Bandits Hit Best Buy For 20 Apple Laptops

In the words of my buddy Joshua Schnell from Macgasm…this one is straight out of Mission Impossible.

A group of bandits has made off with about $26,000 worth of Apple laptops after breaking into the South Brunswick Best Buy on Route 1 early this morning.

What's crazy about this is that they never touched the floor or showed up on any surveillance video. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners.

On top of the building, the thieves used a saw to cut through several inches of rubber and insulation, then sliced a 3-foot-wide square in the metal roof.  Once they were inside, the burglars dropped 16 feet to 10-foot-tall racks — avoiding contact with the floor, where motion sensors would have set off an alarm. They snatched the notebooks from the racks, then went back out through the roof.

“High level of sophistication,” said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman. “They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out.”

The effort was daring and unusual, said John Harris, an expert in security who has consulted on thousands of burglaries.

“I would say they were a professional crew,” said Harris, who is based in Atlanta, Ga., but does work throughout the nation. “At least I’ve never dealt with anything like this. From time to time, people break in, but not usually through the roof.”