The Bad Guy Gets Booed. Understood?

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 them.

Containers were piled in their thousands along the Yokohama waterfront, entirely unguarded. Shippers would pick up what they needed, note the registration codes and send their cheques to Switzerland for relay to the containers’ registered owners.

All we needed for our heist was the hire of two large trucks, with winches and drivers, for a couple of days, and some warehouse space for a week or so. In the warehouse we would erase the registration codes of the real owners (and company insignia, if necessary) and apply our own. When I say “we” would do these things, I recall raising with Bill the thought that if either of us took to the oxy-acetylene torch to remove the original markings there was a good chance of our burning off all our fingers or blowing up the warehouse. Bill said he knew where to get tradesmen. Security would not be breached. In those days, Japanese went along uncritically with weird behaviour by foreigners.

When the preliminaries were completed, we would truck “our” containers back to the Yokohama waterfront and wait for the money to flood in.

But while we were still figuring out how best to distance ourselves from our putative container-owning company, Bill said: “You’re a journalist and I’m a [say] shipping agent. You know what we’ll be after we pull this off?”