I'm no criminal genius or anything but as a monday morning quarterback here i feel like he got too many people involved and screwed himself. Fencing the gold you can't do much about I guess but if you're able to just do it and gtfo. Don't go around giving people money to go on a road trip to LA with you. Don't give your shady-ass girlfriend the money to hold onto. Take it with you and ditch the car on the border and walk across to Mexico. And what's he telling everyone in ecuador he stole $1.6m in gold for anyway? Sounds like the guy's lucky he got caught and never received the money.
2) I have no scientific evidence for this but it feels humans want to confess and unless death find them first everyone will confess every crime they have done. It could be through a joke, or to a complete stranger or some other way.
What's the name for this logical fallacy? You think people want to confess because you know people who have. You don't know of many who got away with a crime and didn't confess.
A friend in law school once told me that in the US a deathbed confession is treated as an exception to normal heresay rules, because (i guess ) we think someone dying has no reason to live. Meanwhile in some other countries (india?) deathbed statements are considered less reliable, because the person knows they won't have to face any consequences for lying.
How likely would it be that you could get that quantity over the border going South? Is luggage checked?
Assuming they could identify him from camera footage, he'd have limited options to keep an existing car or buy a car and stay in the US? It'd be a risk even buying a car in a friend's name.
Best bet might be to forgo a car, rent somewhere remote and informally with cash, and sit tight for a while.
"How likely would it be that you could get that quantity over the border going South? Is luggage checked?"
I can only speak from personal experience, but ...
As someone who has driven into, and through, Mexico many, many times (one trip was Colorado to El Salvador and back) I can tell you that it's all smiles and waves and thumbs up as long as you are driving south.
As long as you're driving south, nobody cares what you're doing or what's up or where you're going or who you are.
The moment you turn around and point north everyone cares.
I assumed as much. I suppose he would've wanted to have done it quickly before his photo was out there. Maybe stash half and risk carrying the other half.
Or, as I said, get to a more remote area, make friends, rent a room cheap, befriend the landlord and try to borrow their car for cash, and then slowly develop a lifestyle where you can make careful use of the money without divulging your identity too much.
I think it depends on the border crossing. At San Ysidro you can walk across and probably not get checked. I've walked across into mexico there a number of times (visa runs for TN) and never been checked, not even my passport. Granted I didn't have a bag with me. They tend to have a couple of guards who seem to check people occasionally, but I suspect if you were to walk across with a backpack behind a group of old ladies with luggage you'd probably be ok.
I drove over the border, perhaps Brownsville? I forget the name, but one of the last eastern border crossings.
Drove over in a camper van with European plates, didn't even realise had left the US until got to the Mexican side and went and sorted papers for the vehicle. No search, no check, just passports
If you arrive to México in a plane you can expect random searches. I get my luggage opened around 1 in 10 times. They also use x-ray for screening luggage on arrival.
If you are driving or walking sometimes you just say hello and that's about it. But I also have gotten my car searched, specially if crossing by myself.
It is a bit more relaxed on Christmas time, when a lot of people cross the border.
The Mexicans would've stopped him. That's why he didn't take the money with him. In his case he would've need to do a reverse coyote which I am going to guess is basically impossible with $1.2m. A boat to Cuba maybe with a flight but otherwise impossible. His best chance outside of friends or family was bitcoin.
I would guess that, however one goes about converting a million dollars of physical cash into bitcoin, it has just as many downsides as his other options.
Might be a good thing for bitcoin (heh) if that surprises you. That was pretty much it's public face for a long time thanks to the Silk Road and various mainstream pieces about money laundering.
Actually it doesn't surprise me that much. Parents asked when bitcoin was around 10k on the way up if they should invest. I told them there will probably be value for a while because it is a money laundering Mecca, but definitely risky. For a while (up to 19k+) I thought I might have burned significant tech trust.
Bitcoin (or more specifically, the purchasing power thereof, which is what matters when you are using it as a store if value) gets arbitrarily confiscated too, except it's called "whales dumping" instead of "government seizure". Though I suppose if he stole the money then the risk of a 50% haircut thanks to bring on the wrong side of anonymous pumpers taking profits is no big deal.
