> “I’m real nervous about this,” said Blake Boesky, an eBay seller and former “international lotion salesman” who recently got his hands on some of the paintings

Missed opportunity to describe this guy's hands, which I'm certain are well moisturised.

That Westlake Taco Bell has had quite a life.

* It burned down in 2007[0]

* a car ran into it and set it on fire in 2014[1]

* aforementioned art heist

* 3 (three!) employees shot and killed an armed robber and another got away in 2017[2]

* a drunk driver somehow lawn darted in front of it after hitting its sign in 2021[3]

Lots of other stuff over the years I can’t even remember at this point, but it’s strangely a hot spot despite being located in a fairly affluent neighborhood. Of course, I imagine most Taco Bells are.

0 - https://www.cleveland19.com/story/5919348/westlake-taco-bell... 1 - https://fox8.com/news/car-crashes-into-westlake-taco-bell-sp... 2 - https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/09/armed_robber_fatally... 3 - https://fox8.com/news/westlake-police-suspected-impaired-dri...

From the title, I was expecting this to be about some new strategy invented by private equity vultures.

I’m happy to learn that it wasn’t

There is a much older Taco Bell grift: the charity coin drop game. Drop a coin onto the bottom step of an acrylic spiral staircase in a little water tank and you get a free menu item based on the denomination of the coin. It was designed so that if you landed on the last 2-3 steps you had a chance, but any higher and the centrifugal force of walking it down the steps would send the coin off the edge. It was very random with poor odds.

But eventually employees got sick of changing nasty change water and left it empty. The physics were a little different, but it seemed to be sufficiently difficult. Rather than wafting around, the further the coin dropped the more likely it was to bounce off a step. The much more deterministic coin movement enabled a new strategy: walk the coin backwards off of the first step and catch the coin directly on the final step. After ~$1 of practice, I had years of 5¢ tacos.

Sometimes quality rises to the top and people notice. Not often, but sometimes

With the words "heist" and "Taco Bell", I thought for sure it was going to be a repeat of Operation Soda Steal.

I have never even seen a Taco Bell IRL and yet I would consider hanging a reproduction of one of these paintings because of the story. And they're not really ugly either.

Very odd to refer to "Baja Blasts" in the plural. Like saying mountain dews

I knew someone who decorated their apartment with Panera artwork after the location that they worked at closed down. They told me that it otherwise would’ve been thrown away. Pretty nice artwork all in all.

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