BRITISH COLUMBIA – I don’t know, but probably not brag about having it on my person and subsequently get my ass robbed.
Yeah, that’s right, Ron Shore was enjoying a casual night at a Christian concert with his 18 pound pure gold maltese eagle accompanied by 763 diamonds and a 12.7 carat emerald from a 1600’s shipwreck to top it off. All of which is valued at a cool $6.8 million.
The eagle was the most valuable piece on display at the Art! Vancouver art fair and when the four-day event concluded on a Sunday Mr. Shore had to transport it himself since the usual bank vault he kept it in was closed until Monday.
First off, if you’re housing a near $7 million diamond encrusted majestic bird in someone’s bank vault you have to have enough pull to get them to open it up on demand. But this doesn’t even begin to tackle the poor decision making in this story.
So, he decides to transport it to a “secure location” himself, but not before he hit up that aforementioned Christian concert for a little jam sesh.
Another concert goer, my man Jim Murphy, who is not afraid to kick a man while he’s down said that our eagle owner was being very boisterous about the contents of his backpack (spoiler alert it was the eagle).
So, leaving the show, two men, hearing that this guy is wandering around town with the contents of a literal gold mine in his knapsack, did the old bumrush and hit the old guy on the head move and made off with the riches. But, the worst part of all of this may be that he had a security guard with me! What the fuck was the guy up to while all this was transpiring?
He had a “security person” with him at the event, but police said the person was not in an area where they could be helpful at the time of the attack.
Oh…. Like come on, I don’t mean to be cliche, but for real you only had one job: Don’t let anyone steal this absurd gaudy spectacle. And to top off this comedy of errors, Mr. Shore comes out and says the decoy eagle was stolen too! From a different backpack! I don’t know how someone of this intelligence level gets to the point where their well off enough to go copping outlandishly priced birds, but something seems off here.
Oh, also Shore is offering $10,000 for the bird to be returned, which the likelihood of that amount being enough to entice crooks to hand over a $7 gold statue is about as likely as Shore getting on the Apprentice (he auditioned 11 times to no avail, which may be the single most ridiculous portion of this).