Smokescreen Crime

"No one looks for a bullet wound in a bomb-blast."

— John Watson, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

During an investigation, it comes to light that the crime the protagonists are investigating is merely a cover for the perpetrator's true objective, meaning the authorities have been chasing a false lead.

Examples include but are not limited to:

• A person who was Collateral Damage in a murder or attempted murder is revealed to have been the killer's true target.
• A person who is killed during a robbery is revealed to have been the target of an assassination and the robbery wasn't the true goal.
• A person robs a bank or a jewelry store, but steals something that no one knows is missing in addition to the money or jewels they stole to disguise their true motive.
• A criminal deliberately dupes the authorities into thinking they are going to commit one crime and then does another one the authorities never even considered.
• A criminal's actions are obscured by another crime happening concurrently which is so huge that it obscures the former crime.

More often than not, this type of plan will result in a Revealing Cover Up, especially if the cover-up crime involves murder.

Super-Trope to Serial Killings, Specific Target. Sister Trope to Infraction Distraction. Contrast Crime After Crime in which a person commits several other crimes after the initial one with less planning and coordination. See also Killed to Uphold the Masquerade and Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Outlaw Star: In "Final Countdown", a terrorist named Crackerjack plants a bomb on the Outlaw Star and threatens to detonate it unless Heifong is granted independence. The true purpose of this act of terrorism is to draw attention away from the robbing of a jewelry store whose security system was disabled when the power was cut in response to the decoy crime.
• Transformers: Robots in Disguise: In "Landfill", the Decepticons sabotage the Autobots' Space Bridge and launch a series of attacks across the city which the Autobots are unable to respond to because the malfunctioning bridge keeps taking them to the wrong locations. This is all a diversion to keep the Autobots preoccupied while Megatron and Scourge attack an energy research facility. The Autobots ultimately fix the problem with the bridge and head to the facility to deal with Megatron and Scourge.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Batman: It was long believed that the shooting of Thomas and Martha Wayne by Joe Chill was just a random robbery-homicide. Detective Comics #235 reveals that Chill was hired by mob boss Lex Moxon to kill Thomas as revenge for getting Moxon arrested and imprisoned. Bruce believes that the reason he wasn't killed that night was so that he could testify that his parents were simply the victims of a violent robbery, thus making it impossible to trace the deaths back to Moxon. This revelation is largely forgotten in subsequent comics but has influenced a few Batman adaptations as seen below.
  • Plastic Man (1943): In issue #42, Plastic Man apprehends a gang of criminals who are robbing a doll store. The robbery is actually a distraction created by Dr. Devious who intends to rob a diamond company just across the street.
  • Starman (DC Comics): The "Infernal Devices" storyline sees Mr. Pip committing a series of bombings across Opal City, leaving the heroes and the police baffled about his motivation. The epilogue reveals that Pip was hired to kill a man's wife; the other bombings were done to obscure the real motive and avoid having Pip's crimes traced back to the man who hired him.
  • Superman: During the One Year Later storyline, Luthor hires the Prankster to wreak havoc across Metropolis while he secretly breaks Kryptonite Man out of prison. After this experience, the Prankster starts providing services to other criminals as a distraction-for-hire.
• Spider-Man:
  • The Kingpin sometimes has his men commit minor crimes like carjackings and purse-snatchings to draw Spider-Man away from a major crime he has underway. They don't mind being used as a diversion since the Kingpin can always bail them out and provide them with good lawyers.
  • Spider-Man Beyond: Issue #88 reveals this to be the reason behind Beyond's plan to co-opt superheroes. By staging their own superhero battles, Beyond hopes to control the news cycle by keeping people's attention solely on fights between costumed individuals or groups while more important incidents and crimes fly under the radar. As Marcus Momplaisir points out, this plan would require Beyond to create their own supervillains for their heroes to fight, which Beyond is also doing.
• Preacher: Herr Starr is tasked with killing two journalists who are in a mental hospital, but to do it in such a way that the authorities don't investigate too deeply. Starr blows up the hospital, killing everyone inside and leaving the investigators with several hundred potential targets to sort through. This also avoids posthumously vindicating the journalists, who were sent to the asylum before they could reveal too much about the Grail.
• V for Vendetta: V starts his wave of terror by murdering or maiming a string of government officials who were once assigned to the Larkhill Detention Camp during the government's round-up of gays and immigrants, which leads Finch to discover that V was imprisoned there. However, Finch notes that every single other employee at Larkhill is now dead and the records of anyone who might have survived the camp are missing; with two of the officials dead, and the other left incurably insane, there is nobody who could identify V or guess at his true motives, meaning that the government has every reason to suspect that V's killings were just revenge against those specific victims. The reality is that the killings were only the beginning of a larger campaign to completely topple the government.

