Of Rich Kids and Rare Book Theft:

American Animals and the Various “Nonfictions” of a True Crime

American Animals is an excellent movie. It is also a load of hooey — beginning with writer/director Bart Layton’s assurance that his film is not based on a true story but rather is a true story. In fact, it is a creative, thoughtful, mostly accurate, and interesting film that suffers the same glaring flaws as all previous efforts at accounting for the crime at its center — and it leaves out the best part of the whole episode, to boot.

From nearly the moment four college boys were found to be responsible for the violent and haphazard theft of rare books from a small Kentucky college, the media has spooned-out the easily digestible story that these were good kids gone wrong — a local adult is quoted saying they had one bad moment — and the ringleader was a mastermind tripped up by sour luck. But the fact is these were not good kids — they were white kids and they were affluent kids, but there was little about them that was good. And the idea than any of them — much less their ringleader, Warren Lipka — was a criminal mastermind is absurd. They were the stupidest thieves in the history of rare book crime.

December 17, 2004, was not a cold day, even by the standards of Kentucky, so when a man calling himself Walter Beckman walked into the lobby of the Transylvania University…