Get stoned: 8 jewel-heist tales

The crime
The theft of the Sisi Star — not to mention the emptying of a Radio Shack and numerous Canadian ATMs, plus a couple of debit-card scams and more than one escape from police custody — by self-described “criminal mastermind” Gerald Daniel Blanchard. (No relation.)

The story
Eve and I each spent a good half an hour trying to chase down any reference we might have made to Hulu’s recent doc The Jewel Thief — while Substack’s search function has improved somewhat, it’s still not good enough to work with that vague a phrase, even with supporting detail — because it seemed like one of us must have reviewed it, or at least linked to other reviews of it. Maybe one of y’all had it on your weekend-watch list?

In any event, I spent part of a sweltering NYC afternoon with Landon Van Soest’s feature on Dan Blanchard, and my only regret is not watching it when it hit in July, because it’s just the thing: an hour and forty minutes that seems shorter; process-y, but not burdensomely so, wisely focusing on compelling sequences and details but skipping those that might seem obligatory (the day-to-day of Blanchard’s prison time, for example); and a slightly snarky tone that acknowledges the non-violent and aspirationally Ocean’s quality of Blanchard’s life of crime, not to mention the dumb luck of law enforcement in finally catching him (which law enforcement has to acknowledge in interviews as well).