The Gotham Guillotine

Home Security Systems Killed The Gentleman Thief 

By Hameed Mourani

My wife and I were making love. I’d just gotten on top of her when—PING! 

My son installed all these cameras all around my house and connected them to my phone so I can see everything from every angle. My son’s handy with that stuff. He works in Loss Prevention down at the graveyard. 

So there I am, on top of my wife, and I get a PING that there’s suspicious activity in the driveway. I’m annoyed obviously, but I’m bored a lot of the time and I rarely get any action like my good ole mall cop days. Not a lot happens here. So I climbed off my wife and unlocked my phone. 

The app is really good. When you tap the notification, it’ll send you immediately to the camera that picked up the disturbance. And, sure enough, there was a disturbance. Some chump was trying to jack my Tesla. 

I keep a gun in this little plastic duck on a table in the hallway. I lock it before the grandkids and the Methodists come over. I opened up the duck, took out the gun, and ran outside ready to go Rambo on this fucker. 

I could see the chump plain and clear. He was wearing fucking black ballet slippers, some longass black cape, and a bigass top hat. His hands were gloved in white with black rhinestones on the knuckles. He was sliding the jimmy through the window.

“Hands up, motherfucker,” I shouted. 

His hands shot up like they’d been electrocuted. I kept myself cool, calm, and collected even as this motherfucking dandy did a pirouette. But I still didn’t shoot. 

When he stopped spinning, I got a better look at him. He was wearing a three-piece suit, all made of reflective material. I could see myself in his suit like he was wearing a fun house mirror. It gave me a fucking headache. 

He wore a little black eye mask. Over this, he had clipped a monocle which shrunk his right eye. He had a stunned look on his face. Almost like disbelief. 

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked. 

This chump pulls his cape around his face like he’s fucking Dracula. And then he started laughing in French. 

“Ha ha ha, consider yourself flattered, you impotent mark. You are the chosen prey of Jean de Voiture, Gentleman Car Thief!” 

He was going for Parisian French, but he ended up sounding more French-Belgian than anything. There’s a difference, despite what my Quebecois wife says.

“But now I make my escape, monsieur!” he said. And then he tries to run away.

“You’re not going anywhere, asshole! You’re staying right here until the cops show up!” 

“The cops?! Come on, man—er, mon ami. We don’t need to do that. You don’t have to do that. I didn’t even steal your car.”

“You were trying to!” 

“But—sacre bleu!—I didn’t succeed.”

“Attempting is still a crime.”

“Come on, dude. You’ve got the gun. You’ve got the power. Just let me go and you’ll never see the likes of Jean de Voiture again.”

He clasped his hands in a begging way like a junky in need of a venmo. There was a part of me that was considering mercy. He looked so ridiculous in his get-up I was thinking of letting him go out of sheer pity. 

But then what does this guy pull out of his vest? A fucking derringer! He wants to go toe-to-toe with me, and he’s brough a little fucking peashooter. 

The thing could’ve jammed, and nothing would’ve happened. But it also could’ve worked, and he could’ve shot me. I don’t like getting shot. So I shot him.

I wasn’t trying to aim for anything vital, but I guess I hit an artery. He crumpled to the ground like a half-empty garbage bag and started mumbling something about “la société de Lupin” and some other chump named “Frère Jacques.” His derringer clacked on the concrete like a kid’s toy.

I called the cops as soon as he hit the ground. He thrust his hand out to me and beckoned me to come closer. He didn’t seem to have a second derringer, but I kept my eyes peeled for a swiss army knife.

“Tell them the spray didn’t fucking work.”

“Tell who?”

“They’ll be in touch.”

“Who is they?” 

The chump started coughing up blood so I didn’t listen much after that. I was just glad he was facing away from my car and didn’t get any of his blood on it. 

Any reports floating around on the Internet that say I experienced an emergency lactation are patently false. At the time I was taking a new workout supplement, which I’m no longer taking. One of the unintended side effects is the altered opacity of my sweat. Whereas most people sweat clear, mine comes out a milky white. 

What the paramedics mistook for an emergency lactation brought on by stress was just the cloudy sweat dripping from my body. It was a hot night. I just shot a man. It wasn’t breast milk.

I cooperated with the boys in blue when they arrived on the scene. Paramedics did their best to stabilize the injured gentleman car thief, but he had lost most of his blood. He was wearing several layers of clothes, none of which were bulletproof. They had to tear his outfit to shreds to reach the place he had been shot. He died on the front lawn.

