5 Criminals Who Went Full ‘Mission: Impossible’ with Realistic Masks
If you’ve watched the Mission: Impossible movies, or maybe seen the viral footage of hyper-realistic silicone masks, you’ve probably thought about how those masks would be perfect for doing crimes in. Forget the balaclavas and bandanas, why not send the police on a full-on goose chase after some poor sap who probably got paid a couple hundred bucks for a face-molding session?
The technology is there, and it has indeed been used for this exact purpose. I personally hadn’t heard about it, but I also assume the police probably don’t want media blasts going out about the easy new way to get away with crimes. I have no such qualms, however, so let’s look at some silicone-laden criminals and how it went for them...
Benoit Constant
Cornelius Police Department
If you don’t want the police pulling up your picture in the system, one good strategy is to make sure they’re filtering by all the wrong categories. That was the plan of Benoit Constant, a 28-year-old Black man who robbed a bank wearing a silicone mask that made him look much older and whiter. Constant was caught, but not because the mask didn’t work. After all that money and effort spent concealing his face, he left the license plate of the van he used completely unaltered, making it all for naught.
If you’re willing to rob a bank, I’d think you’d also be willing to lift someone else’s license plates first.
Clauvino da Silva
Brazilian drug cartel member Clauvino da Silva didn’t use a hyper-realistic mask to carry out any of his crimes. In fact, his attempt at silicone-amplified impersonation didn’t come around until he was already doing time for them. He instead saw an opportunity in tricking prison guards into letting him out, something they will practically never do when they know you’re a prisoner. He had his 19-year-old daughter visit him with a mask of herself, and then attempted an ill-guided switcheroo where he would walk out pretending to be her.
The mask — and plan — both left something to be desired, and neither worked.
Gilbert Chikli and Anthony Lasarevitsch
Gilbert Chikli and Anthony Lasarevitsch somehow convinced a mask-maker to construct them a mask that looked just like the Defense Minister of France, which I would think should raise a flag in a database somewhere. They would then don the minister’s face and Skype executives and politicians, saying they needed money to negotiate a top-secret hostage release of French journalists held in Syria.
The plan worked at first, but Chikli and Lasrevitsch were ultimately caught, and I can’t imagine meddling in foreign affairs at the same time got them a commuted sentence.
Conrad Zdzierak
Conrad Zdzierak committed a series of robberies in the Cincinnati area, but the security footage didn’t show someone even remotely resembling Zdzierak. What it showed was the mask he was wearing, which made him look like an older Black man. Left there, it would have been nothing more than an attempt at a dramatic change in appearance. Where it gets really nasty is that his fake mask ended up in the arrest of a genuine, real-life man that happened to look like the mask after witnesses picked him out of a lineup. Mix advanced movie magic with bad movie police investigation procedures and you end up with a hell of a mess.
Zdzierak was eventually arrested after his girlfriend sold him out, thankfully for the poor guy who was secretly twins with Zdzierak’s silicone mask.
The Geezer Bandit
For our final entry, we’ll look at a masked man who remains at large. In fact, the realization that he might have had a ersatz head pulled over his own only came about well after the crimes — and after he’d been given a catchy nickname. The “Geezer Bandit” was an infamous figure in the San Diego area, as a (seemingly) elderly bank robber. He was never caught, but police now think that he was never as golden-yeared as they thought, and that his signature septuagenarian appearance might have been silicone all along.