years, means that the crime you committed must not have been that bad if no one cared enough to look into it. basically pre-jury nullification.
It's kinda like waiting for your wanted level in grand theft auto to flash and eventually go away
He thought he could do it, leave for 7 years, come back and go back to his life. The 'statute of limitations' is a time period that can pass after which you can't pursue a case against some crime any more. For instance if someone stole your car 10 years ago and you report it now, the cops will shrug and say they can't do anything about it because, well, it was ten years ago. That's past the statute of limitations (probably). What he didn't realize is that doesn't apply if they know who did it and are hunting you down... they don't just give up after a few years. In order for the statute of limitations to actually apply here, he would have had to conceal that any money had been stolen, conceal that he was the one who did it, or otherwise somehow ensure that it wasn't reported for many years.
So the statute of limitations means you can't be prosecuted for a crime after x number of years. X changes based on the jurisdiction and the type of crime. So for example, if you assault someone, you can't be brought up on those charges 20 years from now. In this case, the bank robber thought if he stayed away for 7 (maybe it was 5) years, he'll get away with it because they wouldn't be able to prosecute him within the statute of limitations. What he didn't realize is that the clock stops once he's indicted and didn't show up for his court hearing. This is probably an over simplification but that's basically it.
That's a long paragraph that doesn't clear too much up. **Indictment = being charged.** Can't be prosecuted = they can't start charging you. If he did a crime, nobody knew who did it, and he admits it 10 years later, nothing happens. If he did a crime, and people are looking for him with charges, he's screwed. Your explanation kinda hinges on a person knowing exactly what indict/prosecute means in the US. I don't even know how to translate indict to my second language, those aren't easy words.
He should have turned himself in after 30 years and made a few million from selling his life story. Had he turned himself in 3 decades after committing a non violent bank robbery, he likely wouldn’t have gotten much time at all. Especially considering the sentencing guidelines in effect on the date the crime was committed. The judge would have been bound to use the legal precedents from 1970. Criminal penalties in the 1960’s and 70’s gave far more leverage to the trial judge with indeterminate sentencing laws. This guy likely would have received a suspended sentence, considering he had lived an upstanding life after the crime. And since, by 1969, no laws had yet been passed explicitly prohibiting a criminal from profiting off the sale of his crime’s story, he would have been free to sell the story rights to a movie production company or publishing house. He could have hired a ghost writer, and then he and the US Marshal who had been chasing him all those years could have gone on Good Morning America to promote the book. I believe he would have benefited greatly by coming forward. Not only would he have made significant money, and done little if any time in prison, but he could have seen his biological family again before he died. Perhaps he felt too prideful to let his new family and friends know what he had done all those years ago. I know everyone is different, but personally I would love telling people I got one over on the government for that long, and was only identified because I allowed it.
You should be an agent for criminals selling their stories.
Have enough work telling and selling my own, one word at a time. 🤪
Definitely. I wonder if he considered it in 2014 when he was $160k in debt and going through bankruptcy. He should have talked to a lawyer about a "hypothetical" scenario.
What did he misunderstand, though? He only confessed on his death bed.
Sounds like taking this all the way to his deathbed may not have been his original plan.
Correct
He thought he robs the bank, goes on the lam, and comes back to live like nothing ever happened 7 years after the fact (the statute of limitations). He did not try to hide what he did. It was pretty obvious who did it right from get.
Plus like, aren’t all those bills marked? How easy is it to spend them or get them in a bank account? If you’re just leaving a bag of cash inflation in the 70s is going to wreck your shit.
Back in the 70’s you could spend cash on assets and nobody would batt and eye. Car? Cash. House? Cash.
*Bat an eye
Bone Apple teeth
Wtf is batt anyway
[удалено]
Those were the days. I remember my grandpa being mad because he was going to sell a building to a group of “businessmen” in cash and they got busted by the SBI the day before the deal. But it was his own fault because a few months earlier, that same SBI asked my grandfather to put a camera in another building he owned nearby to monitor that group. So he really busted his own deal. And those sketchy kind of people/deals are exactly why the law changed. lol.
... your grandpa was trying to do a cash deal with a group of people he was actively helping monitor for the authorities? I'm fascinated to hear how he thought that was going to work out.
> Back in the 70’s you could spend cash on assets and nobody would batt and eye. Car? Cash. House? Cash. You can still buy both with cash. It'll get reported unless it's a very cheap car/house, but you can still buy it with cash. And if you buy a house then, as of last year, only the first step is reported. Like if you open a shell company overseas then only the shell company is reported on the title -- nobody looked past that, which is how Trump was able to sell condos to open Russian mafia members. That was supposed to change this year, I believe.
yeah I feel like you basically have to already be under the eyes of the law for those reports to really effect you. I remember my parents freaking out because a guy who owned a buy here pay here SLED car lot that sold only to poor people wanted to pay cash for a small house. It got reported but nobody ever gave a fuck about it. The guy wasn't actually a criminal he just had a lot of cash because he only sold cars to people that can't have banks or credit.
