Ralphie comes up with what he considers a great money-making scheme, but he needs the help of his girlfriend, Tina, to make the plan work.

The first time the couple puts Ralphie’s plan into action, Tina walks into a bank and hands a note to a teller. All this time Tina is talking constantly on her cell phone.

The note is one of those "gimme the money, or else" type notes. What she’s doing on her cell phone is giving Ralphie a second-by-second description of what’s happening inside the bank. Ralphie is parked outside waiting for Tina to come out of the bank with the money. He’s the get-away driver.

This doesn’t sound like a well-thought-out plan, but it works. Not once. Not twice, but four times it works on banks in Northern Virginia near Washington, D.C.

Of course you know that banks have video cameras. Tina is in disguise and photographed many times in each of the four bank hold-ups.

It doesn’t take the cops long to figure out how to remove Tina’s disguise (electronically) using a photo editing program. The finished photo is distributed to a wide area around the Nation’s Capital and in a short time somebody drops a dime to the cops and Tina and Ralphie are busted.

Police recover only $5,000 of the $48,000 stolen from four banks. Tina confesses that they needed the money for rent. Tracing the couple’s spending spree, cops find they spent most of the money on things like designer clothing, a giant-screen plasma television set, and, oh yes, they spent $1,500 for a Chihuahua hairless Mexican puppy dog whom they named "Capone."

Tina got 12 years for her crime spree and her boyfriend got 12 years as a co-conspirator. As one TV reporter aptly described the crime spree: "They robbed banks using a cell phone — now they’ll spend time in a cell."