One month ago, we wrote to you about a heist. This was the heist at the Flying J truck stop in Grapevine, California where thieves made off with millions of dollars in jewelry from the trailer of a Brink’s truck. An exhilarating heist, though that should be something we can say of any good heist.
We’ve got more news.
The thing getting the headlines here is that Brink’s is saying one of its drivers was asleep in the truck at the time of the steal (“per Department of Transportation regulations,” says Brink’s), and that’s worthy of said headlines. First, it’s a departure from the original reporting on the subject, but second, it gives us more of a picture of the scene: One driver’s sleeping in the sleeping berth. The other driver’s walking into the store to get food (for 27 minutes, implying maybe a little midnight meal, maybe a trip to the bathroom, maybe a little TikTok binge sesh—not just, you know, buying Funyuns and a Mountain Dew). The thieves roll up. Quietly enough (how quiet that is, we don’t know, it’s unclear), they break the lock, steal the jewels, and disappear into the California night.
Also exciting, though, is that we’ve got a big dispute over the value of the jewels! As you’d hope. For millennia, humans have fought and died over the market rate for things with no intrinsic value save that derived by their beauty and their scarcity. Continuing this practice is one of the greatest signs of respect we can show our ancestors, and both Brink’s and the jewelers are playing their role perfectly.
Brink’s was the one who started the lawsuits, filing one three weeks ago (as first reported yesterday by the Los Angeles Times) asking a New York court to cap how much they have to pay out to the jewelers whose jewels they lost to thieves. I’m not a lawyer, but basically, they seem to have said, We’re going to get sued. So we’re proactively suing in a court we think will be favorable and asking it to say we can just go by the contract we and the jewelers signed where these jewelers said their goods were worth $8.7 million. On Monday, though, the jewelers sued back, in Los Angeles County Court, saying a Brink’s representative told them to “understate their value on the Pickup Manifests in order to save money, because the cost of shipping would be too expensive if they declared the full value of their goods.” (Again: I’m not a lawyer, and to those asking whether this is a test to see if my lawyer friends are reading my blog posts, the answer is no and yes.)
All of this comes back to the basic concept of insurance, at least in a true “insurance” approach and not one where the “insurer” instead becomes an intermediary with thorough control of a given market, eliminating said market’s ability to set fair prices and amping up bubbles/grift/terrifying situations for diabetics facing unemployment. With real insurance, you pay into a pool a rate which is a percentage of the value you’d need to receive in the event of calamity, a percentage slightly higher than the probability of said calamity occurring (this is how insurers get their cut—if you pay nine percent and the probability is eight percent, they keep that extra percentage point, over the long run). Should said calamity occur, you get the agreed-upon amount back, and it comes out of the pool you paid into. If the probabilities (and therefore rates) are determined correctly by the insurance provider, everything works great and the insurance provider takes their cut and jewelers whose livelihoods just walked out the back of a Brink’s truck while the driver sat on the pot are put through tremendous stress but receive the value for which their livelihoods were insured. If the probabilities (and therefore rates) are determined incorrectly, or if Brink’s has employees saying, “Hey, what are the odds?” to customers, who in turn say, “You know what, yeah,” and take on greater risk, well, bad things can happen. And a bad thing happened here. If the allegation against the Brink’s employee is true, the employee and the customers broke the insurance system. Not enough money was going into the pool to pay out the true value of the goods, because the money going in wasn’t stated to be enough to pay out the true value. It was enough to pay out $8.7 million (we’re assuming here that the probabilities were correctly estimated, and we should also note that we don’t know if this is Brink’s dealing with an insurer or the customers dealing with the insurer provided to them by Brink’s, though we think it’s the former). It isn’t purely a question of insurance—Brink’s has a lot of control over the probability of theft—but it boils back to that (I don’t think Brink’s is providing this insurance. I’m guessing Brink’s is buying business insurance the rates of which are determined by the insurer’s estimate of the probability of theft, given Brink’s history and advances in the heist industry and when the last movie in the Ocean’s franchise came out.)
There is, lastly, a good plot twist that could happen from here. I’m not saying this happened. This is speculation. But if I were writing this movie, the thieves would be the jewelers themselves. “Insurance fraud” doesn’t sound glamorous, but it’s an exhilarating crime! You know how many crimes have happened because of insurance? And I’m not just talking about crimes against humanity, like (insert whichever recent American presidential election makes you more likely to continue reading this blog). I’m talking one jeweler saying to his pals, “You know what that Brink’s employee just said? He said they can lower their shipping cost if we underestimate the value of our jewels. I say we do it, then try to steal the jewels. Worst case, we follow them and find out stealing it isn’t going to be doable. Second-worst case, we steal the jewels and get paid out the underestimated value. Best case, we get the jewels, we get the payout, and we get a higher payout after courts say Brink’s can’t go around telling us to underestimate the value.” This would also explain why the initial reporting stressed how the thieves were probably very familiar with the contents of the truck, which felt like a real-life Chekhovian gun. I was told once that narrative is an intrinsic part of how the human brain processes the concept of time.
Post Script: Ok so really the twist would be that the jewelers were trying to be the thieves themselves but the truckers beat them to it, stealing their own goods and transferring them to a third henchman. This is going to lead to me writing a screenplay.
