Security camera image from the Berlin casino heist
of March 6, 2010 (Source: BILD Zeitung)

COMEDIAN JAY LENO ONCE delighted millions of “Tonight Show” viewers with his “stupid criminals” routine, where he would highlight the week’s most pitiful heists and holdups for his audience’s amusement. But if he had just looked beyond America’s shores he could have created an entire show around the subject.

For example: On the night of February 24, 2004, Germany’s most woebegone gang raided the city’s second-largest casino, located at the Park Hotel on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. The five young Arabs, all members of an extended family from Berlin’s immigrant Neukölln district, put on ski masks and stormed the casino under the cover of darkness. There they planned to raid the safe and make off with a fortune. A brilliant plan! Where did they get it from? “We saw it all in Oceans Eleven,” Mouhamed El-Z., 21, later told the court: “We expected to pull in a million Euros. We were going to tell the casino staff to open the safe.” The trouble was, Mouhamed and his cousins weren’t Frank Sinatra. They weren't even George Clooney! Sure, they found their way into the casino all right – I mean, it’s hard to miss! – but that’s the last thing they got right. When they put a gun up to casino employee Andreas K.’s head and ordered him to open the safe, “I turned and turned the dial, but I couldn’t get it open,” the poor man told reporters. It seems the management had changed the combination while Andreas was on vacation. 

The would-be gangsters turned ugly and started roughing him up, leaving him with ugly facial lacerations and a dislocated shoulder. “We weren’t supposed to start throwing fists,” Muhammed B. (23) later said. “It must have been the heat of the moment,” Aymen al-Z. (20) added. 

Then the men ran off the scene, forgetting that casinos are always equipped with alarms and surveillance cameras, all designed for just such a scenario. The police picked them up as they were getting into a taxi outside. They received sentences of between two and four years. 

 
Security guard Roman H. gives one of the gangsters a half nelson,
forcing him to give up over €400,000 in loot

The casino raid last Saturday sounds similar at first: Four ham-handed gangsters raided a daytime high-stakes poker game on live TV armed with pistols and machetes. They didn’t even bring a bag to stash the loot in and had to make due with briefcases they stole off people at the scene. One of the men wore a bright red jacket and didn’t wear gloves, probably leaving fingerprints everywhere. They lost most of the money in a scuffle with a security guard and then ran for their escape car without their masks before making off with nearly a quarter of a million Euros in cash.

 
The gangsters leave the scene - on camera

But while this sounds almost as awkward as the 2004 raid on Alexanderplatz, these robbers may be smarter than they sound. They entered the casino at precisely the moment when over €600,000 ($816,000) was awaiting transport to the casino vault across the street, and when most of the hotel’s security guards were on their lunch break. They clearly had informants on the premises. And let’s not forget: They haven’t been apprehended yet.

If the police don’t catch them soon, we may turn out to be dealing with Keystone Kops, not Keystone Krooks.

 
The original Keystone Kops in The Gangster (1913)