A group of men robbed a St Pancras telecommunications firm on Thursday evening by dressing up as policemen, in a plot bearing a touch of Alanis Morissette about it.
The thieves were let into the building by one of the firm’s employees, after claiming to be investigating reports of people on the roof. Once inside, they ditched their pretensions to law and order and tied up five members of staff. They then made off with “what is believed to be valuable computer hardware”.
Whilst the suspects now leave themselves open to charges of robbery with cheekiness, they can’t be accused of originality: in 1990 thieves dressed up as policemen in order to swipe thirteen works of art (including a Vermeer and three Rembrandts) from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
If the baddies are caught, will they plead satire as a defence? “Well m’lud, our goal was to undermine the notion of moral truth by committing a robbery ironically dressed as the very forces meant to protect the public from thieves.” Which the prosecution would certainly counter by pointing out that’s not actually irony, just cynicism.
Image taken from Amen-Ra's Flickr photostream.
