Advice to Bank Robbers
by Casey Flynn

1. When buying pantyhose at a department store to wear over your head as a disguise, explain to the clerk that you're a transvestite cross dresser, and not a bank robber.

2. A note to women bank robbers: when robbing a bank, wear an outfit that appears slimming, those surveillance cameras can add like 20 pounds.

3. The Getaway Vehicle:

- Avoid anything that has GEO Prizm written on it.
- S.U.V.s - sure they're great to impress your gangster moll (the industry's term for a gangster's girlfriend) when you pick her up for your first date to go to the talkies together, but they can't take a sharp turn when the police are in hot pursuit, and are liable to flip over according to both 'Consumer Reports' and 'Car & Driver.'
- During the bank robbery, don't leave the engine of the getaway vehicle running, sure the heist might yield $2 million, but have you seen gas prices the summer, two-dollars-a-gallon, ridiculous!
- Don't let a woman drive the getaway vehicle, not because they can't drive, no there's an even better reason. When you're racing out-of-town, she'll noticed the sale sign at some department store. She'll claim that she only wants to go in for five minutes, and you can just wait in the car. But let me tell you now, those five minutes will feel like 10-to-20 years in Sing Sing, as you have to turn your neck impatiently - straining the cartilage of your vertebrae - every 15 seconds to see if the person emerging out of the sliding doors is your god-damn where-the-hell-is-she gangster moll. She comes out sometime later, and as the bullets from the Tommy guns are whizzing by, she shows you these 6 irregular-sized golfing shirts that she bought you at half-price, and when you say in a reflexive pattern I don't like pastel colors, she blows up because she spends all this time looking for something nice for you, and have you ever been once grateful in our relationship, and you better put one on right now, but I don't like pastel colors . . .

4. Advice to yuppie bank robbers: make sure you synchronize your swatches.


5. If during the bank robbery, you have to make an example out of someone by smashing in their jaw, and you have a choice of picking either a sweet old lady or the ex-navy seal who happened to be in the bank that day steam-cleaning carpets for an independent contractor, choose the sweet old lady because haven't you always wanted to take a shot at a sweet old lady.

6. If you are in negotiations with the police for hostages, make this demand: request from the White House all documents relating to the fund-raising efforts of Johnny Chung in the 1996 presidential election or the still-classified documents from the JFK assassination, either demand should buy you plenty of time.

7. Masks:

- During the bank robbery, wear two masks so if you accidentally take one off, no one will recognize you because of the second mask.
- If during the course of the bank robbery, you need to take off your mask, to breath or you're feeling claustrophobic, go inside the stall of the woman's bathroom where there shouldn't be a surveillance camera. If there is one, you still have nothing to worry about. While you're celebrating in the South Pacific, a middle-aged banker who's an usher at a local Methodist church is debating with a pained expression and a nervous stomach whether to turn in the videotape showing the identity of the bank robber, thereby admitting to friends and church-goers of the small town that he's a sexual deviant for having put the camera up there in the first place.

8. If they tell you that the bank vault doesn't open until a certain time or the person with the combination is out for lunch, pull out a copy of Ethan Hawke's first novel (for which he received on advance of $400,000), 'The Hot State' and begin reading aloud to the hostages and employees of the bank. Within five minutes, the vault will be opened and the employees will help you to pack the money into your bags.

9. How should a rich-blue blood rob a bank:

- Step 1, go to the right prep school and Ivy League under grad. College.
- Step 2, spend a summer after college, setting up a business model that helps investment go to black entrepreneurs in Harlem.
- Step 3, get a Harvard MBA and then become a vice-president of a Savings and Loan.
- Give out unsecured loans to your friends and family that then go into default, transfer the rest of the money from these loans to your Swiss accounts.
- When the Feds move in to check the books, flee to Switzerland, put on a ski mask, and become a ski bum, and hang out with all of your old prep school chums from Exeter and Choate who've been in Switzerland for the last 20 years after they killed their respective prom dates with various golf club.

10. Bank robbers, uhm when you're in the bank, find all records and back-up disks dealing with student loans, and destroy them. Let's just say that the staff of jokezine.com would consider it a personal favor.