Journalism was my second-choice for a career. In actual fact I wanted to be a bank robber. The guns, the one-liners, the money — I wanted it all. It wasn’t fear holding me back, as such, it was simply the fact that you couldn’t hold up a bank these days the way they did back maybe 30, 40 — or even 20 — years ago. But, like a concert pianist with stubby fingers, or a ballerina with a bum leg, I still pore over my childhood dream with obsession, crying late into the night over blueprints and plastic explosives.

I never told you any of this, mum.

But I’m gonna be straight: These days, you can’t rob banks with a classic “stick ’em up,” have the teller fill your bag, and escape in your get-away vehicle. It’s just not going to happen. These days biometric technologies (eye/fingerprint scanning and the like), time-locked vaults, silent alarms, exploding dye packs — sometimes concealed within the money itself — will make a hash job of your heist.

You’re not out of options: Crafty criminals have adapted to new technologies almost as fast as banks have been installing them. Security has moved into a more digital era — yes — but its dangers are that they are now automated and that the people using them barely understand the technology. A criminal with a sound understanding of the fairly common-place technologies used in bank security is already fast on their way to understanding how the break open the bank… or better: ‘Lift’ the ‘joint’.

Go where the money is

If you’re happy to get “stuck in” with the bank robbing process, there are quite a few options available. On a relatively small scale, you can use clone debit cards, which can hack a bank from an ATM. For this to be effective, you’d need to disable the ATM’s withdrawal limit, which mean you could withdraw more than the allotted few hundred dollars a day. The key to a good heist is speed: If you’re slow, you get caught. Hackers can disable withdrawal fees online — in the U.S. at least. Alternatively, these intrepid individuals used oxyacetylene welders to bust open ATMs and just took the money. They kept portable acetylene tanks on-hand to perform the task over the course of a night.

A little more hardcore is the Brazilian bank heist that took place in 2005. A group of men bought a house in central Fortaleza, in the province of Ceará. They put up a sign calling themselves a landscaping company and over the course of three months tunneled beneath the house toward the vault of a Banco Central. They were meticulous — disabling the bank’s alarm system before the grab, and spreading burnt lime around the property to prevent finger prints. The money — 160 million real-dollars ($73.2 million, £45.6 million) — was unmarked, meaning tracing was impossible.

Brazil recovered less than R$9 million of that money, and eight of a possible 25 perpetrators. But a word of caution: It wasn’t all plain sailing after their success. The head of the operation — Luis Ribeiro — was killed in a botched robbery of the money he’d made. Many others in the gang are thought to be victims of kidnapping in return for a ransom. Ultimately, the moral is mum’s the word, both for the police and the people around you.

Alternatively, there are the “smart” methods — although to be fair, tunneling under a bank isn’t exactly easy. In September 2013, a group of thieves successfully stole 1.3 million pounds ($2.1 million) from the British bank Barclays. The “Barclays Gang” posed as IT workers and, during their “operation,” set a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) which allows someone to access the computer remotely. They then siphoned off the money — transferring it from customer accounts to their own bank accounts. This is apparently a “hot” technique — so get it while you can before the opportunity closes.

There are, of course, phishing scams to think of. We’ve all gotten the email — “Nigerian general”, “Lloyds will close your account” etc. — but how effective are they? Apparently, annually about 0.5 percent of a bank’s customers will fall for phishing scams, and the money made could be very small, break-even amounts, to the tune of $10 million. A scam set-up is said to cost in the region of $500. Not a direct bank robbery, but you get there in the end. More to the point, would Robin Hood go phishing? Probably not.

There’s a few things to remember about living your life afterward. If the money is “marked,” i.e. if it is identifiable as stolen currency, you need to deposit it abroad or look for “unscrupulous” individuals. Don’t flaunt your money, for goodness sake. If you had the patience to plan the heist, have the patience to spend it at an inauspicious rate. Alternatively, you could money launder Breaking Bad-style. I’m not recommending this course of action, just saying it exists.

Well, there’s some ideas to kick around on a rainy day. Crime can pay, if you’ve got the smarts, the right guys, and a little seed money. The most important thing to remember is: Do the unexpected. Be “the smartest guy in the room.” Don’t get caught. And whatever you do, do NOT take me seriously. I’m just joking. Jeez. Chill.

More from The Kernel…

Much has happened to Paul Schaff and Brenda Rosin-Schaff’s New Berlin home since it was built in the 1890s.

