"Happy": They wired this thing up with, like, five thousand volts. What kind of bank does that?
"Grumpy": A mob bank. I guess
the Joker's as crazy as they say.
When a crook robs an individual or organization without realizing that the victim has criminal ties and the ability to
hit back with means outside of the law. Realization is typically an "
Oh Crap!" moment.
Depending on the types of ties the victim has, the crooks might
get a warning that they've made a fatal mistake. Other times they won't find out until the first
drive-by on their mother's house.
This is a subtope of
Mugging the Monster. In that trope, the mugger is typically a
mook and the monster is a main character, while in this trope, the robber is typically a main character and the victim is a villain.
For cases where characters are deliberately robbing criminals because they think they deserve it, see
Just Like Robin Hood.
Examples
Film
Live-Action TV
- In one Burn Notice episode, Michael Weston once convinced some bank robbers that they were in the process of doing this.
- The Sopranos.
- In "46 Long", Christopher and Brendan Filone start hijacking trucks. The owner of the trucks pays Junior for protection and Junior orders them to stop, but their need to feed their drug addictions forces them to continue. In "Denial, Anger, Acceptance" Junior orders retaliation against them and Brendan is killed.
- Monk: A man attempts to steal coins from a gumball machine in a barbershop. One of them was a rare penny worth millions. Little did he know that that barbershop was a front for a mob family and they all start shooting at him. The man manages to get a hold of a gun, kills everybody in the shop, and attempts to make it look like a feuding mob had attacked them.
- Ziggy's backstory in Power Rangers RPM amounts to this. A low-level member of the mob itself, Ziggy got the chance to prove himself making a multi-million dollar shipment. But when he realized the shipment was of medical equipment that an orphanage of Littlest Cancer Patients sorely needed, he sent it to them instead (letting the mob think he took it himself so they wouldn't target the kids) and escaped into the wastelands outside the city. When he returned to civilization, he quickly got in with the Power Rangers through his new friend Dillon, which meant he was mostly protected from mob reprisals. Mostly.
Video Games
- The plot of Saints Row: The Third is kicked off by a bungled bank heist; the Saints find out the hard way that the bank they're holding up is Syndicate property.