Films — Live-Action

• The Batman (2022): Initially, it is believed that Thomas and Martha Wayne were killed in a mugging gone wrong. However, Bruce uncovers that Martha was severely mentally ill and a journalist was planning to expose this despite Thomas begging him not to. In a moment of desperation, Thomas went to Carmine Falcone for help, who had the journalist killed. It is suggested that Falcone had Thomas killed to keep him from going public about Falcone's crimes, but the movie never makes it clear if this truly the case.
• The Dark Knight: The Joker announces that if Coleman Reese isn't killed in sixty minutes, he will blow up a hospital. While the authorities focus on protecting Reese and evacuating every hospital in Gotham, the Joker sneaks into Harvey Dent's hospital room and preys on the prosecutor's trauma to trigger his full descent into a murderous rage. Then he blows up THAT hospital (which has already been evacuated).
• Die Hard:
  • Die Hard: The Nakatomi building is taken hostage by a team of supposed radicals led by Hans Gruber. However, the team's true goals have nothing to do with politics; they're actually planning to steal $640 million in untraceable bearer bonds from the building's vault.
  • Die Hard with a Vengeance: Simon's plot involves detonating bombs all around New York City, forcing McClane to jump through hoops to find the others and convincing the police there is a bomb planted in an unidentified school. The end goal of all this chaos is to keep the authorities and emergency services occupied while Simon robs the Federal Reserve Bank on Wall Street. Not too surprising given he is the brother of Hans Gruber from the first movie.
• Inside Man: A gang of well-organized thieves hold people hostage in a bank. The "Rashomon"-Style retelling of the events obscures the gradual reveal of their true plan: to steal diamonds in a particular safe deposit box, as well as expose the bank president as a Nazi collaborator; the hostages are meant to delay the police while the thieves conceal the leader in a hiding hole inside the bank. The thieves then dress all the hostages in clothes identical to the ones they are wearing and release them all at once to conceal their escape. A week later, the gang's leader simply walks out of the bank with the goods.
• The Other Guys: A heavily-armed crew robs a jewelry store in a heist that involves the use of a wrecking ball. However, the perpetrators' true target is an adjoining accounting firm which they snuck into and altered the books.
• The Pearl of Death: The villains are after the titular pearl which is hidden in one of six china busts of Napoleon. To find the pearl, the villains hire the Creeper whose process involves killing the owners and then breaking open the busts to see which one contains it. The Creeper also makes it a point to destroy all china items that the victims possess to disguise the fact that he is looking for a particular pearl.
• The Pink Panther 2: The plot deals with the theft of valuable items by the Tornado, a Phantom Thief who has never been caught and whose identity has been unknown for years. The Dream Team find him dead from an apparent suicide with all the stolen items, except the Pink Panther which his suicide note says he destroyed. Everyone except Clouseau believes the case is closed. Clouseau turns out to be right: the real thief is actually Sonia Solandres, the Tornado's ex-lover, who framed him for the thefts so she could lure him out of hiding and kill him. As the Pink Panther was the only item that could be fenced by being cut into smaller gems, Sonia allowed the team to find the other items, while she kept the diamond for herself.
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: Professor Moriarty arranges for a group of anarchists to bomb the conference room at a peace summit in Paris as a diversion from the sniper he employs to shoot one of the VIPs at the conference just before the explosion goes off.
• Shooter: The main protagonist is framed for an assassination attempt on the U.S. President's life which resulted in the death of the Ethiopian archbishop, Desmond Mutumbo. It turns out that the archbishop was the real target all along, as he was threatening to expose a massacre in an Ethiopian village committed by the villains. Since directly killing Mutumbo would've resulted in an investigation as to why someone would want him dead, the villains made it look like he was collateral damage in an attempt to kill the president.
• Smokey and the Bandit: The Bandit leads law enforcement on a wild goose chase in his Trans Am in order to divert attention from his partner's truck full of illegally imported beer.
• Tenet: The Protagonist intends to steal a painting hidden in a high-security warehouse inside an airport. To that end, he hires a crew to hijack a cargo plane carrying gold on the runway and crash into the warehouse. This is to create a security breach that allows him to enter the airport, with the authorities assuming that the crash was either the result of a terrorist attack or an attempt to steal the gold that went wrong.
• Two-Minute Warning: The TV Re-Cut has the sniper fire at civilians at a football game to distract the police from a nearby art heist.
• Unknown (2011): Prince Shada's idealistic views have earned him multiple attempts on his life and it appears that Section 15 has been hired by his enemies to kill him. It is ultimately revealed that the villains' true target is Shada's friend Professor Bressler, who has developed a genetically modified breed of corn capable of surviving harsh climates, an invention which threatens big businesses. The villains' plan is to kill both Shada and Bressler with a bomb, making it look like Shada was killed by extremists from his country and Bressler was collateral damage.
• The X-Files: Fight the Future opens with a terrorist attack on a public building carried out by the Syndicate to conceal their experiments with the alien black oil from the public.

