The Great Sword Heist of 2025

Your regular sandwich feature has been held up by a robbery.

Quite seriously, I couldn’t focus on pastrami this week because … my entire sword collection was stolen out of my apartment, in what seems to have been a daring overnight break-in. The bare facts are that an unknown thief entered my apartment (possibly via a back window) while four people and a dog were sleeping, and made off with absolutely nothing but ten of the swords off the walls. They bypassed a gaming laptop worth more than the entire collection right beside the window, didn’t steal anything else at all. Just waltzed out with ten swords.

In the morning the walls were denuded of weaponry. Although in a weirdly chivalric gesture, they left me two swords with which to take my revenge (also I’m left handed, sometimes an advantage in a duel). Truly bizarre: the thief went to the trouble of unscrewing hooks from the walls and still got away clean. 

For two days, this knocked all thought of sandwiches from my head, and rather than give pastrami short shrift, I’m just going to talk about it, because I am the victim of an extremely silly crime and if nothing else I finally have a story—albeit one in which I play a totally passive role. Nothing so novelistic has happened to me before or is likely to happen again, frankly. Unless this saga ends in a clifftop duel on the New Jersey palisades in which I avenge my blades, after going to study with a swordsmith on a mountain (I wonder if there are any Shaolin masters in the Catskills?). 

Anyway, I reported the theft to the NYPD, which led to a bunch of cops hanging around my apartment, squinting at me and making me repeat exactly how many swords I had. No one asked me why I had so many swords, but the question was hovering in the air along with the subtle scent of too many large men in my apartment on a hot day. I did talk to one cop about his love of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, which features a legendary swordsman. Several cops manfully refrained from laughing in my face when I referred to the situation as a “sword heist,” but it was a pretty narrow thing. I have no doubt they laughed at me all the way back to Staten Island. The NYPD clearance rate—by their own data for the first quarter of 2025—for grand larceny, which this technically qualifies for in the fourth degree, is an abysmal 13.87%, so I reported it more for the look of the thing and in case the sword bandit comes back with murderous intent than with any particular hope of seeing my most prized possessions returned to me.

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I need to clarify that my swords were not particularly valuable, except in aggregate I suppose. They were made of steel, which, as scrap metal, is pretty worthless; Damascus steel, while pretty and seductive to me personally, isn’t any more valuable as a metal. These weren’t antiquities of any kind, and they weren’t particularly rare or priceless. Several of them were replicas of swords from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I bought most of them off the website battlingblades.com (which eventually gave me a discount code) for somewhere between one and three hundred dollars. Yes, this is pricey for fripperies, but I’ve been acquiring them over the course of five years, doling them out as special treats to myself for, e.g., selling a book to a publisher, or a significant birthday. A few were gifted to me. I was absolutely not keeping some sort of mythical armory on the walls.

Still, I like to think that the cumulative effect was impressive, and it certainly brought me joy to come out every day and feel like the last knight of Europe (who, per GK Chesterton, takes weapons from the wall), or hoist a bastard sword in my hand and briefly allow myself a totally fictitious sense of blissful invincibility. My swords brought me joy and were both beautiful and fun and made me feel complete in an intangible way—probably brought about by my watching The Lord of the Rings saga in theaters an implausible number of times at a very formative age—but for value, pretty much any decent laptop from the last five years (like the one they bypassed and totally ignored) would have outstripped this collection.  

Several of the swords are also huge. The centerpiece of a five-sword array on one wall was four feet long. My zweihander was also four feet long. The majority were at least three feet, and most weren’t even hanging in their sheaths, which means that the thief got away with quite a large number of giant lengths of metal without making enough noise to even rouse my roommate’s dog (although she sleeps quite heavily). I guess we can rule out a literal cat burglar; she goes nuts about cats and squirrels.

From my own experiences carrying around broadswords from place to place, it gets really slippery and awkward after about four. I keep trying to envision the burglar’s movements post-heist and can only imagine it as the world’s deadliest silent jig. I truly hope someone witnessed it, although I’m rather glad I didn’t, since they had all the weapons at that point. It must have looked goofy as hell. Like the Seven of Swords in the tarot deck, just dripping blades. (Or maybe he had a duffel bag, but even so HOW DID THAT NOT CLANK LOUDLY).