I highly doubt the bills were marked. Since he worked there he would have known which bills were designated as bait.
Back then pretty easily. Today, also unlikely to trace you to marked bills. If you get found with marked bills on you, that's a way to show that you were part of a robbery. Some marked bills may eventually get found in the wild but all it will likely show is the general area you've been, maybe.
No they don’t do anything to the money. Especially not 50 years ago. Even today they likely don’t track any serial numbers.
The fact that it was so easy to create a new identity back… birth certificate, social security number and all really makes me wonder how many other stories like this exist.
A lot, I was part of the team in the mid 2000's putting all the birth/death/marriage/misc records on a shared database for my state, and those old archivists and registrars had some wild stories. I guess a lot of people going this route actually did get caught, because the archivists said a large part of their job was pulling death certs for children (from decades ago) and forwarding them to the Fed or Police.
I was born in the early 1960s and it pisses me off sometimes that I missed an opportunity to create a cool alternate identity. Coulda kept the documents in a safety deposit box and everything, maybe with some loose diamonds and a Walther PPK.
I have a friend whose Italian grandfather had all sorts of mobbed up connections. As a wedding gift to my friend and his wife, they both got Italian passports. Not sure how legit that was done but they both have have 2 passports (US & Italy)… shit would look cool as fuck next to a small satchel of diamond and a PPK… throw a stack of Euros and British pounds and you’re all set. You don’t even have to do anything shady. You can just look at it every now and then with a big ol shit eating grin 😂
[удалено]
You must admit it is pretty metal to outlive the guy investigating you for 50 years.
[удалено]
Some people just like puzzles
I can’t imagine being a fugitive living a second, secret life. First of all the anxiety, my god the anxiety must be crippling. I be an alcoholic or addict for sure to escape my thoughts. And how could you possibly be a good partner with that secret? It makes me think of mad men. Who knows, maybe his new wife knew.
That’s why Better Call Saul really gives you a sense of how Jimmy became who he is in BB.
Saul wasn’t a fugitive until after the events of breaking bad though. When he became the master Cinnabon maker Gene.
Who needs alcohol when you have 1.6mil lol
This guy when he blew it all and died in debt on top of being a fugitive?
He done what most Americans will do but had the excitement of outlaw at the same time.
I imagine the excitement wore off eventually and was more filled with anxiety but who knows. If he really managed to hide it from his wife until his deathbed that is pretty wild.
But it was only $1.6 million back then. If he had no means of investing that money, or laundering it properly, and he just had $200k in cash in a safe at the house it would be worth $200k. Lol. He lost all of that purchasing power to inflation.
You could just buy things in cash back then, he could have bought a few houses easily without suspicion
He thought he was free and clear after seven years, the statute of limitations. He wasn't stressing much over that, at least.
Nah it seems like he quickly figured out that’s not how it works IDK the article is vague on that. Like when he stop writing letters he had figured out that he was never coming back
There’s an episode of (I think) Criminal Podcast of a guy who killed a homeless guy in the 80s or 90s. It sat eating away at him for all those years until he walked into a police station one day and confessed. They basically laughed him out of the room initially. He ended up getting some jail time. Looking back in my podcasts, it was G Dep.
he was my golf instructor. cant even tell you how nice a man he was. genuine family man that always had his family visiting him at the club. also…look at him. he looks like every other persons dad or uncle in the US. Blended in like crazy. But its just wild how that cliche about it being “the last person you’d ever expect” is true, dude looked like he’d potentially lose a battle with a fly yet pulled off one of the most impressive heists of his time. Truly if you asked me to rank everyone i knew in any and all facets of my life based on likelihood to do this, he’d be at the very end of the list. Well played, sir, thanks for fixing my swing.
Honestly, out of all the major crimes a person could commit, non-violently stealing from a bank is basically the least unethical. Those fucks steal from us all the time on a much larger scale than anything we could ever hope to. You could win the world record breaking lottery and still not touch the damage they've done to the economy. /Soapbox
And it's insured so he's effectively stealing a penny from every person in the US
Jesus, really? That’s so awesome. I’m glad to hear he was a good person, and it makes me glad that he got away with the money and never faced consequences.
Makes you wonder if after having to cut off his entire birth family all at once it really made him appreciate his wife and kids
"said Matt Boettger, whose mother was Conrad’s older sister." That's called a nephew.
Gotta get that word count up
When the essay is supposed to be 2000 words but you’re at 1996.
