Police Identified A Suspect In The Gold Bucket Heist And The Story Somehow Got Even Better

You probably thought the gold bucket heist couldn’t get any better. You probably sat there a week or two ago and said to yourself, “Well, this is it. A man grabbed a 90 lb. bucket of gold worth $1.6 million out of a truck in the middle of Manhattan in broad daylight and waddled around the city with it before fleeing to Florida in an unmarked white van, and he eluded authorities for two months. There is nowhere any of this can go but down. We had a good run.” And you wouldn’t have been entirely out of line for thinking that, either. There’s a lot going on there.

But you also would have been wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Just wildly, galactically wrong. Of course the gold bucket heist story can get better. You idiot.

You see, police finally identified career criminal Julio Nivelo as the primary suspect yesterday. And in doing so, they released the following information about him, via NBC New York.

NYPD Det. Martin Pastor says Nivelo, who’s from West New York, New Jersey, is a convicted felon who’s known to the NYPD as Luis Toledo, among other aliases. He’s a career thief who’s been arrested seven times and deported four times to his native Ecuador, according to Pastor.

Right, so, a couple things here:

– Deported four times! I should probably read that and get upset about our nation’s border security or a justice system that allows him to keep committing crimes on American soil, but it’s hard to get upset when you are giggling like a maniac. Four times! The man has more perseverance about coming to America to commit crimes than I have about pretty much anything. It’s almost inspirational, in its own little way.

– Luis Toledo! His alias is Luis Toledo! As an aficionado of fake names, I must say, this is a really, really great fake name. And it’s just one of many fake names he uses, if the “among other aliases” in that blockquote is to be believed. I hope they all use geographic locations as the last name. Pablo Manhattan, Juan Galapagos, Ricky Detroit, etc. I could go on and on. And you know what? I will. Hector Cleveland, Tex Montreal, Ron Vegas, Freddy Seattle, Raul Tokyo, Carmelo Baltimore, Trent Louisville, Lance Kentucky, Mickey Cincinnati, Bartolo Miami, and Victor Bangkok. Okay, that’s better.

And as if that wasn’t enough to make you want to wrap your arms around this story and hug it like a loved one you thought you lost in a war, or begin a letter-writing campaign to ask Ryan Murphy to do an entire season of American Crime Story about it, well, there’s also this…

Yes.

Yes.

There is a gold bucket thief on the loose who goes by Luis Toledo and one of the photos the NYPD released to help the search effort is a blurry one of him at Madame Tussaud’s posing with a wax statue of E.T. to recreate the famous bike scene. This is incredible. This photo has immediately vaulted to the number two spot in my Favorite E.T.-Related Thing Power Ranking, coming in just behind this footage of Ol’ Dirty Bastard discussing the movie with MTV’s John Norris, which is NSFW but you should watch it anyway, because I kinda think ODB was under the impression that Drew Barrymore played the alien in the movie. That’s some pretty great company.

Good luck finding 12 people who will convict him, Manhattan prosecutors.

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