Criminals, real and celluloid, don’t seem to take off holidays. In real life, holidays provide great cover for crime; and in movies, they add an additional layer to the story. Whatever the reason, crime and holidays often go together.
Easter seems to be particularly popular among real-life criminals. Over 2015’s Easter weekend, a gang of elderly criminals (nicknamed “The Over-the-Hill Mob”) stole millions in diamonds from London’s Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company. In the Easter Sunday Heist of 2024, a gang grabbed $20 million from the GardaWorld facility in suburban Los Angeles.
But it’s not just Easter; Valentine’s Day is also popular.
In 1979, an unknown thief nabbed a 20-pound marble head of Hermes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Crooks spent two years preparing before spending Valentine’s Day, 2003, robbing the Antwerp Diamond Center of an estimated $100 million. (We can only assume criminals pick Valentine’s Day because they were single and had no other plans, or felt their partners would prefer bearer bonds over chocolates and roses.)
Meanwhile, the heist in Die Hard (1988) takes place on Christmas Eve. (We are not delving into whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie but it absolutely takes place the night before Christmas.) In Entrapment (1999), Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones plan their heist for New Year’s Eve. And the Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon characters disguise themselves in Some Like It Hot (1959) because they witnessed the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
For Stealing Time, our time-travel novel primarily set in 1980 New York City, we knew we needed a heist and decided that the target would be the fictional Desert Sun, a huge yellow diamond that was the centerpiece of a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. The robbery and the gang behind it were inspired by Jack “Murph the Surf” Murphy and his crew who, on October 29th 1964, actually broke into the museum and made front-page headlines around the world for the theft of the Star of India and other gems.
We moved the heist in our book to 1980 but needed to figure out the day to set the crime. A random day in October that’s not Halloween seemed—well, random and therefore blah. We decided against Halloween—its spooky associations would be a distraction. And we didn’t want to set it on Christmas Eve because that had already been done.
We were looking to balance several variables. We wanted a holiday that wasn’t featured too often in movies, one that real-life criminals had picked but not so often that the holiday or a particular crime would overshadow what we were doing.
That’s how we landed on St. Patrick’s Day. Looking back a hundred years, we found few significant real-life crimes from March 17.
1. The St. Patrick’s Day Massacre, Chicago, March 16, 1926. Nearly three years before the more-famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre that may have been masterminded by Alphonse “Scarface” Capone, another Alphonse “Scarface”—in this case named Lambert—wiped out Jean Arnaud’s rival gang at a St. Patrick’s Day party hosted by Arnaud’s sister-in-law.
2. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist, Boston, March 18, 1990. In the biggest art heists in modern history, thieves dressed as police officers stole 13 priceless paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, Manet and others that still haven’t been recovered. The frames from the stolen paintings remain empty as a reminder, and the museum’s website has a page devoted to the paintings, offering a $10 million reward.
3. The St. Patrick’s Day Massacre, Wilkes-Barre, PA, March 17, 2002. This time, the rival gangs were the Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins and the Syracuse Crunch, two teams in the American Hockey League (AHL), the NHL’s development league. At least four players from each team started fighting. When the dust settled—well, that’s not accurate; it took place on a hockey rink so it was probably ice shavings—refs handed out 286 penalty minutes among the players. As of 2022, the 20th anniversary of the fight, the WBS website noted that WBS Penguin Steve Parsons “still holds the record for the most penalty minutes in one game, with 64 PIM (penalty infraction minutes) from the St. Patrick’s Day Massacre.” (Regulation hockey games consist of three 20-minute periods, meaning Parsons’ penalties exceeded an official game.)
4. Leprechaun Bank Robbery, Gallatin, TN, March 17, 2010. A man dressed as a leprechaun, with “a green top hat, vest and shorts and a fake brown beard and wig,” according to a CBS News article, robbed the First State Bank in a Nashville suburb. Police pursued the leprechaun and an accomplice, who fired shots at the police, resulting in this actual headline from The Register: “Nashville cops trade fire with leprechaun.” Lest you think this was an isolated crime, according to the same CBS article, this case “was reminiscent of the Dec. 22 robbery in Nashville when a man dressed in a Santa suit—including hat, beard and mustache—” held up a different bank.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist served as a precedent for choosing St. Patrick’s Day for our fictional robbery in Stealing Time. With its massive crowds and diverted law enforcement, New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade provides the perfect cover for a high-stakes heist. Ultimately, it balanced novelty with realism, making it the ideal backdrop.
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