Silver Burglar and the Incoming Wave of Boomer Baddies

Longer Active Lives and a Population Surge will Redefine our Views of the Elderly

Earlier this week, police in Austintown, Ohio, noticed a pickup truck without taillights cruising through the city’s streets in the dark. The driver was an 89-year old man, gaunt of frame, with a horseshoe of wispy white hair encircling his tender, liver-spotted scalp, and a pair of thick bifocals that framed nearly half his face.

The dreaded Silver Burglar was nabbed. Despite shuffling feebly into his arraignment in a neck brace and providing police with the address of a rundown house sporting building permit in the window in the rustbelt steel industry ghost town of Youngstown as his place of residence, Kermit Gabel isn’t quite the sweet, pitiful, old, innocent man he at first appears to be.

Authorities report that Kermit has been on a continuous crime spree (from the 1940s through 2019; interrupted only by long stays in prison) since many of our grandparents were young. He’s spent nearly two decades in jails and prisons, and he’s on lifelong parole for a variety of crimes that include: burglary; theft of silver flatware, furs, and jewelry; aiding and abetting; forgery of bonds and securities; mail fraud; and various parole violations. In fact, as one judge noted…