It started out as a small four-bedroom farmhouse. Then it more than doubled in size when a former owner added a 10-car attached garage.

When Paul bought it about 10 years ago, the house was sound structurally, but it needed updating. So he gutted the kitchen and turned part of the garage into a bar and TV area with bedrooms above.

But the biggest changes happened 5 ½ years ago when Brenda moved in and the couple merged households.

She painted and redecorated the home’s five bedrooms, 4 ½ baths, kitchen, dining room, living room, large entryway, bar, TV area, laundry room and a common area on the second floor. At the same time she made extensive repairs to outbuildings on their 3-acre property, then furnished them mainly with pieces she repurposed.

“The barn and chicken coop were in poor condition,” Paul said. “The roof in the barn was riddled with holes, and rain would come in. The chicken coop was on the verge of collapse….We either had to pay money to renovate them or pay to have them torn down.”

Today their property — called Wildcat Creek Farm after the creek that runs alongside their property — is warm and comfortable, with distinctive pieces at every turn.

“Paul allowed me the freedom to decorate the house and outbuildings any way I wanted,” Brenda said. “He trusted my judgment.”

“She knows how to put things together, especially in reusing materials,” Paul said. “I had renovated the house, but she took it to a whole new level. And the barn and chicken coop, that really was her major undertaking.”

Repurposing pieces is something Brenda loves, in part because she was brought up not to waste things and to be creative.

“I have a lot of creative energy,” she said. “Every day I wake up and I’m excited because I always have a project to work on.”

These projects often include using pieces that have sentimental value, an interesting story or are given to her by friends. She also hunts for pieces at rummage sales and discount stores.

Two favorite pieces with sentimental value are an antique fishing lure and a mounted lake trout in the home’s TV area.

“Paul’s not a fisherman, but he caught that fish,” Brenda said. “The fishing lure is the first gift he gave me — not flowers. That hooked me. It was the fact that he listened to what I told him was important to me.” For Brenda, that was nature and conservation projects.

She said that after they met, Paul joined the Badger Fisherman’s League, the oldest non-profit conservation league in the state. She has been a member of the group since she was a child, and both are now on the board. Paul is a co-owner of Schaff Funeral Home in West Allis; Brenda does volunteer and community work.

No matter what area of the property she’s working on, Brenda does much of the work herself but gets help from professionals as needed.

Two helpers she counts on regularly are her grandmother, Bev Bolling, and Bev’s friend Maybelle “Toots” Pezewski, both of Sussex.

“They’re my cohorts in crime,” Brenda said. “My grandmother helps me with a lot of sewing things. She helped me make curtains in the silo, cornice boards in the kitchen and dining room and runners for our wedding. Paul and I were married here two years ago. I come up with the ideas; they help me execute them.”

During a late-fall visit, the couple talked about their home and how it has changed over the years.

Q. What are some of the home’s amenities?

Paul: The chicken coop and barn. We also have two gas fireplaces in the house, original beams in part of the kitchen and the dining area, and a field stone basement.

Q. How do you use the outbuildings?

Brenda: We use them for entertaining friends and family, and we’ve also hosted a few events in them for friends and family members. I’d like to use them to host charity events one day.

Q. What are examples of pieces you got from friends and repurposed?

Brenda: I’m using an old copper sink with a pump and an old farm table in the chicken coop. I reupholstered and painted four church pews for the barn, and I turned an old work bench into a buffet/bar with wheels for the barn.

Q.What’s your favorite room in the house?

Brenda: The yellow bedroom with the four-poster bed, because I just redid it. It has lots of light and good views of our courtyard. Also, the back bedroom, which is done in gray. From there I can see the wood bridge on our property and the barn. That room has the best views.

Paul: The pub. It reminds me of being in Europe in a pub. It’s where family and friends meet over a glass of beer. It’s homey to me.

Q. Your favorite spots in the outbuildings?

Brenda: I like to relax on the leather couch in the chicken coop. If the window is open, I can hear Wildcat Creek. I also like to sit on the couches in the barn’s lower level because I can look out the window and see nature.

Paul: The lower level of the barn, too, because I like looking out the windows. When I’m there I wonder what it was like when they actually used it as a barn in the early 1900s.

Q. Which of your five bedrooms do you use?

Brenda: We use all of them now. When we were first married, Paul’s daughter and son and my son lived here and used some of them.

