Story Peeps Change Lives

Policy Folly Report: Red Handed Radio Thief

Member: VinceM

Some kids like to watch movies, some kids like to watch sports, we like to cause havoc!

In middle school I met a whole crew of kids that my parents would consider to be bad apples. These kids weren’t bad by nature, just bad because they wanted to be.

You probably met kids like this or maybe you are one of these kids yourself. Here’s a simple test to see if you are a bad ass.

Question 1: Have you committed any crimes?

Question 2: Do you like causing trouble and getting away with it?

Question 3: Do you take unnecessary risks just for the adrenaline rush?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then you’re an ass#$%$  LOL, just kidding, you’re a bad ass.

Well when I was young, I was a bad ass myself. It’s not that I didn’t know right from wrong, I simply loved the rush of doing something bad and getting away with it.

Throughout my teenage years, I routinely wreaked havoc around my neighborhood, because my friends and I became accustomed to high jinks and getting chased. You may ask yourself, Why would a person want to risk getting their ass beat? And I probably should have asked that question myself when I was younger, but instead I just focused on how much fun we were going to have instead.

One of my middle school acquaintances showed me the art of stealing a car radio. Now car radio theft is practically dead, but in the 90’s it was very much on the top of the to-do list for young hooligans.

Raymond was the master thief and I was his apprentice. His favorite method to break into a car involved the use of a small ceramic portion of a sparkplug. He called this little white nugget a Ninja Rock. BTW: When I was growing up, Ninja’s were the definition of cool.

Raymond simply walked near the target car and threw the Ninja Rock at the driver’s side window; it shattered almost silently. I have to admit it was pretty genius. We would break into cars and all you heard was the rush of tempered glass pouring down as if someone poured it from a cup onto the ground.

Stealing the car radio involved the use of a flat head screwdriver, which we would use to pry the radio free by gently nudging it from each side. Some car radios back then were called pull outs. These radios would simply pull right out from the socket and all you had to do is disconnect some wires.

We stole car radios, but it wasn’t for a profit. I could hardly remember what we would get for them, but I know that it wasn’t much. We were not in it for the money; we did it because it was fun and dangerous.

I remember taking my friend along one day, who I told about these car radio thefts. He always wanted to go along with me because he craved a little excitement himself.

Craig was the type of kid that if you go over his house, you would end up egging cars on the road at some point of the night and get chased by the drivers. I guess Craig needed a more dangerous fix of adrenaline.

Now, why do I say that stealing car radios is dangerous? Well picture this scenario: You park your car only a few feet from your house, it’s maybe 11pm at night and you are still awake. You here some commotion, so you look out the window when all of the sudden you see one kid standing outside of your car, while another is messing around with your dashboard. You run out of the house grabbing the closest weapon and hoping to catch the radio thieves.

EXACTLY, my friends and I got chased on more than one occasion. One day we broke into a few  high school jocks cars, and they chased us for almost an hour through the woods screaming “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!” Of course we were scared of being caught by the chasers, because I’m sure they really did want to beat the living day lights out of us. Just imagine two kids running with car radios through the dark woods at night for what seemed like forever, with massive amounts of adrenaline pumping through our veins. Yeah, it was a big rush, much better than any roller coaster or anything else that I could think of.

Now, since I buttered you up with the introduction, it’s now time for the main course of the story.

So, I took Craig along with me one day and we went to a nearby small town in Massachusetts. We cruised around until we found a neighborhood that seemed to have a lot of cars that teenagers had back then. Yes, we did target teenagers because they were the ones who actually bought aftermarket car radios.

Craig and I parked the car and we began walking around the neighborhood around 12 midnight. Car after car, we broke into them and many of them were actually opened. This was a small trusting town, where people left their car doors open, good for us, bad for them.

We collected about 5 stereos without making even a peep in the neighborhood. I sat in the car, pried out the radio and cut the wiring. Craig served as the lookout.

We dropped of the collection of car radios and ventured out once more, because Craig still didn’t get his fix apparently. I was pretty much done, but decided to go for one more because of Craig’s whining.

Just like many of the cars before, the door was open. I sat in the car and began working on the radio when Craig yelled my name. The owner of the house came running out and we made a run for it. From a distance we noticed the owner had a baseball bat and we were glad that we fled in time.

We walked back to my car and sat in it for several minutes. Craig in that time pounded down a Private Stock 40 ounce of beer. Forty five minutes later, Craig decided that we should go back and take that guys radio; purely a stupid decision, but I went along with it.

We crept back to the car and amazingly enough we found the door still open! What the hell was the owner thinking?

I began prying the car radio out when I noticed it was a generic brand not worth stealing. At this point I didn’t want to take it at all because it wasn’t even worth five bucks. I looked around in the car and found a Sony Discman; this was a much better prize for the effort.

So the second time around, we made the car radio theft a success in some way. We called up some friends to brag about our mischief and picked them up to hang out and smoke some blunts.

We were driving through another small town when my car grabbed the attention of a police car. At the time I modified the fog lights on my car with blue plastic which gave my car the appearance of having blue lights. I actually didn’t know this was illegal and that’s why the police officer pulled me over.

So, me and three friends are sitting in my car; high out of our minds with at least 6 car stereos beneath my car seats. Everyone is nervous, because we had plenty to be nervous about.

I was really polite with the officer who gave me a citation for the blue fog lights and another one to remove my dark window tints which I just put on the other day. I was really devastated about the tints, but not as devastated as I would have been if he checked my car and noticed that we were stealing car radios earlier.

That night was the last night that I stole car radios. I simply thought about what could have happened when I got pulled over, and realized quickly that what I was doing was pretty stupid. If the police officer would have arrested me for the car radios, I would possibly have gone to jail and although it was fun, it wasn’t fun enough to risk being in jail.

Yeah, I did a lot of dumb things when I was younger, but eventually I grew out of it before I ruined my life. Unfortunately some of my friends never learned from their mistakes and did ruin their lives.  If you are hanging around causing mischief, you should think about cleaning up your act before it’s too late.  You don’t get a warning before you ruin your life, so just take matters into your own hands now.

-VinceM