Advice for young criminals

I always wanted to be a bank robber. That was my big ambition. My little ambition was to be a prison escapee; but only if I couldn’t make it as a bank robber.

Of course, my birthmark posed a problem. See, I have a birthmark on my face that makes it look like I am wearing a stocking over my head. You might think this would make it easier to rob banks, but it’s not. Once the police find out there’s a guy who looks like he has a stocking over his face, every time anyone robs a bank, they’re knocking on your door. ‘Well, you match the description that every eyewitness gave us.’

This makes it hard for me to just go down the shops and get some milk. In fact, my first few robberies were completely by accident. I just walked up to the counter with my birthmark all inflamed and the shopkeeper threw the till at me, screaming ‘Don’t shoot me!’ I suppose it was also because I happened to be holding a toy pistol that I had planned to buy for my cousin’s 10th birthday. I thought about correcting the mistake but, hey, free stuff. Free stuff is the number one motivator for robbers like myself.

This brings me to my first piece of advice for the budding crim: turn negatives into positives. Now, if you’re a scientist this should be fairly easy, but for the rest of you, you’re gonna have to work at it. So if you’ve got a bad leg, use that to play on people’s sympathies. Like ‘Hey man, come on, I’ve got this bad leg. Why don’t you, like, give me all your money?’ If your leg is OK, but hurts a bit from time to time, practice walking with a limp. Remember: when people feel sorry for you, you don’t have to say sorry.

My second piece of advice is also related to legs: walk the walk. When I’ve just robbed a joint, I’m always careful not to give my crime away by the way I walk. That’s the first mistake most criminals make. They think they’ve got away with a crime so they strut. That’s just asking for trouble. All of a sudden you’ve got guys coming up to you saying, ‘Hey, you look like you just robbed a bank. Could you spot me $20?’. I had an uncle whose tax evasion was discovered in the same way.

By the way, you know that saying ‘laughing all the way to the bank’? Well, in real life, it’s the exact opposite. You’ll actually be laughing all the way from the bank, preferably while running.
However, this rule is void if you have a particularly distinctive laugh. Then it’s ‘being silent all the way from the bank’.

This brings us to the third and final lesson: don’t be fooled by common sayings.

Remember that chestnut ‘Crime doesn’t pay’? If you have any kind of aptitude for bank robbing, you should be able to see right through this. Crime doesn’t pay? Really? Oh, then I guess I must have made all this cash money by working for a living! Yeah right. Pull the other one, science face.

And I can’t tell you the number of new thieves that get tricked by that old ‘If you do the crime, you do the time’ saying. The thing they forget is, that only applies if you get caught. It’s imperative that you don’t get caught. In fact, this is so important should have its own heading.

Lesson number 4: Don’t Get Caught.

Now, I know I said the third lesson was the final one, but that was just an illustration of lesson number 5: never trust a criminal.

So, that’s it. Five pieces of advice from an expert criminal. I know that might sound like not much, but who ever said life was meant to be fair? It wasn’t me, and if it was, see lesson number 5.

Happy thieving!