what we titled the book, you think about a few things. You think about, you know, time

of day, day of week, part of the year and so on. And this grew out of the fact that

I’d read about a bank robber in New Jersey who was finally arrested after robbing banks

on six Thursdays. And it made me wonder maybe Thursday is the best day to rob a bank. Maybe

he knew something about the way the bank operated. Maybe that was his day off, whatever. So I

went looking into the bank robbery data itself because that’s kind of what we do is look

at data and see what’s interesting and this one was more, you know, we weren’t searching

for this before the question arose. And so it turns out that the data are kind of fun

to play with. It turns out that bank robberies are most – the most common day is Friday

which I guess people, it makes sense because people think it’s payday and there’s a

lot of money coming in and going out. But that doesn’t necessarily mean, you know,

you’ll be more likely to be successful on Friday. There’s really no big difference

in success rates from day of week. But you are much more likely to get more money if

you rob a bank in the morning than in the afternoon.

And yet most bank robbers work in the afternoon and not the morning which leads you to think

well either bank robbers aren’t very good at profit maximizing, you know, thinking the

way economists do or that maybe they just can’t get up in the morning and go to work

bank robbing which means that maybe if they could get up in the morning early in the first

place they wouldn’t have to resort to bank robbery. But the real answer to when to rob

a bank is never. And never is the right answer because the ROI or the return on investment

on bank robbery is terrible. So if you’re going to become a criminal bank robbery is

a bad crime. The average haul is about $4,000 in the U.S. per bank robbery. In the UK it’s

substantially more so you could consider that. And you’re likely to get arrested after

just three bank robberies and sent to prison. So you have to think as a career move bank

robbery is really dreadful. And then one other tangent that we got involved with on this

and looking into bank robberies is internal, you know, inside jobs. And one of the most

interesting ones we came across was a woman in Iowa who for years and years and years

had been embezzling money from a bank, about two million dollars’ worth. And the bank

was actually owned – the president of the bank was her father interestingly. So I don’t

know what the dynamics were there. And the way she was finally caught – and it turns

out that she kept two sets of books which is kind of how you want to embezzle. And she

was exhausted when she was caught.

The reason she was exhausted was because she’s worked so hard. She’d never taken a vacation

over all those years. And the reason was that she was scared to because if she took a vacation

someone would find that she’d been keeping two sets of books and she would have been

found out. So what was interesting is she went to prison for a few years. She was let

out. She moved back in with her parents who were obviously very forgiving since it was

the dad’s bank that she had kind of put into trouble. And then she went to work with

law enforcement. And what I love about this is it’s the classic tale of – only someone

who knows how to cheat or how to steal or how to lie or rob would know how to help the

good guys catch the bad guys from doing it. So she went to work for law enforcement and

they found that one of the best metrics to look for in preventing white collar crime

generally in embezzlement, particularly it was people who took, who didn’t take vacations

or who took really strange vacations. So if in your firm you see that someone is passing

up on their vacation time you shouldn’t necessarily think of them as just like a super

hard worker or an altruist to your company. You might want to take a look in their drawer

and see if they’re keeping a second set of books.