"'The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom VCR,' recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard’s teachers."

ATMs and art museums are just two of the well-guarded depositories of wealth that were no match for Gerald Daniel Blanchard, a dyslexic international master thief based in Canada who could rig and rewire almost anything with his nimble hands and quick mind. Before his 2007 arrest, Blanchard eluded law enforcement for almost a decade despite his bold robberies. He was profiled by Joshuah Bearman in Wired in 2010. An excerpt about the criminal’s formative years:

“Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a 6-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn’t afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cereal, the boy spotted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor’s porch. ‘I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission,’ he says. ‘And no one saw me take it.’ His heart was pounding, and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. ‘After that,’ he says, ‘I was hooked.’

Blanchard moved to Nebraska, started going by his middle name, Daniel, and became an accomplished thief. He didn’t look the part — slim, short, and bespectacled, he resembled a young Bill Gates — but he certainly played it, getting into enough trouble to land in reform school. ‘The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom VCR,’ recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard’s teachers. Flanagan thought he might be able to straighten out the soft-spoken and polite kid, so he took Blanchard under his wing in his home-mechanics class.

‘He was a real natural in there,’ Flanagan says. Blanchard’s mother remembers that even as a toddler he could take anything apart. Despite severe dyslexia and a speech impediment, Blanchard ‘was an absolute genius with his hands,’ the teacher recalls. In Flanagan’s class, Blanchard learned construction, woodworking, model building, and automotive mechanics. The two bonded, and Flanagan became a father figure to Blanchard, driving him to and from school and looking out for him. ‘He could see that I had talent,’ Blanchard says. ‘And he wanted me to put it to good use.’

Flanagan had seen many hopeless kids straighten out — ‘You never know when something’s going to change forever for someone,’ he says — and he still hoped that would happen to Blanchard. ‘But Daniel was the type of kid who would spend more time trying to cheat on a test than it would have taken to study for it,’ Flanagan says with a laugh.”