Heist in Los Alamos
Mike Smith
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The city of Los Alamos is New Mexico’s best-educated community, with more than 62% of its adults over the age of twenty-five holding at least a bachelor’s degree, according to the 2000 census. It is the north central New Mexico birthplace of the atomic bomb, and home to the world-renowned Los Alamos National Laboratories.
The city of Los Alamos was, until recent decades, so private that it required a security clearance just to drive through, and even today it is tightlipped enough that its married pairs of scientists often have little to no idea what their spouses may be working on. It’s a city that is no stranger to big ideas, to big risks, and to big crime.
Spies and accusations of spying, as well as treasonous thefts and allegations of theft, have been a recurring part of life on The Hill, ever since the Manhattan Project and the creation of the bomb—ever since the first scientists arrived in the 1940s. Big ideas often inspire big risks, and sometimes those risks are illegal.
The city’s latest such relatively epic criminal happening occurred on the evening of Tuesday, May 6, 2008, when a team of two currently anonymous individuals found themselves seized by just such a big idea—inspired, perhaps, by a need of which only they will ever know the actual depths.
With their devious plans in mind, these silent plotters advanced to one of the many boxy, nondescript, almost featureless buildings for which high-security towns such as Los Alamos are often known. The two conspirators then managed to invade the structure’s premises while evidently casually but cautiously eluding any security stationed near the building’s entrance.
The pair then made their way to a temperature-controlled area of the largely sterile complex, where they must have known the synthetically engineered objects they desired were stored.
They must have also known that their exposure to these items could very likely have unhealthy effects, to say nothing of what might happen to them if they were caught removing them illegally. They must have known that repeated exposure to such things had, in the past, caused the limbs and torsos of other area residents to swell up grotesquely, and had shortened people's lifespans. (Numerous animals had even died because of them.) And the two must have been aware that once the objects' various components were removed from the airless vacuums in which they were stored, there would be only a short amount of time before what they had taken became completely worthless.
And yet, they acted.
They acted, but without success. Within minutes, the theft had been noticed, and the alarm went out. Within minutes, they were confronted, forced to yield up the stolen property, and sent fleeing the compound empty-handed.
To date, the two male suspects are still at large, and it seems a brief mention in the May 9, 2008 Los Alamos Monitor—in the “LAPD Police Beat”—is so far the only printed mention of their attempted theft. It reads:
May 6…
7 p.m. - Smith’s Food and Drug Center, 535 Central Ave., reported that two boys attempted to steal Lunchables. Upon confrontation by store clerks they returned the Lunchables and ran from the scene.
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Reader Comments (4)
The clerks should have forced them to eat them as punishment.
Maybe hes right. I was a rodeo clown, a Marine and a independent trucker. I never was no lazy drone.
Writing this, I kept thinking about a friend of mine who was arrested back in high school for attempting to shoplift a case of "Juicy Juice."
That still cracks me up.