![]() “Some of the more fantastical elements make the story fun,” Van Soest says. Although Blanchard would sometimes exaggerate, the director said he “decided to lean into the mythology around him and let the viewers make up their minds.” McCormick notes, “You can draw some comparisons with us and him - we’re both driven and spent long hours at work, and it was about the challenge and the thrill of the chase.”īlanchard’s desire for notoriety may have led him to embellish his actions for dramatic purposes, Van Soest says. We pushed and worked hard enough that he got caught. ![]() “To speak on what Blanchard did is to glorify it, and I worry about him being a celebrity,” McCormick says, “but we didn’t create that. They chose to participate in the film because Van Soest was interested not only in telling Blanchard’s story but also in their determination to take him down. “He put on an adult diaper and stayed in a building’s ductwork for 12 hours just in the hope of an opportunity.” “He’s quite bright, and I’ll give him an A-plus for commitment,” says Larry Levasseur, a former Winnipeg police officer who with Mitch McCormick, another officer, led the team that caught Blanchard. Detectives and prosecutors refer to him as a “genius.” “It’s easy to glorify him, because the genius of the crimes is head-spinning, and the preparation and work is to marvel at.”īeyond the question of character, there’s no denying Blanchard’s brains and commitment. Though Van Soest’s film plays into Blanchard’s desire for fame, the director says he worried about glamorizing his subject too much and admits it was a tricky balancing act. “He wanted the pursuit someone who wants to fly under the radar doesn’t strap smoke bombs across their chest.” “He clearly got a thrill from seeing how close he could fly to the sun,” the director says. He had this incredible ambition to pull off these crimes and to achieve some level of notoriety,” Van Soest says.īlanchard would devote months to carefully casing a bank, as we see in the documentary, but almost immediately after successfully walking off with a huge sum, he’d risk detection with a more brazen crime like sawing open an ATM on the street. It was an obsession - he calls it an addiction. The filmmaker also notes that while Blanchard’s escapades may have started out as “a response to poverty or an issue with authority,” those motivations quickly faded. Van Soest says a lot of people wouldn’t talk to him for the film because they feared retaliation from Blanchard. “If someone’s going to rat me out, I feel they deserve pain. “My mind-set is if I’m being intimidated or hurt or pushed into the corner, I’m going to fight,” he says. When I note that he speaks on camera about his willingness to hurt anyone who has betrayed him, he defends his retribution policy. Though he speaks about never robbing or harming individuals, when I asked about a petty robbery arrest that came after his prison time for his more heralded crimes, he relates a convoluted story that involves helping a friend break into a car to steal $4,000 worth of goods, allegedly in lieu of money owed. ![]() (Warning: Spoilers ahead!) He escapes from the authorities once by hiding in the ductwork at a police station and another time by stealing a police car while still in handcuffs he falls in with crime syndicates and arms dealers and, in varying versions, he pulls off the extraordinary Sisi Star heist by parachuting out of a plane or scaling a roof.īut Blanchard’s answers don’t always add up. ![]() ![]() He quickly graduated to more ambitious crimes, and getting arrested did nothing to alter his belief that he was a criminal mastermind who was smarter than everyone around him.ĭuring the ’90s and aughts, Blanchard made that stand up - his meticulous and ingenious planning enabled him to slide past security systems, stealing sums as large as $500,000 from ATMs and banks across Canada and, allegedly, to swipe the diamond-and-pearl Star of Empress Sisi from a secure case inside Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace.īlanchard’s story, now recounted in Landon Van Soest’s documentary on Hulu, “ The Jewel Thief,” is a wild ride. As a Canadian-born teenager growing up in Omaha, Neb., Gerald Blanchard reveled in shoplifting and petty thievery with his friends, capturing the high jinks on video. ![]()
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