It was a crime that gripped the small, idyllic town of Teaneck, New Jersey — and beyond: A bespectacled man casually slipped two pricey mandolins into his his puffy jacket, and disappeared into the ether.
“I try to keep the walls filled, so we’ll be aware something’s missing, which hasn’t happened in 20 years when there were a couple of Les Pauls stolen,” Lark Street Music proprietor, Buzzy Levine, tells Rolling Stone. “So I noticed there were two empty spaces next to each other.” Luckily, the shop recently got some high-end security cameras, which caught the heist clear as day.
Levine shared the video to Facebook on Dec. 23 with the caption: “How to steal 2 mandolins at the same time! Be on the lookout for this criminal and the Gibson F-12 #A2985 and a Weber Yellowstone #9360302. This thief has a Montenegrin accent.” No one was able to ID the suspect (even Rolling Stone‘s facial recognition tools came up short), and, for a while, it seemed the store was out close to $8,000 worth of folk music fuel.
A few days later, though, it seems the alleged thief changed his tune — or, at the very least, saw that his face was plastered across social media and freaked out. Either way, Levine says the man deposited the instruments at the shop door on Dec. 26 with a very frank note: “SORRY, I BEEN DRUNK, MERRY CHRISTMAS You are good man.” The shop owner tried to catch the suspect, but he was too fast and “half my age,” Levine says.
Despite the time of year, Levine stresses that this was not a Christmas miracle, just the power of social media and shame. “It was a really clear video of him, and I’m sure a relative or friend saw it and gave him a talking to and [was told to] undo it, which he really can’t. Because, as the police say, it doesn’t matter that he returned [the instruments], the crime was committed,” he says.
Levine is not entirely sure he’ll press charges if and when the suspect is arrested — especially since local outlet Independent News points out that the suspect may have struck before; he looks extremely similar to a man who stole a designer handbag in the same town on the same day.
