Also funny, that while the perpetrators were not difficult to catch, according to Capt. Randy Montandon, the case was as labor-intensive as it gets. Officers were left with the tedious task of counting 96,300 one-dollar bills, one at a time, perhaps the greatest single tabulation they've ever had to make, says Montandon.
Funny, like the three-paragraph statement issued after the heist by Alex Czajkowski, marketing director for Sportsbook.com, the company whose name and whose online gambling contests were advertised on the lucrative billboard, in which Sportsbook.com was plugged three times, and in which Czajkowski managed to mention the contests in each paragraph (as well as to explain how they worked). What it did not say, however, was that Sportsbook.com was going to file charges against anyone. Later, Czajkowski was to say that the company was just grateful the majority of the money had been recovered.
"That's funny," says Ron-Ron, the ineffable old man who can be seen in front of the nearby Walgreens speaking to no one in particular on any given day, "because them dudes got alls da way ups there, on da billboard, breaks the box, and they don't gets more than a few goddamn handfuls of it. Them dudes must be crazy!"
And it's rather funny that they even made it up there, for Sportsbook.com had positioned a guard around the clock to patrol the billboard from the grounds below, to adequate success on the first five days of the billboard's existence. But, according to Montandon, the guard on duty was either getting a drink or falling to inattentiveness at 3 a.m. on September 6, when the heist went down.
Which, of course, makes the billboard itself funny, stating:
$100,000 REAL CASH
(AND REAL GUARDS BELOW)
It's just like Captain Montandon says: "To me, it's the same as putting a hundred thousand in a brown bag in front of your house and expecting no one to try for it."
At any rate, on the first day of September, when the billboard was erected to announce the three different contests Sportsbook.com was offering, each with prizes of $100,000, many thought it funny that the online gambling company announced in concurrence that they were taking bets on whether or not the 100 grand would be stolen, with odds like this:
Yes, it will: +600
No, it won't: -1000
(It wasn't so funny, however, if you were one of the "handful of people" Czajkowski says took the bet, and you put your money on it being stolen, for you still would not have won anything. Hours after the heist, Czajkowski proclaimed: All the money would have to have been stolen for you to win.)
In the beginning it was funny, too—just the idea of it: An advertisement for online sports gambling in the midst of the Strip, right across the street from the Stardust's historic sports book, even though placing bets on sports via the internet is illegal in this country. Just ask Peter Dicks, chairman of Sportingbet PLC, the London company that owns Sportsbook.com. He was in no laughing mood when authorities in New York arrested him one day after the Las Vegas Boulevard billboard heist for gambling by computer, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and $25,000 in fines.
In this city of strange and ironic happenings, some events make you laugh, out loud, and others make you say "funny," without even chuckling. This, of course, falls into the latter.