In This Economy?

These days it seems like every time you check the news there is a story about a new despicable, money-vacuuming, upper-tier douchebag. Some are scamming people out of billions while some are just assholes doing asshole-ish things. It can all be a bit overwhelming.

With that in mind, I have decided to create some shithead trading cards. A set of the worst of the worst. Please print them off and use them as a reference whenever you get confused as to which common thief did what to whom when. Collect them all and trade with your friends!

Alright, let’s get right into it. It’s been too long.

Teresa Tambunting AKA Queen Midas

During the past few weeks I’ve been mired in a bit of a shithead drought. I’ve started writing pieces on everyone from Roddy Blago to that woman who said she “couldn’t live” on the $63 million she got from her husband in a divorce, but none of them have felt right. I’ve been adrift.

That was, until today.

Today I was introduced to Teresa Tambunting and the shithead fog was immediately lifted. The shithead trees are once again yielding shithead crops! The drought is over! This is a weird analogy!

Let’s move on.

Teresa Tambunting worked for Jacmel Jewelry in Queens, New York. She worked there for 27 years, and for the last six of those she was stealing gold from the store by sneaking it out in the lining of her purse. Day by day, little by little, she stole small pieces of gold until she had amassed a stockpile at her home that weighed around 500 pounds and was worth several million dollars.

So why is she a shithead? That whole thing actually sounds kind of awesome. It’s like The Shawshank Redemption, only set in a jewelry store and without Morgan Freeman.

So why?

Let me break it down into a few reasons:

1. She was making six figures at the time of her arrest.

Queen Midas worked at Jacmel (which is a higher end jewelry store “popularly priced jewelry manufacturer”, we’re (still) not talking about fucking Jared here) as a vault manager since 1991. This position paid her $165,000 a year. Yet, somehow, that wasn’t enough.

She started swiping gold six years ago and kept doing it until finally turning herself in last week after an audit of the vault she was supposed to be managing showed 850 pounds of gold missing. Yeah, that’s $12 million in gold that just vanished. Yikes.

So far investigators have only recovered a little more than half of that from Mrs. Tambunting’s home. Where the rest is remains to be seen.

2. She was disorganized and lame.

When I first heard about this woman and the crazy caper she pulled off for six whole years I pictured a calculated super-villain type. A Lex Luthor.

Unfortunately, this really couldn’t be further from the truth. Where as Lex Luthor would have turned the gold over to some shady arms dealer to purchase a kryptonite sword or something awesome, Mrs. Tambunting kept the gold in buckets in her basement. Yeah, buckets. Not even a safe or a nice cabinet. Buckets. I mean, come on. Buckets?

She never had any grand plans for the gold (at least none that are known), and she never converted any of it to cash. She didn’t have any super-villain type schemes up her sleeve, and that’s upsetting to me. She could have funded the construction of some Earth-destroying laser technology or paid a crooked geologist to create a “natural” disaster that would inevitably sink the entire state of California, but no. Nothing. Really, she was about as un-Lex Luthor as a person who is quietly siphoning millions of dollars from the jewelry store vault they work in could be.

So not only is she a thief, she’s a lame thief without a 5-year plan.

3. She’s claiming it’s not her fault.

Since she started confessing and returning gold (she brought in about 80 pounds with her first confession to Jacmel management) she’s been consistent in her story that she HAD to steal the gold due to an obsessive-compulsive tic.

Some OCD patients lock their front door 50 times daily, while some steal millions of dollars in gold from the vault they work in by smuggling it out on a daily basis in a hole they have cut in the lining of their purses. It’s textbook medicine, really.

Personally, I don’t know that I buy it. As more evidence comes out it may become clear that Queen Midas truly is OCD, but for now it just seems like a really convenient excuse to cover some theft. Plus even if the OCD thing plays, I don’t think kleptomania is going to get her out of jail time.

We’ll see though. I just hope she doesn’t steal the judge’s gavel or her lawyer’s notes at the trial.

–

And that’s basically it. One other interesting thing to note in this case is that her husband is claiming ignorance to the entire plot. Sounds kind of like the ever-popular Annette Yeomans case from a few months back. I guess this dude just never noticed his wife’s buckets-filled-with-gold collection in the basement.

Yeah, sure.

Seriously though — buckets?

Oh, and I apologize for the crappy picture. It was one of two that I could find and the other one was way worse (believe it or not).

Get your Teresa Tambunting shithead trading card now!

—

Complete the set:

• #8: Marcus Schrenker
• #7: The AIG 73
  
• #6: Samuel Israel III
• #5: Annette Yeomans
• #4: Bernie Madoff
• #3: John Thain
• #2: Nadya Suleman
• #1: R. Allen Stanford

Tags: jewelry, Shithead Trading Cards, Teresa Tambunting, theft

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 2:23 PM and is filed under Shithead Trading Cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.