Another black eye for the Valley

If Roger Dillon, his girlfriend, Nicole Boyd, and his mother, Sharon Gregory, are convicted of the $7.4 million armored car company heist, they should be executed.

OK, not executed, but certainly lobotomized.

Why? Because when the FBI finally moved in on the trio four days after the theft of cash and checks from AT Systems’ facility in Liberty Township, they were holed up in a trailer. At least it was a doublewide. Not just that, the trailer was in West Virginia, a mere four-hour drive from the scene of the crime.

Talk about knuckleheads.

And yet, Dillion, Boyd and Gregory will forever be remembered for pulling off the largest such heist in the history of the Mahoning Valley and one of the largest in the nation.

It was so daring and brazen that even the director of the FBI in Washington, D.C., was given a briefing.

That’s why they are deserving of our disdain. They took what could have been the crime of the century (had they shown any imagination in their escape) and turned it into an mediocre theft. Being caught diminishes the significance of the act.

In so doing, they confirmed what this writer has suggested on numerous occasions: Things have gotten so bad in the Mahoning Valley that we can’t even do crime well.

Chump change

We have a former congressman in federal prison who used his public office for personal gain. When it was all added up, the price tag of his criminality came to $45,000. Chump change compared with the millions of dollars in bribes other members of Congress have been convicted of accepting.

Then there’s the botched organized crime hit on then Mahoning County Prosecutor-elect and now Prosecutor Paul Gains.

Mobsters who didn’t want Gains to take office sent a shooter to his home armed with a defective gun. He fired once and hit Gains, who fell to the floor of his kitchen. Then, standing over his target, the hitman pulled the trigger — and nothing happened.

Mob bosses in New York City are still chuckling about it.

There’s also the judge who hit up lawyers for lunch money, and the sheriff who made a deal with the mob for campaign contributions.

The exception to this embarrassing record of two-bit crimes is the late county Prosecutor James Philomena, who actually had a price list for fixing cases. Now that’s creative criminality.

Visions of a legend

So when it became known that $7.5 million had been lifted from the AT Systems building and that the alleged perpetrator, an employee of the company, and his girlfriend had about a four-hour head start before the theft was discovered, there was a “D.B. Cooper” moment.

A folk hero in the making? A young man with a page on MySpace, a self-described Wiccan who wrote that he didn’t care what people thought. He identified himself with Greed of the Seven Deadly Sins.

But then as the details emerged, it became evident that Dillon and Boyd were idiots. A purple truck? They might as well have painted a sign on the side saying, “We’ve got $7.5 million in the bed under the cover.”

Oh yes, they just about did that.

They abandoned the truck in Salem with merchandise receipts inside. They led the FBI to Beckley, W. Va.

Beckley? How utterly pedestrian.

On second thought, they do deserve to be executed.

With that much money, they should have at least made it to New York City, checked into the Waldorf Astoria, asked for the presidential suite and tasted the good life. From there, they could have met any number of underworld figures who, for a price, could have arranged for them to leave the country.

At the very least, they could have had the pleasure of being arrested by the FBI in their high-priced hotel room surrounded by all the things money can buy.

Oops!

The state auditor is the sole Republican statewide officeholder in a non-judicial position, not the treasurer, as stated in last week’s column.

The difference between Auditor Mary Taylor and Treasurer Richard Cordray is plain to see.