I think the point is that your life doesn't reach the point where you steal $1m worth of gold without a few ripples of insanity appearing here or there. It appears it takes a confluence of chaos for such a heist to manifest.
Here is the simple explanation: He is dump/stupid.
You wonder why the guy would not handle himself better? Well, if he was smart, then he would never think of it. He has access to the US and countless opportunities. He'd have been probably better off financially.
And he has access to NYC, he doesn't need a girlfriend.
If he thought that way then he wouldn’t be a thief in the first place, or he’d be a thief in a suit. At the very least he’d commit crimes with a less risky profile and greater potential rewards.
When I travelled through South America quite extensively I found the Ecquadorians were much more brazen about theft than people in some other countries. The moment I wasnt looking at a bag when on a bus they were going through it. I had an old laptop stolen while asleep even though the bag was right at my feet - think they must have come under the chair somehow - though they missed the cash in there. The next time I was on a bus I put my backpack above my head - the only thing in it was some spare batteries for the laptop - I just wanted to see if it would happen on this bus too - and sure enough it did - I could see them trying to be sly about it - but I just let them have those since they werent any good to me now anyway.
Depends where you go, and how you act. In the Amazon part of the country and in Galapagos, it's hard to find crime, but in Guayaquil, it's sometimes unavoidable.
Many Ecuadorian people are comfortable about stealing from Americans, or ripping them off, and there's a sense of "these Americans won't miss it." Partly, this idea is imposed by the government, which charges different prices for some services (including airfare) to Europeans, Canadians and Americans. I've encountered (and sometimes lost money to) attempted ripoffs by taxi drivers, laundry services, restaurants, and even a surgeon.
Yet I haven't had much stuff stolen from me in Ecuador, and in fact a local acquaintance felt so bad to see me lose the only item that was stolen, she bought me a replacement.
> and there's a sense of "these Americans won't miss it."
To be fair, they’re probably right. Besides, if you’re traveling in Central America with any more than the bare necessities, you deserve to get robbed. At least you should assume all your belongings could be taken from you at any time.
TIL traveling within a huge multicultural region of the world with anything more than a single change of clothes and a toothbrush means I deserve to get robbed.
Typically when someone says you "deserve" such a thing, they mean "you will learn a hard lesson." They aren't impugning your morals, but your judgment.
If you view it as flaunting first-world wealth while you’re exploiting a developing nation for its tourism, then you might make the argument that you morally deserve to get robbed.
If you believe people in any circumstance morally deserve to have their property stolen by threat of bodily harm (or even without) you're a pretty sad excuse for a human being.
I guess it would be better if tourism didn't exist and rural Mexico continued being cripplingly poor?
Having just been to Ecuador, and ridden my share of buses, I saw nothing of the kind. The other bus riders just seemed to be people who were also hot, crowded, and wanting to reach their destinations. Then again, I kept my backpack on my lap, between my legs, or in the luggage compartment under the bus, just like I would anywhere.
It's funny how the reporters call this "the crime of a lifetime" when billion-dollar crimes run rampant in Wall Street and crypto (Enron, Bitconnect, etc.).
I suppose a few million dollars is enough to guarantee a lifetime of middle-class living. Maybe that's what they meant.
At conservative withdrawal rates, $1.6 million is $64k a year without ever touching the principal. Definitely a solid middle-class life, and even more so in Ecuador. And that's assuming you want to die with $1.6 million in the bank. Pulling out $100k a year at the same return rates will still last you 25 years.
But this all assumes you can invest it. If you've got $1.6 million in gold bricks and the police in the country all these investment figures are based off of know you have it, you're probably not going to be able to do that.
Julio Nivelo was a convicted felon prior to this crime and deported four times. Four times! Obviously something is broken. Perhaps improving border security isn't such a bad idea?
