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'Mission Impossible'-Style Best Buy Thieves Swipe Laptops, Baffle Cops

by Amar Toor on March 5, 2010 at 10:06 AM

There's a very good reason that 'Mission Impossible' is a movie: it's impossible. The "Don't Try This At Home" disclaimer pretty much goes without saying for virtually anything involving Tom Cruise, and certainly for the kinds of Hollywood stunts featured in the 'M.I.' franchise. To a group of burglars in New Jersey, however, the film was much less fiction, and much more how-to manual.

Thursday morning, employees at a Best Buy in South Brunswick walked into the store to find a pile of debris, a hole in the roof, and a bunch of missing laptops. Theft, to be sure -- but how did the plunderers avoid the spider web of alarms? According to Police Sgt. James Ryan, the thieves managed to climb a gas pipe to scale the building, and used some type of suction device to lift a hole in the roof. Ryan speculates that they then lowered themselves through the hole into the store, managing somehow to keep themselves ten feet above the floor at all times, evading the store's motion sensors. They even kept behind store banners throughout the operation, thus shielding their faces from security cameras. Upon swiping $26,000 worth of Apple laptops, they scurried out the same way they'd come in.

Needless to say, police and experts are impressed. As security and burglary consultant John Harris tells The Star-Ledger, "I would say they were a professional crew... I've never dealt with anything like this." South Brunswick police, of course, have their work cut out for them as they try to nab the bandits. They're pretty confident, though, that whoever pulled this off must have had some pretty intimate knowledge of the store's security parameters. Whether or not the mission was appropriately scored, however, remains a mystery. [From: The Star-Ledger and Boston Herald, via: CNET]

Tags: apple, best buy, BestBuy, crime, heist, laptop, mission impossible, MissionImpossible, theft, thief, tom cruise, TomCruise, top, viral

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