True Crime in California

Rolls-Royce and Benzes and Bears, oh my!

The following story actually happened. I did not make it up. Although I wish I had.

On the night of January 28, 2024, in Lake Arrowhead, California, three automobiles — a Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes Benzes — were allegedly attacked by a bear. The car owners filed claims with their insurance companies, including security-camera videos purportedly showing a bear climbing into the cars and ripping up the interiors. The three insurance companies paid the owners a total of $141,839.

That might have been the end of the story — just another case of a wild creature, compelled by natural predator instincts and of course Global Climate Change, going on a violent rampage against luxury-automobile upholstery, as carnivores have been doing in the wild for literally millions of years.

But it was not the end of the story. In fact it was only the beginning of the story — a story that could be the plot of a major crime-thriller motion picture starring, at bare minimum, Jason Statham. Because as fate would have it, the Lake Arrowhead vehicle attacks happened to come to the attention of an outfit whose name is virtually synonymous with being a department involved with insurance in California. I refer, of course, to the California Department of Insurance.

When state investigators looked at the security-camera videos of the alleged bear attacks, they noticed something interesting: All three videos were taken by the same camera. This would suggest that either:

(A) By pure random coincidence, three luxury-car owners, unbeknownst to each other, all happened, on the same night, to park their luxury cars, one after another, in exactly the same spot where a bear was repeatedly attacking luxury cars, as if the bear was having luxury cars delivered to this location via DoorDash.

Or:

(B) Something fishy was going on.

So the investigators showed the videos to a biologist in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. You can view the videos for yourself here, although you won’t be able to make out much detail, because the security-camera lens apparently was fashioned from a used Smuckers jar. But the wildlife biologist — I see Ryan Gosling playing him in the movie — saw enough in the videos to confirm what the Insurance Department investigators already suspected: It wasn’t a bear that attacked those cars.

It was a beaver wearing a bear suit.

No, seriously, it was a human being wearing a bear suit. So the investigators got a search warrant, and in one of the suspects’ homes they found what is known, in the world of professional crime detection, as a “clue”:

California Department of Insurance

FYI, those pointy metal things at the bottom, which apparently ripped up the car interiors, are called “meat claws.” They’re used by barbecue enthusiasts to shred meat. I can’t believe they are even legal in California. (By “they,” I mean “barbecue enthusiasts.”)

This investigation, which the California Department of Insurance dubbed “Operation Bear Claw,” resulted in the arrests of four men, and last week three of them were sentenced to jail for insurance fraud.

This story should serve as a reminder to all of us, but especially anyone contemplating breaking the law, of one of life’s most important moral lessons: Get rid of the bear suit you moron Crime does not pay.

I congratulate the California Department of Insurance for solving this case, and — even more important — for coming up with the title of the movie. Right now I’m leaning toward casting George Clooney as the bear.

I’m also seeing a lot of potential for tie-in “merch.” Party City could make a killing with this costume on Halloween:

I can’t believe I’m giving these ideas away for free.

I do have one important piece of advice for anybody who may be thinking of wearing a bear suit, whether it’s for Halloween or to commit insurance fraud, especially in a warm climate: Make sure you hydrate.

I say this because I have had some experience wearing a large furry animal costume, although in my case it was a monkey costume. I once spent an entire day — a warm day — trudging around Key West inside a monkey costume. I did this for Journalism. You can read the entire story, which I wrote for the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, Tropic, here. But to summarize:

In the early 90s, a Massachusetts-based company was using two small uninhabited Florida keys as breeding grounds for rhesus monkeys, which are highly valued as biomedical research subjects. There were nearly 4,000 monkeys on these keys, which are about 25 miles from Key West. Some people were unhappy about this. Environmentalists thought the monkeys were wrecking the ecosystem by beating up on the mangrove trees and pooping all over the place. Some locals worried that the monkeys might escape, possibly during a storm. As one county commissioner put it: “If you have a hurricane, you’re going to blow those monkeys all over the Keys.”

That was the big concern back then: Monkeys all over the Keys. So in a professional journalistic effort to gauge the magnitude of that menace, I rented a monkey suit and spent a day wearing it around Key West, accompanied by a photographer, to see what kind of impact a loose monkey would have on the public. Here’s a photo of me at the historic home of Ernest Hemingway, pretending to look at a tourist map (I am third from left):

Photo by Marice Cohn Band for the Miami Herald

So how did people in Key West react to my presence? They were, in a word, unimpressed. In fact they barely noticed me. Really. As I wrote in my story:

“Ah,” was the general public reaction. “A giant monkey.” (Not everybody felt this way, however. A few people said, “Ah, a bear.”) There were times when, wearing a monkey suit, I was one of the more conservatively dressed people around.

So I concluded, based on my investigation, that an influx of monkeys in the Keys would not be that big a deal — especially not in Key West, which regularly experiences considerably weirder phenomena, such as Fantasy Fest, an annual multi-day celebration wherein throngs of people traipse around in public dressed in, basically, paint.

But getting back to my point, which by now you have forgotten, and who can blame you: It got really hot inside that costume. Also sweaty. After a few hours it smelled like I was sharing it with a flatulent musk ox. So you need to hydrate.

This concludes today’s Substack, which I will now turn over to you awesome paying subscribers so you can express your views on today’s topic, whatever it may have been. Please note that after the poll below you’ll find a Special Literary Supplement in the form of a video of me interviewing my pal Adam Mansbach about his new book.

SPECIAL LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

My friend and sometimes co-author, Adam Mansbach, who wrote the number-one New York Times bestselling guide for young parents Go the F*ck to Sleep as well as a bunch of other books, not all of which contain the f-bomb in the title, has a new book coming out May 5 titled Go the F*ck to College. I recently conducted a profoundly unprofessional Zoom interview with Adam during which we talked about the book and a wide variety of other literary topics, such as how to make matzah ball soup. Here’s the interview: