The Jewel Thief is an Intimate Portrait of a Criminal Mastermind

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It’s hard out there for the discerning true crime fan. Amid a glut of superficial rehashes of famous cases, or bloated limited series on run-of-the-mill murders,  it’s hard to find anything truly new and juicy. You’re always on the lookout for an interesting, underexposed case, told with a good amount of access and a bit of flair. There’s something special, however, in Lanon van Soest’s The Jewel Thief, which premiered on Hulu last week. It’s the literally incredible tale of a stunningly brilliant, staggeringly arrogant, thief, who managed to pull off a series of stunning heists through a mixture of cunning and no small measure of compulsion.

As a young kid, the slightly dweebish Gerald Blanchard found a place for himself in school by wowing his fellow students with his inventive electronic contraptions. As a teen, he won a kind of respect from his peers through his audacious shoplifting (first cartons of cigarettes from gas stations, then gold chains and designer shirts from the mall.) Blanchard captured all these incidents on a then-state-of-the-art camcorder. There’s a lot of twerpy swagger in these videos, and when he frames himself in the camera and gazes into the lens there’s something disconcerting there, too — a naked, hungry need for attention and self-regard for his own felonious daring. We also see Blanchard learning some early lessons: if you watch and plan–-figuring out the security cop’s route and when he takes a break–then it’s easy to take things in plain sight. Even if you’ve got a giant camcorder in your face while you’re doing it, and three teenage girls giggling on the sidelines.

But soon, whatever itch it is that Gerald needs to scratch gets a lot itchier. Once he graduates from lifting cell phones from RadioShack to stealing a whole RadioShack (boosting the store’s entire inventory on an Easter Sunday), his life of crime begins in earnest. There’s a sadness as his ties with his classmates begin to dissolve, as they move on from casual juvenile delinquency, and they realize that Gerald is incapable of moving on too. One of his friends notes matter-of-factly that he got to a point where he just assumed that Gerald “wasn’t going to be around” much longer.

After he’s deported to Canada after a prison stint in the US, Blanchard begins to spread his wings, crime-wise, and begins an equally storied history of nose-thumbing at law enforcement. After a brief stint making a living by lifting electronic goods and returning them with phony receipts, Blanchard drives by a bank one day and thinks it looks crackable. This is just the beginning of Blanchard’s spree of bank heists across Canada, each netting hundreds of thousands of dollars.

All the best heist stories provide the great pleasure of watching plans skillfully are watching a plan skillfully executed. Say whatever else you will about him (and there’s a lot you could), Blanchard is willing to put the work in, and through an incredible amount of surveillance, low-tech engineering, and time spent in air ducts, he’s able to beat alarms and clear out entire ATM machines with ease. The astounded and delightfully Canadian cops become major and winning characters in themselves, especially as they admit that matching wits with Blanchard is as fun for them as it is for him. Blanchard, for his part, grows cockier and cockier once they get a wiretap on him. At one point, he tells an associate he’s not getting involved  in any caper that nets him any less than 300k. He also likes to taunt them with pictures of him around the world flaunting piles of cash.

The title The Jewel Thief is a bit of a misnomer, since the bank heists were really Gerald’s bread and butter, but it alludes to maybe the most glamorous, and definitely the most mysterious episode, in Blanchard’s  life of crime. Sometime in 1998, he swiped the Sisi Star—a diamond-and-pearl pin belonging to the former Empress of Austria–from an exhibit in a museum from a palace in Vienna. He somehow managed to get past high-security locks and replace the jewel with a replica from the gift shop. It was probably weeks before the swap was discovered.

It seems that Blanchard may still face some legal jeopardy from the Austrian government, so he’s uncharacteristically cagey on the details here. This leaves tantalizing possibilities—did he parachute down into the palace? Scale up a wall? The motive for the theft, however, is not in doubt, and very indicative of Blanchard’s wily character: he knew that having something of such cultural significance could be a persuasive bargaining chip if he were ever to get caught.

The story of Blanchard’s downfall is still pretty wild but also sadder and more predictable–-as he gets more money and his globetrotting more pro forma, the videos take on a kind of sad, empty quality. And, of course, as you chase bigger and bigger scores, you throw your lot in with badder and badder dudes. You can’t fault Blanchard’s hustle though: it’s not every thief who’d have the nerve to tell a major international bad dude that he can’t take his call because you’re in an air conditioning duct planning to rob another bank.

The story would be a great and wild one in any event, but what makes The Jewel Thief a particularly gripping and revealing story is its access to Blanchard himself. Now released from prison, Blanchard is, of course, an unreliable narrator, but still in many ways a revealing one. Strait-laced and occasionally stuffy (“He looks like my doctor,” one of his ex-accomplices notes), he’s matter-of-fact but still clearly motivated by an adolescent sense not only of acquisitiveness, but also of sticking it to everyone (cops very much included) who have underestimated or insulted him.

The immense amount of documentation left of all his crimes seems less foolish than a kind of compulsion, an endless tease or provocation. More than ever before in my years of true crime consumption did I have the sense that I was watching someone who couldn’t help talking about his crimes, but couldn’t help but keep committing them. It is this portrait of a truly, disturbingly compulsive personality, as much as the audacity of that person’s crimes, that makes The Jewel Thief a great watch.

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