Human Flower Project
Flower Crime, Flower Enforcement
Flowers are anti-vigilante, which makes them good accomplices.
With wine and flowers, a scammer in Sydney gets caught on camera
Photo: Livenews
Ornamental, yes. Accessories to crime – Flowers are that too.
Thieves too lead-footed for cat burgling and too broke for the full six-week session of crime camp have a special affinity for blooming things. We’ve run a couple of stories on this theme already. But over the past six months, there’ve been so many crime stories with floral perps we started to compile a whole rap sheet.
There was the guy in Maple Grove, Minnesota, who ordered flowers and a gift box sent to a local bank; he then phoned in, saying the box contained a bomb. The robber demanded that a garbage bag full of money be delivered to a limo waiting outside, met and tipped the limo driver several blocks away, and managed to get off – for awhile, anyway – with $30,000.
There was the bouquet an elderly woman spotted outside her apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. When she opened the door, two “deliverymen” stormed in, proceeded to tie her up and gag her, and ransacked her flat. They took off with $75,000.
In Sydney, Australia, a scammer knocked at the door with flowers and a bottle of wine in hand. He’d explain that these gifts were yours for a simple $3.50 delivery fee and would swipe your credit card. Keep the bouquet with his compliments, and in the next couple of days find a wallaby-sized dent in your bank account.
Some of these flower “crimes” never get beyond a crank phone call. Others have been deadly. But in every case, the sight of blossoms works to disarm, softening us up. You let your guard down and….
PC Lee Ganley, who went undercover as a flower deliveryman
Photo: The Bolton News
Last month policemen in England turned the tables. Authorities in Bolton had staked out a heroin ring but couldn’t figure out how to get into to the main drug dealer’s house (the little matter of a double-door entry) without alerting everyone and giving them time to escape or destroy the evidence.
Lee Ganley went undercover, delivering a bunch of flowers, and of course the doors, both of them, swung open.
“Then officers struck. Three people were searched and a large bag of heroin was recovered from one man. The half-ounce bag was worth £1,400 on the streets. … They believe heroin worth £46,200 has passed through the house in the last five months.”
On the face of things, flowers are expressive – of affection, congratulation, apology, sympathy. “Say It with Flowers” was FTD’s promise. All that, they can do. But we add another motto, equally true—and any experienced florist will tell you so: “Hide It with Flowers.”