Literature

• The ABC Murders: The villain decided to murder his rich, childless, soon-to-be-widowed brother, whose name and city of residence both begin with the letter C. To hide this fact, the villain first murders people whose names and cities match A and B, respectively, and sets up a traveling salesman whose route includes the A and B cities with the initials A.B.C. as a fall guy.
• Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident: The B'wa Kell goblin terrorist group are noted as having attacked several facilities belonging to technology magnate Opal Koboi. Later, it's revealed that the attacks were a smokescreen to disguise the fact that Koboi is the one funding them in the first place.
• The Expanse: The purpose of the Free Navy dropping asteroids on Earth is to draw everyone's attention away from them also stealing the only known protomolecule sample and seizing control of the Medina station as part of the deal with a fleet of renegade Martians who called dibs on an alien planet possessing some interesting precursor technology.
• Full Metal Panic!: Gauron seeks to cover up kidnapping Kaname on her school trip by blowing up the plane her class was on. Under the circumstances, nobody would be able to tell she hadn't even been on the plane when it exploded.
• Sherlock Holmes:
  • "The Six Napoleons": An unknown man breaks into people's houses, takes out a plaster bust of Napoleon and smashes it to pieces outside. Lestrade thinks it's a maniac when he brings it to Holmes' attention, but it's quickly figured out that the culprit worked in the workshop that made the busts. He was part of a gang of thieves who stole a pearl and then fled his associates, hiding the pearl in a bust moments before being arrested for a different crime.
  • "The Abbey Grange": Three robbers break into a country house, kill the owner, tie his wife to a chair and make off with some silver. Unfortunately for the police, the silver was found in a pond outside and the presumed thieves were arrested in New York, meaning they have to look for new culprits. It was actually self-defense, the wife's platonic lover was outside and fought with her abusive husband, killing him. He helped set up the break-in story, and is Let Off by the Detective once Holmes tracks him down.
  • "The Reigate Squire": A country landowner's house is broken into and several Noodle Implements like candlesticks, a book, and a ball of twine are stolen. A few days later another house is robbed and the thief kills the coachman to escape. It was actually a murder: the coachman was blackmailing his employers, whom he'd seen breaking into the first house to try and steal legal documents.
  • The Sign of Fear, an Expanded Universe novel by Robert Ryan. During World War One, a British extremist organisation kidnaps the government board set up to determine the level of compensation for mutilated soldiers, and starts mutilating them in turn as a protest over the poor compensation rates. Holmes and Watson realise the actual target is the board member who works for the Treasury, to frighten him into helping them rob the secret location where sterling bank notes are printed. But even the robbery is a cover; the real plot is to substitute forging printing plates for the real ones. The Big Bad (who may be working for the Germans or Irish republicans) will be able to print genuine bank notes while the country will be thrown into financial chaos once the substitution is discovered.
• The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean: The antagonist breaks into a bioweapons facility and subsequently threatens to commit a bio-terrorist act with the stuff he stole. The situation is all the more dire when it appears that he's unaware he stole a top-secret bio-superweapon in addition to much less deadly bioweapons. But this is all a multi-level ruse. Not only is the antagonist merely pretending to be unaware of how dangerous the weapon is to get the police on edge, he does it so that London will be evacuated and he can walk into every bank vault he desired.
• Three Act Tragedy: An aged clergyman is killed by poison, and a respectable doctor is killed in a similar fashion at a different party that has the same guest list. This is meant to mislead the investigators into thinking the first victim was the intended target and the second one was silenced for discovering something about the killer. In truth, the second victim was the true target, and the first one was randomly chosen as a cover.
• Warrior Cats: In Forest of Secrets, Tigerclaw plots to kill Bluestar, the leader of the ThunderClan, in order to take her position. To carry this out, he lures a pack of rogues into the ThunderClan camp as a distraction, then sneaks into Bluestar's den to kill her with no interference.
• Worm: Coil uses the Undersiders gang to rob a bank on a day the only available local heroes in Brockton Bay available were the teenage Wards. With the Wards distracted and no other major heroes available to respond, Coil is able to complete his true objective — kidnapping a young and powerful precognitive only he is aware of.

