Ukulele Thief in NZ

seeso

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http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellington/4363788/Ukulele-thief-hits-Cuba-St-shop

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A brazen young thief smashed his way into a Wellington music shop overnight just to steal a ukulele worth $200.

Security cameras caught the man on film as he broke in around 4.30am on Thursday morning at Alistair's Music on Cuba St.

Owner Alistair Cuthill said witnesses had told him the man had been lurking around prior to the theft, and had been warned off three times by a security guard.

"It's crazy for something that's only worth about $200, he should have stolen a banjo - they're more expensive."

Security footage shows the man approaching the shop in a dark hoodie and jeans, before running off in the direction of Abel Smith St. The theft has been reported to police.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/wellington/4363788/Ukulele-thief-hits-Cuba-St-shop
 
And the comment posted on The Dominion Post site......."The thief got away with the lute"

:rofl:
 
Aloha Seeso,
Thanks for posting, it needs to be posted...Steal a ukulele and deal with the wrath of all of us ukers....MM Stan...
 
mmmm...poor love sick puppy...when you fall in love with a uke, you fall hard.

Did he just forget to grab the kazoo as well? Shame...could have been the perfect crime:)
 
Along with Nuprin's recent post about the stolen banjo uke that he so graciously returned, this is disturbing. I would be devastated if any of my ukes were stolen. Unfortunately it is apparent that all ukers do not have the Aloha spirit. Hopefully this guy will be caught and the uke returned.

BTW Seeso, love your new avatar, Magilla!
 
Along with Nuprin's recent post about the stolen banjo uke that he so graciously returned, this is disturbing. I would be devastated if any of my ukes were stolen. Unfortunately it is apparent that all ukers do not have the Aloha spirit. Hopefully this guy will be caught and the uke returned.

BTW Seeso, love your new avatar, Magilla!

The banjo uke was actually the 2nd stolen uke my store has run into in the past year...the first was a Mele double puka soprano (which sounded great...I had my eye on it but was trying to convince myself I really didn't need another uke). Apparently the thief was the brother of the actual owner...he found the uke upstairs in their attic and figured the owner would never know it was missing. The owner went looking for it the next day and realized it was gone. As we're one of the only music shops in the area, he called us first. Fortunately it hadn't sold so we took it off the wall and returned it. This is why we write down the ID number of everyone who sells us anything!

It's pretty disheartening. Last year I moved back into VT...I had been living elsewhere for the past 10 years but VT always felt like home. When I previously had lived here, musical instrument theft was very uncommon...I knew local musicians that would leave the instruments in their car with the doors unlocked and they wouldn't have to worry about their gear getting stolen. Those days are long gone...my store gets calls about twice a week from people who are reporting their gear stolen and asking us to keep an eye out for it.

We actually managed to catch one thief because of this. One of our regulars called one morning saying his keyboard got stolen from the back of his car...he described the keyboard and even noted that the thief hadn't taken the power supply. Sure enough, later that day, in walks some teenage kid with the same keyboard (with no power supply) looking to sell it. That immediately raised a red flag to me...just to be sure, I started talking to the kid about the keyboard and it was obvious he didn't play and didn't know anything about this model. So, I went through the process of negotiating a price and told him I would have my boss cut him a check for the keyboard. Instead I went up to my office and called the police...they showed up 5 minutes later and the kid confessed. I'm glad we were able to get the keyboard back to its rightful owner but it's not too often we actually get to catch the thief.
 
If the thief had gone back in to get another uke, would that be re-entrant theft?
 
Just an aside about Alistair's - they're the mecca for ukulele purchases in Wellington. It's a shop run by a lovely Scottish couple that specialises in stringed instruments, especially the ukulele. The uke stolen was, I understand, a Mahalo Koa.
 
