During the 1960s, in Japan, with an American friend, I planned the perfect crime. The use of shipping containers had just become universal but the management of their use was still pretty informal. Bill’s and my plan was to register ourselves with a central agency in Switzerland as owners of a number of containers—I forget how many, but enough to earn us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year forever. The Swiss agency would issue us a registration code to be stamped on our containers as identification. Our next step would be to acquire the containers. We proposed to steal…