Live-Action TV

• 9-1-1: In "Ocean's 9-1-1", two thieves fake a chemical attack on a bank so that no one notices them stealing money from an armored truck parked in front of the bank. Then it's revealed that one of the two thieves used the armored truck robbery as a cover to steal diamonds from the bank's vault.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: In the season 7 finale, Jake and Charles arrest a man who caused a citywide blackout by getting drunk and driving into a power substation. Jake and Charles notice that something is off when the man is not only sober but is revealed to be a recovering alcoholic who has been clean for two years. It turns out that the man simply caused the blackout so his friends could rob a bank unimpeded.
• Burn Notice: In "Sins of Omission", Michael breaks into a high-security lab to put back a certain item. To "explain" the breach (without implicating the person who'd stolen the item in the first place), he grabs some expensive-looking items and tosses them in the trash, making it look like they'd stolen something else.
• Castle: In one episode, a group of thieves break into a secure building and steal some codes. The code theft is actually a diversion for their real target: a nerve gas from a lab in the same building.
• Criminal Minds: The villains of "Lo-Fi" and "Mayhem" are a New York terrorist cell who commit seemingly random acts of violence to cause a citywide state of panic. Their endgame is to take advantage of the chaos caused by their actions to assassinate a government official.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • "Condemned": Wilson Fisk decides that Detective Christian Blake is a liability that he needs to get rid of. So he has a corrupt ESU sniper on his payroll gun down Blake and two uniformed cops outside an abandoned building where Matt Murdock and Vladimir Ranskahov are holed up along with a rookie cop who was overpowered and tied up by Matt. The corrupt ESU team that get sent in to "rescue" the rookie cop proceed to murder said cop as well. Thanks to Fisk's influence over the press, he's able to spin the cop killings as the work of the Devil of Hell's Kitchen (Matt) rather than targeted assassinations.
  • "Nelson v. Murdock": Leland Owlsley and Madame Gao conspire to have Fisk's girlfriend Vanessa Marianna killed because they think she's making him go soft. They do so by poisoning her champagne, along with that of several other guests at Fisk's charity gala (Vanessa survives because Fisk immediately rushes her to the hospital). As a result, it looks like Vanessa ended up the victim of an assassination attempt against Fisk himself.
  • "Blindsided": Matt visits the prison where Fisk was held to get information on Fisk's stay there. Unfortunately for him, Fisk has set up a trap in the event one of the lawyers who put him away happened to stop by the prison. After the nurse injects Matt with a sedative, Fisk remotely orders the guards and inmates to attack Matt, and cause a riot in order to make it look like he got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Matt manages to escape the riot thanks to the help of several Albanian inmates, who help him past the guards after providing him with the identity of the inmate Fisk paid to shank him. However, Fisk has planned another contingency for if the riot failed to kill Matt, as he's had Matt's cab driver replaced with one of his henchmen, who then proceeds to drive Matt into the river.
  • Over the course of season 3, Fisk manipulates FBI agent Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter into wearing a Daredevil suit and committing a series of terrorist attacks for him. The attacks serve to discredit the real Daredevil (Matt) and those allied with him, while also providing a cover for the death of certain individuals Fisk wants disposed of.
    • "The Devil You Know": For his first mission, Dex attacks the New York Bulletin in order to silence Jasper Evans before he can go on the record about being paid to shank Fisk as part of Fisk's scheme to manipulate the FBI into letting him out of prison. First, he murders a bunch of Karen's coworkers, critically injures Matt after a drawn out fight around the office, then proceeds to wound Karen's boss Mitchell Ellison and Foggy, and finally finishes by shooting Evans dead with Karen's gun. As a result, the public are once again led to believe that Daredevil is a terrorist, Karen's reputation is tarnished by extension, and Evans just looks like another victim. Problem is, no one signed off on Evans' release from prison thanks to Fisk having cooked the books. So his turning up dead in the midst of a terrorist attack when he should be in solitary for the shanking serves to finally convince Ray Nadeem of what Karen and Foggy have been trying to tell him all this time, that Fisk is using him as a pawn.