I hate stories like this. There's also the guy in the newcomers forum who had his 8 stringer nabbed. This punk probably got scared when the alarm went off and grabbed the first thing he saw that would fit under his hoodie. These punks have no clue what they're taking. Over my life I've had three priceless guitars taken from my car/home by some random idiot who probably sold them for peanuts. A good friend of mine had a '63 Les Paul stolen out of house a couple years ago. It turned out to have been taken by a friend of his son's who traded it for a bag of weed. Fortunately, this particular kid had a conscience and thank God was able to get it back. "I didn't know it was worth anything!" he said. "It just looked like a beat up old guitar." He was forgiven by my friend and as a form of "community service" was made to be a roadie for a few gigs, lugging amps up staircases, setting up PAs and, what I thought was cool, polish and change strings on all the guitars. He ended up with a real appreciation of his crime after that. Don't know whatever became of him after that. Lord knows what will become of the punk in the surveillance video. Sad sad sad.
 
I work in a charity shop and we had a ukulele stolen.
So a thief now owns a ukulele or has fenced it to a less than honest receiver. So there is one more dishonest ukulele player out there.
We know that there are more honest people than petty thieves, from this we can take heart, we also know that we have all taken some thing in our lives (think forbidden cookies). Plenty of people doing time play the ukulele.
So what do we do. Property mark your gear, insure it, keep it safe and be willing to use extreme violence, and forgive.
 
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The person who steals a ukulele is firstly a thief. Might also be a good ukulele player. One can never tell where the talent comes from.
 
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He was forgiven by my friend and as a form of "community service" was made to be a roadie for a few gigs, lugging amps up staircases, setting up PAs and, what I thought was cool, polish and change strings on all the guitars. He ended up with a real appreciation of his crime after that. Don't know whatever became of him after that. Lord knows what will become of the punk in the surveillance video. Sad sad sad.
It's funny how these things work out. I grew up in a small town and one of my highschool classmates tried to steal a small plane from the local rinky-dink airport. He actually managed to get it started and almost took off (probably would have killed himself) but ended up running off the runway without enough speed for takeoff and collapsing the nose gear (he didn't know you needed to push the choke back in after the engine warmed up to get the engine up to speed). Anyway, the cops came and he ran off to hide in the weeds. He fell asleep trying to wait them out and they finally found him asleep a few hundred feet from the plane.

The guy who owned the plane had a long talk with him and then declined to press charges. He declared that any idiot who wanted to fly that badly needed to be taught before he killed himself or others (he was an instructor). He made the kid work off the damage to the plane, but also taught him to fly and the kid got his private license just before we graduated. That really turned a nair-do-well's life around. The last I heard the kid had enlisted in the Air Force, I think as an engine mechanic (you can't be a pilot in the AF without being an officer, and for that you have to have a college degree).

Gotta tell you, though, if it had been my plane I would have strung the guy up by a rather tender part of his anatomy!

John
 
...Gotta tell you, though, if it had been my plane I would have strung the guy up by a rather tender part of his anatomy!
That's a great story, MrPhart. Don't even ask me where that Les Paul's headstock would have been firmly inserted had it been mine!!!
 
Well have any of the people who have stolen ukes actually been uke players? Doesn't seem like it.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say hell no. Having said that I will also say that as a ukulele player I have stolen plenty from other players, just not their instruments!
 
The person who steals a ukulele is firstly a thief. Might also be a good ukulele player. One can never tell where the talent comes from.

The person who stole this uke is, firstly, a punk. He may play ukulele, but if he does he's a hack with no apparent eye for high quality. The only talent he's displayed is for breaking glass and disrupting this mom and pop's livelihood. For a $200.00 uke he's now made this couple repair the glass, which ain't cheap, waste time with police reports and insurance claims, not to mention the cost to the city for the police's time and the increase in insurance rates for the store (well here the rates would go up, maybe NZ insurance companies are more... ethical...).

It's times like this that makes me hope I'm wrong to be cynical about kharma and what goes around comes around. Thankfully there's a pretty good surveillance image of this miscreant, so there's at least some hope he'll get his comeuppance.
 
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