You hear stories like this all the time, it’s absurd. He was able to enter subsequent times because he used other people’s passports. Wtf?? Why is CBP taking pictures of our face, scans of our retinas, and fingerprints every time we cross the border, if they can’t even use that data to identify a felon coming into the country under a different name??
Sometimes I’m concerned about dragnet surveillance and the police state, but then I realize how incompetent the government is at doing its job. Honestly that might be the scarier part than the surveillance...
If you behave lawful, you'll create one single tracking history for everything tied to your real life person. If you don't, you apparently can get away with stuff like that AND on top of that you won't create a single, coherent stream of data for big brother.
That’s a good point. Surveillance is more likely to result in false positive identification of law abiding citizens than of criminals, simply due to higher availability of data.
Is it the same? Someone you know and trust, is different to him stealing from someone he has no idea about, and is likely a rich company or corporation.
Not a lawyer here but would that fall under "profiting from the proceeds of crime"?
This article from Australia suggests it's illegal in that country, I wonder if it's the same in the US.
>Orders may also be made to seize the proceeds of the commercial exploitation of a person’s notoriety from criminal offending, literary or otherwise (but often described as “literary proceeds”).
I believe he was taken to court by the father of Ron Goldman, who won rights to the book. I'm not too familiar with the circumstances arouns the case, though, so this doesn't necessarily refute the idea that OJ could potentially have profited.
My understanding was that Goldman initially won a lien on the profits from the book, since Simpson owed Goldman money from the civil suit, and later the Goldman's where handed the book rights by the bankruptcy courts, when OJ failed to pay his debts.
So in theory OJ could have profited if he didn't also, independently, owe the Goldman's a lot of money.
He had no strategy. Weirdly. Because he said he told himself he'd have a chance at one of those buckets some day. In which case I'd have expected he'd have thought of an exit. Some kind of plan to leave the country, maybe even a contingency, in case he ever struck it rich.
Surely, it you choose a life of crime, you'd do that anyway? Kind of a burn the bridges get out fast plan, for when things go wrong. Which they will, eventually.
I can't believe this guy has the nuts to act like he deserves a lick of sympathy. Nuts. I don't know what's worse, him acting that way or a news channel glorifying his actions. What a strange world we live in.
I know we live in a world where this guy is going to make a better, more clickable story than somebody finding and returning somebody's purse but where do we draw the line. I guess if it weren't such a large quantity of gold plus being stolen from an armored vehicle in broad daylight it might have been seen as more of a terrible crime. As it stands it's almost more laughable that he was able to pull it off than anything. The dude was such an idiotic thief after he actually got away with the goods that there is a story in that itself.
I'm not arguing that his actions should necessarily be glorified, but I'm completely unsurprised that they were, and I think there are some very clear reasons why (beyond just saying it'll get clicks):
- First, I'm sure many people view it as a "robbing the rich" type situation, and it was completely non-violent. Those gold bars certainly were not from some small business owner making his nightly deposits. With economic disparity such as it is these days, I'm not surprised at all that people would find that amusing and root for the criminal in this case. (Of course, the problem with such "robbing the rich" situations is that the rich often recoup their losses at the expense of the not-rich. But many people either don't know or don't think about that when they see a "rob the rich" situation.)
- Also, it was a pretty brazen broad daylight robbery itself, due to the weight of the gold, and the video of it was pretty amusing to watch, with all the effort and breaks needed.
- Finally, this story is from an local NYC news channel, and NYC is the US metro area with the most Ecuadorians, by a long shot. That is not to say that Ecuadorians should or do necessarily feel pride when following this story, but it's at least a local (to a subset of NYC) interest piece because of his nationality.
Calling B.S. on his story that his fiance stole all the cash that he exchanged the gold for.
Also, how come he wasn't arrested? The story starts with "he was in jail and now out". How? The crime happened in 2016 and it's less than 2 years later now.
Did you read the article? He was arrested in Ecuador, sentenced to a year in prison, and was out after 9 months for good behavior. There's no extradition treaty between Ecuador and the U.S., so he wasn't sent back to the United States (where he had a criminal record and the sentence which would have been much higher).
