Episode 98 - Chas Allen (Real-life subject of "American Animals")

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Higher Ground

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2018

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Six years out of prison, Chas Allen joins the show to talk about the time him and his three college friends attempted to steal 12 million dollars worth of rare artwork from their campus library.(Yes, this really happened.)Since then, the incident - later dubbed the "Transylvania book heist" - has been transformed into a film called "American Animals", now out in theaters across the country. While it captures much of what unfolded in Lexington, Kentucky, 2004, there's more to the story. To Chas' story. Today, he was ready to tell it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin. But ultimately I think some of this came from siding with my mom and you know all the challenges we were all facing with the divorce, yeah, it turned out that all the sudden I thought at one point that I had net worth of over $300,000 and I'm working towards becoming a millionaire and retiring at 26 all of a sudden I had nothing.
0:45.0	And I had been building my life towards that and I felt like he was taken away and I felt betrayed and I felt very lost. I didn't know I didn't know
0:56.8	what to do moving forward. I didn't know what my life meant and I didn't really it got to a point that you know the guys have
1:07.8	been talking about the highest and I just walked in to where Warren lived in the basement one day.
1:15.0	And I said, fuck it.
1:18.0	I'll do it.
1:20.0	That was Chaz Allen. I'm Sam Fregoso and this is Talk Easy.
1:26.0	Welcome to the show. Oh, In the past few weeks a new film has begun to make waves across the country.
1:54.0	It's called American Animals, and it's a retelling of the Transylvania book
1:58.0	heist in which four college students attempted to steal first edition books and paintings priced at over $12 million.
2:06.6	They didn't try stealing these rare pieces of art out of a museum or a private collector's home, but instead out of their school's library.
2:17.0	Here's a bit from the trailer.
2:21.0	This library is home to the most valuable book in the United States.
2:26.0	12 million dollars.
2:30.0	You really need to see how easy this is going to be.
2:33.0	Oh, you know this from all your previous ice?
2:36.0	Oh, you know this from all your previous ice?
2:37.0	Oh, moles.
2:38.0	Can I just say how dumb this entire thing is?
2:45.0	How do you know no one's going to get hurt?
2:47.0	I don't want you waking up years from now
2:52.0	wondering what could have happened and who you could have been.
	...

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