    • "Karen": Having found out from Karen herself that she murdered James Wesley, Fisk decides to have her killed as revenge and tasks Dex with carrying it out. Dex dons the Daredevil costume and attacks Matt's church, where Karen is in hiding. Matt shows up to save Karen from Dex, but by the end of the fight, Father Lantom and two bystanders are killed, and Matt and a few other civilians are wounded. Between this attack and the previous attack on the Bulletin, Fisk is able to sway the press into believing that he was framed by a vicious terrorist.
  • Prior to the events of season 2, Frank Castle's wife and children were killed in a gang shooting at Central Park. District Attorney Samantha Reyes had lured the gangs to the park with the intent of taking them down, but chose not to clear the area to avoid showing her hand. The twelfth episode of season 2 and the Punisher's own series reveal that Frank's former commanding officer had taken advantage of the sting to try and kill Frank to make sure he never spoke of the atrocities his men committed in Afghanistan, hoping to make it look like Frank and his family were simply collateral damage in a gang war.
    Frank Castle: What are you saying? You killed my family to get to me?
    Carson Wolf: Misdirection. A good player hides his hand, Frank. We figured if there were enough dead bodies, nobody would really care to look close enough at any given one of them. It was a calculated risk. You understand, right?
• Elementary: In "End of Watch", a police officer is murdered by a masked man so that his funeral will draw most of the department away from a planned robbery of the Emergency Services Unit's armory. The murdered officer's funeral is cancelled after Holmes and Watson discover he was stealing department weapons and fencing them to feed his drug addiction, forcing the killer to murder a second one.
• The Good Guys: One episode has the Villain of the Week set up a bank robbery to be performed by expendable henchmen (including "the worst getaway driver in the business"). This was only meant to draw the entire Dallas police force to that location so the villain could set off explosives on the bridge between the cops and a jewelry store, which was his real target. Jack and Dan figure out the plot just in time to scare the thieves off, but aren't able to catch them. Their presence does make the legitimately dangerous crooks wonder if their Manipulative Bastard of a boss had set them up to be the fall guys, however, leading them all to kill each other off.
• Gotham: The mystery of who killed the Thomas and Martha Wayne is a long-running plot thread throughout the show and the deeper Bruce digs, the more it becomes clear that it wasn't a simple robbery-homicide. It's ultimately revealed that the Waynes' deaths were ordered by Hugo Strange because Thomas was opposing Strange's experiments at Indian Hill.
• Grantchester: In episode #8.3, the murderer, after killing the porter, cuts a priceless painting from its frame and takes it with them to make it look like the porter had been killed after interrupting a robbery.
• The Irrational:
  • "Point and Shoot": The murder of the week was intended to cover up several local cops and a judge being on the take from a corrupt multinational corporation.
  • "Scorched Earth": The culprit of the week sets off a string of fires near unhoused camps in order to make the burning of a valuable house look like the work of a serial arsonist.
  • "Reciprocity": Alec and Marisa learn the truth about the bombing that Marisa has been investigating all season (and which left Alex so heavily scarred): Kevin Sanford accidentally killed Natalie Price, a campaign aide, and in a panic, called up Bob Caswith, an old war buddy who worked for the FBI. Caswith helped cover up Natalie's overdose, then arranged for a bombing in which she was supposedly killed.
• Law & Order:
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: In "Raw", a grisly school shooting by a white supremacist is eventually traced back to a pair of greedy white adoptive parents who put out a hit on their adopted black son so they could collect on his life insurance policy. By sheer dumb luck, the white supremacist happened to be affiliated with a terrorist group, and thus the SVU was too busy investigating their many other crimes to look at the insurance angle from the start.
  • Law & Order: Organized Crime: The episodes "Deliver Us From Evil" and "End of Innocence" deal with the vandalization and bombing of a local mosque in what appears to be just a hate crime. However, the detectives investigate further and discover that the mosque's refugee charity was being used as a cover for a smuggling operation — the bombing of the mosque was to obscure the assassination of the imam to prevent the operation from being exposed.
• Leverage:
  • "The Bank Shot Job": This is wrongfully assumed to be the case In-Universe. The team are trying to pull a con on the corrupt Judge Roy when the bank they are in is taken hostage by a father and son duo who need money to save the mother from drug dealers. Roy gets into a struggle with the father for the gun and accidentally shoots Nate in the shoulder, causing a panicked Sophie to cry out Nate's real name. This leads to Roy realizing that Nate and Sophie are running a con on him, but he mistakenly believes that the robbers are in on it and that the robbery is simply a cover for Nate to take his money without Roy suspecting Nate's involvement.
