Not Sutton’s Heist

“Because that’s where the money is” is an apocryphal quote attributed to Willie Sutton after he was allegedly asked why he robs banks.  He went on to deny saying it but also believes that would have been his answer had the question actually been posed.  Since his time as a bank robber, banking has changed a lot.  Just recently I discovered that the branch I opened my first account at has been closed in the neighborhood I grew up in and one of the last branches I worked at in Chino Hills has suffered the same fate.

The globe has become much more cashless than in the 1930s when Sutton was sticking up tellers or even in the late 1990s when I was a teller.  In short, banks have become less lucrative to rob.  Robbers are changing the establishments they hit.  Take the heist at the Louvre in Paris, the most visited museum in the world.  According to this article from Bloomberg.com, European museum thefts targeting gold and jewelry are on the rise.  For instance, the Paris Natural History Museum was the target of a nearly $700,000 theft, just weeks before the Louvre incident.  It’s not just the French being victimized: in January thieves stole artifacts from the Drents Museum in the Netherlands. 

In a world where physical cash is increasingly obsolete and digital transactions dominate, the targets of theft have evolved back to an analogue replacement.  Museums, with their irreplaceable artifacts and precious metals, may increasingly attract the kind of attention once reserved for bank vaults.  Willie Sutton’s logic, however apocryphal, still applies: thieves go where the value is.  As institutions like banks fade from the physical landscape, replaced by apps and algorithms, the allure of tangible treasures in public spaces grows.