Q. Who painted the bird motif in the first-floor bathroom?

Brenda: Paul’s mom, Sandy Schaff of West Allis. We call it the birdbath. I put a birdcage in there.

Q. How big is your home?

Paul: Just shy of 5,000 square feet, and we have a four-car garage. But we can only get two cars in there. Brenda stores pieces in there that she plans to repurpose one day.

Brenda: I’m not a hoarder, but I do save things I can use in some way down the road.

Q. What are the pluses and minuses of having such a big property?

Brenda: We have so many spots where we can entertain. The downside is there’s a lot to keep up.

Q.Any setbacks since you started making changes?

Brenda: Wildcat Creek has flooded the coop and the barn more than once. This year improvements were made to the creek, and it hasn’t flooded since. When we started remodeling the outbuildings, we were trying to save them from the flooding….We kept going to the next level.

Q. Did you make changes in the gardens?

Brenda: When I moved here, there was landscaping immediately around the house. I added more gardens, a number of waking paths and an allée on the north side of our house that runs from our courtyard to the backyard. Allée is a French word for a walkway lined with trees and shrubs. I got a lot of the flowers from friends; some I even found on the curb. I’m also a member of the Elmbrook and New Berlin Garden Clubs.

I also added a lot of mulch this year. When the creek would flood, I’d lose a lot of plants and mulch. This year I hauled 70 trailers of mulch from the recycling center.

Q. What’s in your court-yard?

Brenda: A hot tub, herb garden, arbors, decorative metal fencing and a fountain I found on Craigslist.

Q. Any more projects to do?

Brenda: We have two separate basements. I call one the creepy basement, and I’d like to turn it into a wine room. It has stone walls and was a natural cellar. It’s too cool of an area architecturally not to do something with it.

Do you, or does someone you know, have a cool, funky or exquisite living space that you’d like to see featured in At Home? Contact Entree home and garden editor Tina Maples at (414) 223-5500 or email tmaples@journalsentinel.com.

The Earl J. Koobs Nature Area in Carmichael got a rough start to the new year after vandals broke into a shed and stole lawn mowers and other landscaping equipment worth more than $5,000 in total.

The 4.6-acre nature area, next to the former La Sierra High School, has become a base of exploration for students studying the environment since its establishment in 1971.

On Thursday afternoon, Linda Jones, chairwoman of the nonprofit committee overseeing the area, waited anxiously for Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies to arrive and take a report. Without the equipment, she said, volunteers would struggle to maintain the landscaping.

“I can’t imagine what they did to get this off,” Jones said, pointing to the large brown door of the shed, now half open.

She said the break-in happened between Tuesday evening and Thursday morning.

The door wasn’t just pried open with a crowbar. Instead, vandals dismantled it altogether by unbolting the sliding mechanism.

With its lush grass and tall oak trees, the plot of land inside one of Sacramento County’s older suburbs is a reminder of simpler days. Volunteer crews maintain the preserve year-round, mowing the grass to prevent fires.

A steady stream of supporters and friends – and even Earl J. Koobs himself – stopped by as word of the burglary spread.

Koobs, 94, was a key figure in founding the preserve when he taught biology at La Sierra High.

“The kids gave me hope that this country would rise again,” said the soft-spoken Koobs, a World War II Navy veteran.

Half an hour earlier, committee member Glen Pinnegar peered into the damaged shed. Pinnegar already had ideas for preventing a repeat of what happened, perhaps by building a wrought-iron fence all around.

But he noted, “If someone wants in, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.”

Over the last few decades, thousands have been touched by the nature area. Elementary-school students hike the trails and observe monarch butterflies during the school year. Countless Eagle Scout projects have been completed inside, including a network of elevated boardwalk trails and an information booth.

The nature area also is home the state’s first-known Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Jones said. About 200 people gather there on Veterans Day every November to remember lost lives.

One thing preserve volunteers share is a sense of community.

Jones, who has led the steering committee for 18 years, said her upbringing in rural Los Altos Hills pushes her to keep the area open. She could hardly contain her enthusiasm as she pored through a scrapbook of old newspaper clippings showcasing the nature area’s history.

“Community,” Jones said. “That’s something to be happy for.”

Call The Bee’s Richard Chang at (916) 321-1018. Follow him on Twitter @RichardYChang.