VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: Crooks Robbed a Potato Chip Truck Thinking it Had Casino Chips

“Never let the the true catch in the way of life of a well(p) story,” Gospel According to Mark Twain one time said.

According to ane persistent Vegas myth, simple-minded bandits erst robbed a Vegas Chips truck, mentation it carried gambling casino chips. Brandishing knives, they jumped into the motortruck alongside number one wood Rodney Dwayne Bont, 30, and forced him to thrust it to a remote area. Here, they made Bont open up the endorse of the truck, telltale(a) a clump of certain composition board boxes.

“Open ’em up!” unity of the bandits commanded.

When they saw the cargo was the Solanum tuberosum sort of Vegas chips, the bandits got angry. They shell Bont upwardly and robbed him of all the money he had on him: $680.

The criminal offence made subject headlines inwards Sep 1992. And the constabulary were simply as convinced as the media, asking for the public’s facilitate in finding the assailants. So was Vegas Chips, which paid $10K for a TV commercial message safari exploiting the crime.

“Commandeering our trucks will only delay service of process to stores,” said an role player holding a newspaper in unity hand and a pocketbook of Vegas Chips inwards the other. “And that’s non reasonable to others. Oh, and past the way, our unexampled slogan is ‘You gotta keep ’em, non support ’em up.'”

Then the Story Crumbled

Only a hebdomad later, however, authorities cracked the case. They dictated that Bont – who had trio previous theft-related felony convictions – invented the robbery to assist compensate cancelled play debts.

Bont had faced the opening of fin years inward prison, but pleaded it downward to two for a reduced bet of attempted embezzlement. His public guardian told the jurist that her client had a play problem, for which he was receiving counseling. Bont served only one year, according to NV State Prison records.

“We’re simply happy that it was not true, that we didn’t have got people out at that place this stupid,” Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department lieutenant Carl Fruge told the Los Angeles Times in a story that ran Sept. 19, 1992.

But the straight story only drew a fraction of the attending that the imitation ane did – which is why you tin can relieve revisit it all o'er the internet. And Vegas Chips stock-still ran its commercial-grade after the play a joke on was revealed.

We relieve ran with the campaign,” former Vegas Chips chairwoman Kevin Holden told KSNV-TV last year. “Actually, when it became a hoax, the story got fifty-fifty bigger. Because then it had a straight minuscule twist around in it … And because of that, we got into all the David Smith foodstuff stores inwards Silver State and all the way of life upward to Utah, and we actually got into all the Vons supermarkets in California.”

The original Vegas Chips went come out of byplay inwards the ’90s. Another companionship resurrected the identify a decennium later, but has also since folded.

Incidentally, Gospel According to Mark Twain ne'er said “Never net ball the truth let in the path of a honest story.” That’s another myth. What he did say – as quoted by Rudyard Rudyard Kipling in his 1899 aggregation of notes, letters, and essays called “From Sea to Sea” – was: “Get your facts first, and and so you can buoy distort them as often as you please.”

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