It was going to happen eventually, and the time has finally come for the bad news: Police have apprehended Julio Nivelo, the suspect in the New York City gold bucket heist. From ABC 7, in New York:
The suspect wanted in the theft of an 86-pound bucket of gold flakes worth nearly $1.6 million from an armored truck in Manhattan has been taken into custody in Ecuador.
The NYPD confirmed the apprehension of 53-year-old Julio Nivelo and thanked Ecuadorean authorities.
There’s no word yet on how New York plans to prosecuWAIT A SECOND DID THAT SAY HE MADE IT TO ECUADOR? Holy crap. That’s… that’s almost a perfect ending to this. Just look at the path he took to get there. He started by grabbing a bucket filled with gold out of a truck in the middle of Manhattan, waddled through the city with it in broad daylight, fled to Florida, then to California, and ended up in a foreign country. That’s right, this is now an INTERNATIONAL GOLD BUCKET HEIST. What a ride. And that’s before we even get to the thing where police got fed up after two months of fruitless searching and revealed information about him, including a) he sometimes went by the alias “Luis Toledo,” and b) he apparently loves the movie E.T., based on this official photo released by the NYPD.
WANTED: NYC gold thief id'd as Julio Nivelo. Stole bucket of gold worth $1.6mil off Midtown truck: NYPD @NBCNewYork pic.twitter.com/KSkPm3SHZA
— Marc Santia (@MarcSantia4NY) December 20, 2016
Incredible. All of it. I hope the jury acquits him and Ryan Murphy makes an entire season of American Crime Story about it, and I hope they cast David Schwimmer as Luis Toledo, and then I hope the real Luis Toledo shows up and steals all the Emmys they win to bring it all full circle.
The perfect crime.