Caught bear-handed

I would make the world's worst crook.

I would make the world’s least effectual criminal because I simply lack the cognitive ability to understand crooked schemes.

I first realized this during the great aerial shot in Blood Simple, the first Coen Brothers movie, about a couple with a foolproof plan to outwit The Law in a James M. Cain-style plot about everything that can wrong when you aren’t quite as clever as you think you are, when the audience realizes as the sun comes up that the protagonist couple have left a mile of ineradicable tire treads across a plowed field as evidence of their culpability. At that point, my wife turned to me and whispered, “I hope we never have to turn to a life of crime.”

Indeed.

For example, you’ve probably seen this news story about some of my fellow San Fernando Valleyites. From CBS News:

4 arrested in California for allegedly staging bear attacks to receive insurance payouts

By Dean Fioresi, Matthew Rodriguez

Updated on: November 13, 2024 / 4:22 PM PST / KCAL News

A group of Los Angeles County residents were arrested after they allegedly staged bear attacks using a costume in order to receive payouts from their car insurance providers, investigators say.

The investigation, which was dubbed "Operation Bear Claw," found that three of the four individuals submitted similar insurance claims after a so-called bear wrecked the interior of their cars in the San Bernardino County mountain community Lake Arrowhead, according to a release from the California Department of Insurance.

Investigators began to look into the incident after one of the insurance companies suspected fraud, revealing that multiple claims were filed for the same location on Jan. 28, 2024. The claimants allegedly provided video footage to their insurance companies of a supposed bear damaging the interior of their vehicles.

Those videos, all in the exact same location outside of a residence in the area, meant to show the bear entering the cars and crawling around. But "upon further scrutiny of the video, the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume," the CDI release said. …

This is kind of nit-picky, but it seems like Southern California would be just about the best place to rent a trained movie stunt bear. Granted, that sounds like a really, really bad idea, but so does buying a bear suit.

The claims, which resulted in the insurance companies being defrauded of a whopping $141,839, were made for a 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost, a 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG and a 2022 Mercedes E350, investigators noted.

OK, but here’s what I don’t get. How do you get rich off of putting on a fake bear suit and ripping up your Rolls?

Presumably, you know a guy who runs a shady auto repair shop who will overstate the cost of repairing your damage to your insurance company. But still … I mean, what’s the point of obtaining a bear suit, driving up into the mountains, and smashing up your luxury car, when you could just stay home, do it yourself, and blame the SFV Peckerwoods or some other local gang for stealing your wife’s wrapped-up birthday present that you left on the seat?

I’m stumped.

The four suspects, identified as Glendale residents Ruben Tamrazian, 26, Ararat Chirkinian, 39, Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32 and Valley Village woman Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, were all arrested with the help of Glendale police and the California Highway Patrol, the release said.

Three Armenians (two -ians, one -yan) and a Jew.

As for the long-running debate over whether Armenian-Americans whose names ends in -ian or -yan tend to be the more respectable, I hereby withdraw from the field of debate and leave it up to Mark Krikorian and Anna Khachiyan to hash it out.

Let me know when you’ve reached a conclusion.