Chapter Content
Okay, so, um, let me tell you a story. This is… this is kind of a crazy story actually. It's about bank robberies. Yeah, bank robberies!
So, back in the day, in the early 80s, there was this guy in Los Angeles, right? And they called him the "Yankee Bandit." Get this, he’d go into banks, wearin' a New York Yankees baseball cap – that was his thing. He was always polite, Southern accent, well-dressed, everything. But he was robbin' banks left and right. Just slippin' away with thousands.
The FBI, they were, like, totally frustrated, y'know? Like, who *is* this guy?
Then, one day – I mean, *one* day – this Yankee Bandit goes nuts! Seriously. He hits *six* banks. Six! In, like, four hours. It was just… unreal. One right after the other. And at one point he probably drove right past the FBI office.
Anyway, it set a world record. Still unbroken, apparently.
But that's just the beginning. Because it gets even crazier later. See, bank robbery, it used to be a big deal back in the days of Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, all that stuff. But then, like, it faded. People thought it was dyin' out.
But then, boom! In the late 60s and early 70s, bank robberies exploded! And the epicenter? You guessed it: Los Angeles.
I mean, a *quarter* of all the bank robberies in the entire United States were happening in L.A.. It was insane. So many robbers, so many banks that the FBI started givin' them nicknames. The Mummy Bandit, the Michael Jackson Bandit, Miss Piggy... you name it, they had a bandit for it.
One guy I read about even robbed banks dressed as a cop. It was, like, something out of a movie, y'know?
But the real craziness came with a couple of guys called Casper and C-Dog. These guys, they were next-level. The other robbers were just doing what people called "note-passing," where you, like, pass a note to the teller. But Casper and C-Dog, they went all in. Wigs, masks, assault weapons, the whole shebang.
They robbed one bank and got away with, like, a million bucks in today’s money. Then, the bank goes and tells the press how much they stole. Big mistake.
So this Casper dude, he does the math and figures out that he could make way more money robbin' banks than doin' anything else. But he wasn't gonna actually go into the banks himself. Nope. He was a producer. He recruited people to rob the banks for him!
And these weren't just any people, they were, like, kids! Thirteen, fourteen years old. Can you believe it? He’d pay them next to nothin’ or sometimes nothing at all. He even taught them this technique called "goin’ kamikaze," where they’d just bust in, guns blazing, yellin’ and screamin'. Crazy stuff.
And get this, he even used a *school bus* sometimes to get his robbers to safety. A school bus! He'd oversee the whole thing from a car down the street.
Apparently, Casper "produced" about 175 robberies. It's, like, the world record or something. Just insane.
It got so bad that other gangs started gettin' in on the action. One duo, the Nasty Boys, they would herd everybody into the bank vault and then just start firin’ their guns next to people’s ears for fun.
In one year, there were over 2,600 bank robberies in L.A.. That's, like, one every 45 minutes! It drove the FBI completely bananas. I mean, they were exhausted. Investigating a bank robbery takes forever, and they were gettin' robbed blind.
But then, suddenly, it stopped. Just like that. The FBI finally caught Casper and C-Dog. And once they were behind bars, the robberies just plummeted.
It's, like, this whole insane fever just broke.
When Casper and C-Dog got out of prison they went around Hollywood trying to sell their story. Movie executives were incredulous.
So, here's the thing: this whole Los Angeles bank robbery situation, it was an epidemic. It was contagious. It started small, then it mutated, then it spread like crazy.
And it was all driven by a few key players – the Yankee Bandit, Casper, C-Dog, the Nasty Boys. These guys were, like, the "superspreaders" of bank robbery.
And it happened to be when there were a ton of banks around. It was like Casper and C-Dog were shooting fish in a barrel.
But here’s the thing. Here’s the puzzle, right?
Think about Willie Sutton. This guy was, like, a *celebrity* bank robber in New York. He was famous! He even had a movie made about him. He was smooth, he was charming, he was the total package. If anyone was gonna start a bank-robbery epidemic, it should have been him, right?
But he didn't. He didn't start anything. New York City never had a bank robbery craze. Why not? Why did it explode in L.A. but not in New York? An epidemic by definition doesn't respect borders. Why wasn't New York affected?
That’s the mystery.
So, there was this doctor named John Wennberg, and he was trying to figure out why medical costs varied so much from town to town. Like, why would kids get their tonsils out way more often in one town than in another? It made no sense.
He called it "small-area variation." And it wasn't just about money or what patients wanted. It was about what doctors *wanted* to do.
Apparently, it wasn't random either. It was like the doctors in each area all had the same ideas about how to practice medicine.
Turns out you can find that pattern in other fields, too. For example, in California, if you look at vaccination rates at schools, you see Waldorf schools. Every Waldorf school is low. You'll see schools with 100% vaccination rates, then suddenly Waldorf schools with like 20-40%.
So, what does this all mean? Well, it means that when something contagious happens, it might seem random and chaotic, but it's not. There are rules. There's a pattern. There's something that makes it stop at the borders of a community. There's always a reason for why an epidemic erupts in one place and not another.