So much is so utterly weird and mystifying about the Great Strad Snatch in Los Feliz last month that only now are all the oddities beginning to sink in:
The cellist was so beat one Saturday night that he unlocked his door and went on inside and to bed, forgetting that he'd left his boss' $3.5-million, 300-year-old Stradivarius violoncello right outside, which is where the thief found it the next morning.
The thief made his getaway lugging a big, awkward silvery cello case on his bicycle. The only other big-time bike caper I can think of was the ride-by murder of Mickey and Trudy Thompson 16 years ago. I always found something especially poignant about a lifelong promoter of auto racing being killed by a couple of hit men on 10-speeds.
The LAPD's "Stolen Art" notice, deadpan as a wanted poster, shows front and back mug shots of the hot fiddle, and its vital statistics. Length: 30 1/2 inches. Color: golden brown. Identifying marks: original label stating Cremona 1684.
But the one that stopped me in my tracks was this:
The police had "released a videotape showing a young man on a bicycle ... making off with the cello."
Wait, hold it, achtung, stop right there.
It's just after dawn on an April Sunday, in a hillside neighborhood the real estate agents like to call "quiet and exclusive," and someone's doing a Rodney King cinema verite job on the theft of a bulky stringed instrument? I know we're all supposed to be movie-mad in this town but isn't this taking it a little too far?
(Actually, there is movie potential here, if you like slapstick -- and Mack Sennett, the original pie-in-the-eye, Keystone Kops director, who filmed his two-reeler comedies up in these hills. On the videotape, the fiddle thief rides out of frame and then, in a perfect off-camera moment, comes the sound of a smash-up as he evidently rides straight into some trash cans.
And for the bittersweet finale: Police announced last night that the wayward Strad had turned up over the weekend, alongside some other trash cans in Silverlake. It was noticeably cracked, a perfect Pyrrhic crime.)
*
Three and a half mil. That's a half-million dollars more than the 2002 price someone I know paid for that big Jazz Age mansion down the street from Casa Cello. I've been to that house; it's fabulous, all right, but it's no Stradivarius.
