Change is very hard
You may remember tht back in April this year we did a story about six guys that “got lucky” robbing a parked tractor trailer. They got $234,500 as the culmination of a spree of tractor-trailer robberies in which the crew stole frozen crab legs, shrimp, beer and liquor from trucks moving through the Philadelphia, prosecutors say. Then thieves made off with roughly 2 million dimes weighing more than a ton. The coin caper left thousands of dimes scattered across the roadway, shimmering in the sun as the thieves made their escape. Now, four men are facing charges including conspiracy, robbery and theft of government money that could send them to prison for decades. They allegedly hauled the drivers out of their trucks — sometimes by force — before opening the back of the trailers with bolt cutters. The men often came equipped with a white box truck to transport the cargo they stole and then would later sell the goods over the internet, according to the seven-count indictment. In March, prosecutors say, they stole 60 cases of Jose Cuervo off a truck. Two weeks before the dime robbery, the gang stole six refrigerators off another trailer, pulling the driver from the vehicle and forcing him to lie under their white box truck while they made off with his cargo. Eight days later, prosecutors said, Byrd attempted to sell off the booty from one heist, sending messages to a number of people announcing that he had stolen frozen shrimp to sell.
The crew stumbled across an unmarked tractor-trailer parked in the Walmart parking lot at the Philadelphia Mills mall, they had no idea of the cargo they’d find inside: Surveillance video shows six men, dressed in gray hoodies and armed with bolt cutters, approaching the truck in the middle of the night and breaking the lock that protected the goods inside. Once the thieves discovered that the pallets of coins would be too heavy to carry, they split them open, began loading them into smaller bags and loading them into a waiting truck, Hundreds of thousands of dimes were spilled across the parking lot in the process. And as the thieves made their escape, footage shows them pausing to steal recycling bins from nearby houses — presumably to help later unload their haul.
In the weeks after the theft, the others allegedly converted thousands of dollars of dimes into cash at Coinstar machines in Maryland or by depositing them in at least four different banks in suburban Philadelphia. Still, the amount of converted coins specifically detailed in the indictment — adding up to only a couple thousand dollars — is only a fraction of the more than $200,000 total authorities say the group stole. What happened to the rest? “If for some reason you have a lot of dimes at home,” Philadelphia police say, “This is probably not the time to cash them in.”
Small change is good
There was a fortunate lady who had lost her purse and had it returned to her by a young man. She examined the contents and remarked, “this is strange, I had a $100 bill in the purse when I lost it and now there 5 -$20 bills in here.” “That’s right Mam, the last time I returned a lost purse the lady did not have change for the reward.”
My cousin and I pour two buckets of coins into the CoinStar counting machine and it kicks out the rejects into a little slot. My cousin starts sending them back through the machine to try to get them accepted.
I look over and say, “Come on, now you’re just nickel and diming it.”
The clerk chuckles. My cousin rolls her eyes and says, “you’re not funny.”
I said, “That’s just your two cents.”
When receiving payment in gold coins, pirates used to verify their purity by biting into them.
In other words, criminals only accepting payment in bit coins goes long way back.
I asked the cashier “Could you give me small change instead of bills? I need money for the bus.“
She said, “That’s fare.”
October 24th Birthdays
1995 – Krystal Jung , 1990 – Shenae Grimes, 1961 – Mary Bono, 1984 – Adrienne Bailon
1932 – Steven Covey, 1986 – Drake, 1969 – Brett Favre, 1997 – Jaylen Brown