  • "The Three Card Monte Job": Nate's father, Jimmy Ford, triggers alarms at three different banks to make the police think that all three banks are being robbed. The Leverage team initially believes that Jimmy's intention is to spread the police thin by obscuring which bank is being hit, allowing Jimmy's team to get in and out with ease. Nate then recalls his father trying to teach him how to play Three-Card Monte, and finally realizes the trick to the game -- the Queen of Hearts card is never actually on the table. This principle is being applied to Jimmy's plan: his goal is not to rob any of the banks, but to steal a file that could bring down several Irish mob families from a precinct's evidence locker, which is now vulnerable thanks to the chaos caused by the three false alarms. Nate turns Jimmy's plan on its head by allowing him to steal the evidence, but then contacts the Irish families and tells them that if Jimmy isn't paid a hefty sum, it goes right back to the evidence locker, effectively putting a death mark on his father's head. Nate does show mercy by sending his father to Ireland on a steamer under an assumed name.
  • "The Ho Ho Ho Job": The team learns that Hardison's nemesis Chaos is running an identity theft scheme at the mall from which their client was fired. The team stop him by shutting down the mall server, only to discover that Chaos's true target is the federal depository which Hardison also shut down when he deactivated the mall server.
• Lois & Clark:
  • "The Prankster": The titular Villain of the Week plants a (fake) bomb in one of Metropolis's science research buildings, framing it as an act of love for Lois Lane. Every building in the area is evacuated while Superman locates the bomb, allowing the Prankster and his partner to steal cesium and four pounds of titanium from Whitmore Scientific Labs.
  • "The Phoenix": The newly resurrected Lex Luthor plants a bomb in Perry White's office. While the bomb is being dealt with by Superman and the bomb squad, Luthor steals plastic explosives and a detonator from the bomb squad's headquarters for his latest scheme.
  • "Contact": Bob Fences abducts Lois and hypnotizes her into thinking she was abducted by aliens and implants suggestions into her mind to throw herself into danger. While Superman is busy saving Lois, Fences steals items needed for his plan to hold the world hostage for profit.
• Monk:
  • "Mr. Monk and the Candidate": The pilot episode has two Smokescreen Crimes: the robbery-turned-homicide of a woman named Nicole Vasquez and the killing of Jason Ronstadt, the bodyguard of mayoral candidate Warren St. Claire. Not only do these two deaths have more to them than meets the eye, but it turns out that they are connected and were orchestrated by the same person. Nicole had discovered that Gavin Lloyd, Warren's campaign manager was embezzling money from the campaign; to silence her, Lloyd hired an assassin to kill Nicole and make it look like a burglary that turned violent. However, Lloyd had initially gone to Jason Ronstadt to bribe him into killing Nicole, which Jason had refused. Fearing that Jason would expose him, Lloyd had Jason killed by the same assassin. The shooting being public made it look like it was an attempt on Warren's life and the bodyguard was just collateral damage.
  • "Mr. Monk and The Missing Granny": An old woman is kidnapped from her house by two members of a radical group (which Monk quickly determines is a frame-up) with the ransom being to serve a decent meal to the homeless. The woman is released unharmed after the ransom is paid, but Monk later realizes that the kidnapping was a cover-up to steal her antique chair which the kidnappers used to carry her out of her house.
  • "Mr. Monk and The Sleeping Suspect" : The killer of the week finds a way to send bombs through the mail months after he deposited them with the intent of killing his siblings for their inheritance. To give himself an alibi, the killer deliberately provoked Stottlemeyer and Disher into a car chase in the hopes that he would be arrested and be in jail at the time the bombs were delivered. The plan works a little too well and the killer falls into coma after crashing his car during the chase.
  • "Mr. Monk and The Other Woman": The villain of this episode is a man named Tod Katterskill who discovered that his late uncle was cutting him out of his will. He forged a fake a will and broke into the office of his uncle's lawyer to plant the will and kill the lawyer who would have identified it as a fake. To cover his tracks, Tod picked a random file and burned it, making the police think the subject of the file was the killer.
  • " Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine": Two years prior to the events of the episode, a woman helped her husband commit a robbery, during which a driver of the armored car they targeted was killed. Racked with guilt, the women killed herself and left a suicide note that not only confessed to the crime but also stated when and where a new robbery by her husband and his accomplice would take place. The husband shot Leland Stottlemeyer which resulted in all available police officers giving chase, including the police officers that were in the apartment from which his wife had jumped out of. This allowed the husband to sneak into the house, steal the wife's suicide note and leave a fake one that made no mention of the robbery.
  • "Mr. Monk and The Election": Natalie is shot at by a sniper who leaves a threat in the form of a note demanding she drop out of her race to be elected for the school board. Monk discovers that the sniper's real goal isn't to make Natalie drop out of the race but rather to get his hands on a copying machine she is using which contains a paper tying him to illegal arms deals.
  • "Mr. Monk and The Secret Santa": The killer is Alice Westergren, who murders her ex-lover Terry Chasen with a bottle of poisoned wine. She starts a Secret Santa exchange and arranges for Captain Stottlemeyer to be Terry's Secret Santa. Then she delivers a bottle of port (which she knows Stottlemeyer hates) anonymously to the captain making it look like a local body shop sent it. Alice steals Stottlemeyer's intended gift to Terry and recommends re-gifting the port to him to save face, which the captain does. Terry drinks it and dies, making it look like he was the victim of a failed attempt on Stottlemeyer's life and sending the police after the completely wrong set of suspects. Only Monk realizes that the suspect isn't the killer because he passed up a much better opportunity to kill the Stottlemeyer months ago.
  • "Mr. Monk and The Actor": A man breaks into a jewelry store by smashing through the wall of a bar, steals some items, and (accidentally) kills the proprietor. It's later discovered that the bar had a mural of him with his date, whom he had accidentally killed and he was trying to get rid of any evidence they were together, not just to avoid being tied to her death but because he didn't want his wife knowing about his cheating on her.
  • "Mr. Monk On Wheels": The plot is kicked off by the theft of a bike which is later found in a dumpster. The bike itself was not important; the thief was hired to steal the bike's eight-digit keypad lock whose password was the same one used for a safe containing genetically modified seeds that are worth a fortune.
• Mr. Robot: In "Kill Process", a riot breaks out at the E-Corps recovery building in New York, and Elliot works desperately to divert the files stored on-site to seventy-one other facilities. At the end of the episode, Elliot learns that the riot was just a diversion to keep everyone busy while the Dark Army attacked those buildings.
• The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo: A string of arsons on abandoned houses draws the attention of local police enforcement. It is later discovered that the culprit is a local veterinarian who is trafficking exotic animals by hiding them in the abandoned houses, and the purpose of the fires was to destroy any material evidence. Fittingly, the episode is titled "The Smoke Screen Case".
• NCIS: In "Collateral Damage", four gunmen rob the on-base bank at Quantico and fatally shoot a guard in the process. A short time later, the robbers' getaway car is found burning on a side road with the stolen money still inside; the robbery was a cover for the true motive of killing the guard.
• Republic of Doyle: One episode begins with Des being arrested (while wearing a snorkel) after robbing a convenience store and a male strip club while drunk, and leading every police officer in St. John's across the city to distract them from the real target that evening, a priceless statue.
• Sister Boniface Mysteries: In "My Brother's Keeper", the killer steals a valuable painting from the gallery (and later plants it in Alfie Lynch's room as a Frame-Up) to make it look like the painting was the actual target and Gerry Ardwell's murder was just collateral damage, when Ardwell was the real target all along.
• Spooks: In "Hostage Takers", Ros is trapped with a bunch of Saudi VIPs when a gang of gunmen claiming to be Al-Qaeda militants take hostages and start demanding the release of imprisoned members. Ros notices that one of the gunmen has a Yemeni Jewish accent and deduces that they are actually a Mossad black ops team trying to prevent the planned sale of nuclear power technology to Saudi Arabia.
• In season 3 of Star Trek: Picard, Vadic and her mooks break into Daystrom Station and steal a portal generator. While a devastating weapon in its own right (it destroys a Starfleet recruitment center and causes a lot of problems for the USS Titan), it also distracts Starfleet from the fact that she stole something even more devastating: the preserved (former) body of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, which has an organic Borg tranceiver that's crucial in a plot to assimilate The Federation.