A wallet found in his silk waistcoat identified him as Craig Tepper, 27, a local man whose grandmother lived in the same senior community as me and my wife. He had a PhD in chemical engineering, but wore the mouse costume at Chuck E. Cheese’s. 

According to a hastily laminated card found in the wallet, Tepper was a member of something called LGB. The cops thought it just meant he was gay.

Nothing was made of those three letters until a parchment bound envelope was left in one of the officers’ cars. It was an official statement claiming to be from the organization, written in red ink and marked with a golden wax seal bearing a sigil that looked like a set of breasts. 

“We are greatly angered by the senseless and brutal slaying of one of our most endearing members, Jean de Voiture. He was shot in the street like a dog. Who was he hurting that fateful night? Another rubber-footed monstrosity birthed by the car-dependent infrastructure? Powered by child slavery batteries and owned by a man with adequate car insurance, no doubt? No doubt. 

“Not all of us are so fortunate. It is people like this that will look down on people like us. And it is precisely them that we wage war against: the comfortable and the sheltered. 

“We don’t believe in breaking the law. But we do believe in daring it. We believe in reminding people that they are not so safe. That their precious ideas of security and peace o’ mind are as illusory as any sense of justice. We dare and we dare and we shall continue to dare and we would love to see you try and silence us.” 

—The League of Gentleman Burglars, Local 1905.

Forensics investigators found the usual traces of semen on the inside of the envelope. They traced these to a local sperm bank where an Allan Rattenhorne had made several deposits. 

When police interrogated Allan about the letter, he broke down crying and vomited all over himself. He confessed to everything. The investigators had no idea what he was talking about, but then he showed them the Telegram chats. At least a dozen perplexing larceny cases were immediately solved. 

The League of Gentleman Burglars, which included one gentlewoman burglar, were arrested at a local Burger King. When the accused were apprehended, they were applying wax to their mustaches. The gentlewoman burglar threw five decks of cards at the arresting officers to no avail.

The messages presented during the trial amounted to hundreds of pages of conversations between Rattenhorne and the other members of the League. The League tallied up nearly thirty different charges amongst the six of them. They laid out their crimes beat for beat, minute by minute. All while patting themselves on the backs for their ingenuity in a rather forced French.

They’d stolen all the Coast Guard’s umbrellas with a homemade hot air balloon. One of them borrowed a priceless diamond to wear as a boutonnière during a masquerade ball in a Bushwick warehouse. Craig or Jean de Voiture had tried carjacking The Popemobile. 

“Frankly these crimes were overcomplicated,” Detective Luigi Veneto said during the trial. “It is the belief of our forensic psychiatrists that the needlessly convoluted nature of these crimes was purely intended to produce a personal spectacle for the perpetrator, given the fascinations of this particular group of individuals. The fact that these crimes succeeded, despite the total idiocy of the plans, is nothing short of astounding.” 

“Wouldn’t that reflect negatively on the police department given the way these crimes were ultimately discovered?” asked Rattenhorne’s lawyer.

I was called to testify, but was quickly removed from the list for future examination due to my “conflicting” priorities. 

“Please, your honor, it would do my heart and my reputation a world of good if you would just give me what I want.” 

“For fuck’s sake. Let the record state that Mr. Dabadamian did not lactate himself at the scene.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

The only messages worth reading were Craig’s about prepping to jack my Tesla.

“The shadow of the evening hours used to be all the shroud a gentleman thief needed to perform his work. Home security systems have killed the gentleman thief” began one message. 

“The surveillance state is tightening its hold and expanding its territory. Our kind have been driven underground and soon we shall go the way of the Barbary Lion. But I think that I have found something that we have all been looking for.” 

Craig had made contact with Chechen chemists who developed a spray that made you invisible. Not like you would think. It would make you undetectable to cameras, mirrors, or car windows. It would even hide your heat signature from thermal detection. Tepper applied the $14,000 spray to the suit that he wore on that fateful night. 

Craig’s invisibility spray didn’t work, obviously. And the disappointment I read on his face was perhaps the realization that he had been duped by internet scammers, that they had made a chump out of him. 

Ultimately, every member of the League was sentenced. Good fucking riddance. A private service was held for Craig. His fellow Gentle Thieves filled the funeral home with ornate calling cards. His ashes were pressed into a smoke bomb.

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Hameed Mourani is a writer, illustrator, and educator from New York. His illustrations have appeared in Defenestration and this issue of The Gotham Guillotine (ADD HYPERLINK).

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Image Credit: Home Security Systems Killed The Gentleman Thief (2026) by Hameed Mourani