Straightforward Thieves Now Just Cutting Holes In Walls and Going Right In
Photo courtesy of DNAinfo/Nigel Chiwaya
Just a week after the bizarre story that a possible “hole in the wall gang” broke into a Bensonhurst Best Buy and stole $74,000 worth of merchandise simply by cutting, er, a hole in the wall, there are now reports that thieves attempted to gain access to the safe of an Inwood supermarket by tunneling a hole to the store’s interior (they got in, but fled after the alarms went off). Sources say the first case may be related to a break-in at a Bay Parkway P.C. Richards, and our own Henry Stewart recalls, “When I worked at Blockbuster [in Bay Ridge], some thieves once broke into the accounting agency next door and knocked down a wall we shared. Walked right in and stole mad shit, then walked right out the hole.” Meaning, then, that we can confidently call this a New Crime Trend. The Knockout Game was getting pretty tired, anyway.
In the latest case, police suspect that the thieves spent “at least a week” tunneling through the cement and brick at night, given that none of the supermarket’s employees heard anything suspicious during the day. It’s fairly impressive, in its own specific way. Maybe unnecessarily elaborate, if the end game—setting off an alarm and running away— is exactly the same as just throwing a rock through the front window, but then, hole-in-the-wall gangs don’t show up to our offices and tell us how to do our jobs. We trust there’s a reason for all this.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.