Now, the most plausible theory is that someone broke in through my back window, ganked up on meth or otherwise not making extremely wise decisions, saw a bunch of swords, and decided to make off with them. I mean objectively this is a very silly crime. Yes, it’s destabilizing and upsetting to have one’s home broken into, but frankly, one reason I love swords is their sheer operatic and dramatic presence, and in this case, the very fact of ten missing broadswords has pretty much totally outstripped the violative aspect, especially since it’s not likely to happen again. 

So, obviously, suspect number one is Area Meth User/Idiot Burglar, who will shortly discover that these things are not very easy to fence except in the literal sense of fencing. Suspect number two is a neonazi who’s been mad at me for years about my book and wanted to take the “swords” out of my online handle “swordsjew” in order to upset me specifically (but I think probably would have tried to actually kill me, and in any case would have had to be remarkably determined and strategic but also oddly pacifistic about the whole thing and to be perfectly honest I’m trying not to dwell on it). I trust my friends and roommates and partner, so an inside job can be ruled out, especially because literally anyone who follows me on social media is aware that I have a sword collection, so it’s not like it would take a huge amount of inside knowledge to pull this off. They were also not even slightly hidden. That was the point, they were on the walls in the common space.  

Other suspect possibilities that have sprung to mind in a slightly feverish 48 hours:

1. A time traveling version of me from the future who really needed those swords, not bothering to leave a note because she knows I’d understand;

2. Link from the Legend of Zelda games, who is always acquiring swords, especially in the last two editions. He breaks them really easily, and his enemies keep resurrecting; let the poor androgynous lad hae them if he likes;

3. Some sort of resurrection of the court of Camelot localized totally within my apartment and presumably confused by my ovoid rather than round table, so they took the blades and scarpered back to medieval Britain;

4. Uma Thurman’s character from Kill Bill, woken from a coma and in need of those swords for murder reasons. I don’t begrudge her, honestly, and there are a lot of evil and powerful men who need dispatch by a mysterious swordswoman at the moment;

5. Geralt of Rivia, the Witcher himself, using up all the sword slots in his inventory at once so he could go vanquish a mutated spider or whatever, he moves quiet, and is too sexy for me to impede;

6. A low end heist team—dollar store Ocean's Eleven—that needed swords stopping for a sub-heist before the real heist;

7. A wandering rōnin trained in the arts of stealth, possibly replenishing his armory after Totoyomi Hideyoshi’s nationwide confiscation of swords from all enemy samurai in 1588 [I assume they can wander in time as well as quite far in space in this scenario, it never does to underestimate a rōnin];

8. Elrond, needing some extra material to forge the shards of Narsil into Anduril, naturally needed my wish.com replica of Anduril, a gift from a really mean ex that I kept because fuck him, I get to keep Anduril—but not at the expense of Isildur’s rightful heir, totally cool if it went to the elf forges;

9. A ninja, which explains the stealth;

10. A teenage mutant ninja turtle, because their prefrontal cortexes aren’t totally developed yet and maybe all that sewer pizza has led them to embrace a life of crime;

11. The Highlander, because there can only be one, but he did larceny instead of a duel because of sexism;

12. The goddess Kali enacting a bit of vengeance against me for my hubris, laziness, or other unpleasant qualities; a suspect who is not only armed but ten-armed could certainly get away with this;

13. Someone I mortally offended who swore vengeance against me in this specifically upsetting manner, and who will shortly declare their intentions to have me avenge my blades in a clifftop duel in the Elysian Fields of New Jersey, polluted wind whipping through our hair as we battle perilously close to the Hudson. At our duel, I slash the gauzy mask off their face only to discover it is a beautiful woman, and we trade barbs and parries for hours before she vanishes into the suburbs (still with all my swords). I stand by the riverbank, humiliation and the reek of the river in my nose plus the runoff from those factories that make all the chemical flavorings in Central Jersey; I pray that I will see her again but I know she is my Irene Adler, beloved and sensual thief, and this is the end, or 

14. Is it?