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For the second year in a row, director Tommy Reid came to the Cleveland International Film Festival with a documentary on a famous local criminal. Last year, it was Danny Greene: The Rise and Fall of the Irishman, about an Irish mobster killed in an escalating conflict with the Italian mafia. This year, it’s Superthief: Inside America’s Biggest Bank Score, about bank thief Phil Christopher and the 1972 robbery of the United California Bank in Laguna Niguel. The warm welcome it received suggests that the only thing better than a hometown boy making good is a hometown boy making bad in a very big way.
Born in the Cleveland neighborhood of Collinwood (which one of the police interviewed in this film refers to as the best place for a Bank Burglar Hall of Fame), Christopher grew up rough and quickly turned to crime. Making a name for himself as an alarm specialist, he joined a group of professional thieves to hit a bank in California. After a few initial hiccups, they made off with $30 million in various assets. Before long though, a string of simple mistakes and one of their own turned witness put them all behind bars.
One distinct advantage that Superthief has over Danny Greene is that its subject is still alive, having recently completed a nearly three-decade prison term. Even better is that Christopher is quite a character in his own right. He’s got a wry, off-handed way of putting things that helps keep the film moving while providing some levity. Unfortunately, these same qualities tend to obscure his explanations of the technical side of the robbery.
The rest of the interviews, largely with police and FBI agents, fill in those details. Both the robbery and subsequent investigation are fascinating examples of getting big things done without the kind of technology we take for granted today. One break in the case involves sifting through airplane passenger records hoping to match a suspect, and when you consider that data mining programs didn’t exist then, you realize just how much manpower and trudging work was needed.
That’s the real thrill of a documentary like this: learning how a big crime was planned and executed and how the investigators had to make the case from what little scraps of evidence were left behind. The investigation really is a case of finding one tiny loose thread and tugging on it until the whole fabric unravels. So many years later, it’s interesting to see how amused Christopher is by the chain of events that landed him in prison.
Phil Christopher isn’t a national folk hero in the way that a guy like Dillinger was or even a towering local figure like Danny Greene, but he did leave his mark, morally dubious as it may be, on the city of Cleveland. As long as Tommy Reid wants to keep telling stories about hometown “heroes” like these, I’m sure the city will be happy to welcome him back every time.
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