Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Crime
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/24
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Rick Rosner: Carole and I started watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the TV series inspired by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, a Doug Liman movie from probably 15 years ago. It’s where Brad and Angelina met and fell in love, perhaps 17 or 18 years ago. In both the film and the series, the main characters work for a mysterious Espionage and assassination agency, of which there are many in film and on TV. I was thinking about whether those things reasonably exist in real life. You can undoubtedly have Espionage and assassination agencies connected to specific governments or crime organizations. Still, in a lot of these movies and TV shows, these are like Espionage and assassination for higher organizations, that if you’re sufficiently connected or have enough money, you can hire somebody from these agencies to do spy craft and murder for you. I wonder if that works in the real world. So, we can talk about the limits of that.
Now, we know you can hire a private detective agency; indeed, the more money you have, the more surveillance you can put on somebody. Indeed, the more money you have, the more you can harass somebody legally, at least within the bounds of the law. Still, I don’t know how feasible it is to have a freelance agency that murders for hire because you need a trusted network at several levels, secrecy, and expertise. You can reliably put all those things together in the real world. You hear about people trying to solicit murder for hire and getting caught, and these people are generally idiots.
There was a magazine, I don’t think it has been made in the last 20 years, called Soldier of Fortune. It was supposedly for mercenaries, and idiots put ads in there trying to solicit hitmen. Then somebody from a police agency would generally respond, saying I’m your guy, and then you’d set up a meeting where some money would be turned over. Sometimes, there’d be some fake evidence that the person you wanted to be killed was killed, and eventually, you would be arrested for soliciting murder. Murder for hire seems to be something done by idiots and often responded to by idiots, and it just doesn’t seem like something that works as slickly as it’s usually presented in movies. What do you think?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That’s probably true. Most crimes are done simplistically, including some of the most serious. Where I’m living right now temporarily is one of the most likely maximum security prisons in the country. It’s the highest security federal prison out of Yukon Territory, or the province of British Columbia called Kent Institution. Years ago, when I was planning on doing an actual series of interviews with prisoners at the high end who have committed some of the worst crimes, I remember I communicated with the warden of that particular prison. So, I’m just right by it now. So, I don’t think criminals are known for being intelligent. You noted this when we discussed IQ and that many people have committed crimes. They have lower than average IQs, so they’re in prison, they’re off of the streets. Therefore, the general population who walk around has higher IQs than average, not 100, for instance, or whatever the area’s average is.
Rosner: I mean, there’s the old saying that crime doesn’t pay, and you could boil that down into saying that the effort that goes into crime, that same effort could deliver similar returns with less risk of horrible consequences, imprisonment and being forced to commit further acts of crime that would get you in even more trouble.
Jacobsen: If the crime and the effort put into it are above the person’s effort and intelligence level, then there’s a sliding scale of how likely they are to get caught.
Rosner: If you look at Mexico, which the cartels control, I don’t know how smart you need to need trust networks; you need you and a bunch of other savage motherfuckers together in an enterprise that is making everybody in the enterprise enough money or has the promise of making like the lower level people, a) they’re getting paid more money than they could get legitimately and they may be thinking there’s an opportunity for them to move up in the organization. So, given that you control Mexico, you’re somewhat immune to consequences because Mexico’s been made super corrupt. You’ve got this economic network built from huge profits, and somebody in the network needs to be reasonably intelligent. Nobody needs to be a genius. So, in that case, crime might pay for quite a while for years and decades. Getting out always seems to be problematic. If you’re in a powerful position in a cartel, I haven’t seen many stories of people who managed to tiptoe away from it. I mean, maybe there are, but I don’t know.
To make a lot of money in crime, you need organized crime and to be part of a structured system with many people whose criminal integrity has been established, which I think precludes the idea of just freelance assassins for hire. There have been hitmen in the mafia who’ve worked for several crime families, but their trustworthiness has been established within all those families that they vouch for; various families vouch for the guy. So, it’s not freelancing; it is still part of the established trust network.
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