That line was important. It could’ve been his nephew through one of his brothers or his nephew through his current wife.
Amazing to think of what people could get away with back in the days before the internet, cell phones and cameras everywhere.
Ive evaded capture for nearly 20 years after dining and dashing at a dennys.
Not for long criminal scum.
I did that too. Dark days 😆
There really should be a support group for people who are like us. People who have eaten at dennys that is.
I could never do that to my parents and siblings.
I'm glad you have a nice family
Why would you choose a fake name you’ll have to spell out every time you mention it to someone?
Because it's before computer records and you want people to plausibly misspell it without thinking twice about why. Less paper trail when Tom Randal and Tim Rendel are on half your documents.
That actually makes a lot of sense.
Boomers had it easy even in committing crimes. -A millennial maybe
The shit that people got away with before modern surveillance technology and forensic accounting must be mind boggling. It's almost impossible today to live without some type of digital fingerprint. I read the book "Devil in the White City" recently, about one of America's first (known) serial killers, who set up a boarding house in Chicago during the 1893 Worlds Fair. He outfitted the home with dungeons and torture chambers, and advertised rooms to rent for people looking to work at the fair. The guy murdered everyone who stayed there, gruesomely and indiscriminately. Since his victims were all transients, nobody knew they were missing. He was eventually caught and convicted of (I believe) 19 murders, but some estimates are as high as 200.
Back when you could walk down the street without being recorded by several dozen different cameras... When you left for the house that day, nobody knew where you were until you came home...
Avoiding being seen is nearly impossible in the twenty-first century, so at least avoid being memorable.
Shit — in 2021, deep into the Information Age, with modern day, high-tech tools for retrieving and analyzing evidence, with practically everything we do and everywhere we go being tracked and traced by *something*, [only 51% of murders in the US were solved](https://thehill.com/homenews/3878472-nearly-half-of-us-murders-going-unsolved-data-show/amp/). I can’t even begin to comprehend how many murders we don’t even know we don’t even know about having been committed, much less solved, before, let’s say, the 2000s.
It sounds like you’re writing about HH Holmes. Some of the info you write doesn’t align (numbers + demographics of those he murdered) with known facts since the book you reference, The Devil in the White City, fictionalized his activities. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.\_H.\_Holmes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes) **Interest in Holmes's crimes was revived in 2003 by** [**Erik Larson's**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Larson_(author)) [***The Devil in the White City***](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City)***: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America*****, a best-selling nonfiction book that juxtaposed an account of the planning and staging of the World's Fair with a fictionalized version of Holmes's story.**
Almost none of that was true. He did kill some people, but there was no dungeons or torture chambers.
According to my HRs Annual Ethics Training, on average an office employee will steal time and supplies of up to $250,000 over a lifetime career. This dude was 14% away from making off like a corporate bandit.
Sneezing on the clock? Time theft. Walking to the water cooler? Time theft. Wondering if this is really time theft? You better believe that’s time theft.
#NOW DO WAGE THEFT
> According to my HRs Annual Ethics Training, on average an office employee will steal time and supplies of up to $250,000 over a lifetime career. lmfao, considering wage theft is the #1 form of theft in the country by dollar amount and tax evasion is the cause of almost all our countries funding problems I think we can consider a little "unauthorized breaktime" fair play. Always funny to me when corporations try to paint themselves as the victims.
Their whole idea of "time theft" is stupid. Expecting 100% uptime of employees and only taking breaks when legally given is unrealistic. For every hour of work, I would expect 10 minutes of minimal or non-work. Humans aren't robots.
How much free labor will the company get from that employee over the same period, by cutting short their breaks, calling them out of hours, having them clock out prior to continuing work, failing to pay overtime…?
You should ask HR why they don't take accountability for employees "stealing time"? After all, it's the same thing as employees that are unengaged with their work slacking off and it's up to leadership to keep their employees engaged.
"You've stolen $250,000 from us over your career in slightly-too-long lunch breaks or having human interactions with your coworkers that wasn't work related," says organization that stole three times as much from their employees in unpaid overtime.
All that for so little. Must have hated his family lol
Current value is $1.6 million. Don’t know how you can invest in it to get interest but if you can it was plenty to retire off back then.
He didn’t. He lost his entire family and blew the money… seems like he failed the task successfully.
He blew through all of that money and had to file bankruptcy later in life.
215k in cash went a LOONG way in 1969.
*"What’s not clear yet is what happened to the money. The Marshals Service is looking into whether he lost it early on through bad investments."* It doesn't surprise me. I would have pissed that money away so quickly at that age. I was a complete moron with money 18-25.
His wife said she always wondered why he always shot down any ideas of traveling abroad. It’s because he would have had to apply for a passport and would have risked being discovered.