Thieves.. Bright or not: A number of years ago I lost a number of items from my studio. I had just begun in business and didn’t have money for camera insurance or an alarm system at the time. No cameras were taken, only some long lenses and a spot meter. Many expensive pieces of camera gear were left untouched. The thief had a key to the studio door. My studio was within a large building. I was one of 3 occupants. My landlord had keys to my studio in their safe.
One of my landlord’s employees got into the safe, and with the keys to my studio, on a Sunday afternoon, entered the main building, and then my studio. He made away with the photo gear. The Pawn Shop Detail of the SFPD recovered one of the lenses and was able to trace it back to the thief, my landlord’s employee. The employee had been seen entering the building on the day of the theft. He worked for my landlord as an electronics technician, repairing medical equipment. He wasn’t prosecuted for the crime, as he was the son of a US Senator, and his father used his office to have him released.
One of my passed assistants, on one of his first ventures into self-employment landed a job doing some photos for a large (very well known name) engineering company in San Francisco. He was working in a large room full of engineers. He had his equipment, Leica gear, in a bag along with lighting and tripod Etc. He was across this large room taking photos, and returned to his gear to find that several lenses were missing from his camera bag. They were never recovered.
In the above cases, I don’t think the thieves were stupid. If I hadn’t had a friend at SFPD, the Pawn Shop Detail, would have let my theft sit in a stack with the others done on that day. Some thieves are smart. In both cases, no one went to jail.