Tabletop Games

• Shadowrun: A decker hired to break into a company's computer on a specific mission (e.g. to steal data) could try to make their objective less obvious by doing random damage (deleting unrelated files, crashing the system, etc.).
• Traveller: Tradewar is when two corporations commit illegal acts against each other to gain a commercial advantage. One possible maneuver is for a corporation to carry out a tradewar attack (such as burglarizing a building to steal industrial secrets) and attempt to conceal its true nature by stealing other valuable materials or burning down the building to hide the evidence.

Video Games

• Batman: The Telltale Series: Martha Wayne intended to expose her husband's criminal ties to Carmine Falcone and Hamilton Hill. When Hill learned of this, he hired Joe Chill to kill both Thomas and Martha, disguising the assassination as a robbery-homicide.
• Hitman 2: Silent Assassin: One of 47's targets is a Malaysian hacker named Charlie Sidjan who has stolen a secret American encryption algorithm capable of allowing warheads to penetrate the United States' missile shield. Before killing him, 47 steals money from Sidjan's safe to make it look like Sidjan's assassination was a robbery gone wrong.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations: In case 3-2, Luke Atmey steals an urn while disguised as Mask☆DeMasque in order to establish an alibi for a murder he committed during the robbery. His goal is to invoke double jeopardy through a larceny conviction.
• Resident Evil 6: Neo-Umbrella launches a bio-terror attack on Lanshiang as a diversion while they prepare to launch another, even more deadly attack on Tatchi, with the goal of spreading the C-Virus across the globe.
• Spider-Man: Miles Morales: In Mission 8 ("Time To Rally"), Rio's campaign rally against Roxxon is attacked by the Underground. Miles deals with them before realizing that the Underground's attack is a distraction so the Tinkerer can steal Nuform from a Roxxon transport.

Western Animation

• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: In "Mass Transit Trouble", Robotnik has his minions attack three different locations, with Sonic seemingly foiling them and running himself ragged in the process. However, Robotnik reveals that he has planted bombs in all of the locations and the attacks were just a cover.
• Arcane: Jinx goes on a rampage on Progress Day, murdering several enforcers and blowing up a building, all to create a distraction while she steals a refined crystal.
• Gargoyles: The Weird Sisters actually manage to get away with this: they have Demona and Macbeth steal the Phoenix Gate, the Eye of Odin, the Grimorum Arcanorum, and Coldstone's body. As Coldstone is much larger and more noticeable, and as the other three objects were only being held by the Gargoyles to keep it out of other people's hands, they only initially notice Coldstone's absence, which was exactly what the Weird Sisters were hoping for.
• Justice League: In "Wild Cards", the Joker takes over TV stations in Las Vegas and announces that he has placed a series of bombs that will destroy the Vegas Strip in 22 minutes and 51 seconds if they are not stopped by the Justice League. The League succeeds in locating and disarming the bombs, only for the Joker to reveal that the bombs were not the real threat — that would be his metahuman minion Ace who has the ability to hypnotize people through eye contact and since everyone in Vegas has been glued to the screen since the Joker's plan went into action, they are now under Ace's thrall. Thankfully, Batman is able to foil Joker's plan by turning Ace against him.
• In the penultimate arc of Miraculous Ladybug, Chloe, under Lila's guidance, launches a string of increasingly brazen behavior that includes getting her teacher and principal fired, deposing her own father as Mayor of Paris, and being akumatized into Queen Mayor and turning Paris into a dictatorship, before finally being defeated by Ladybug and Cat Noir and getting banished to New York. From the outside, all of this seems to be Chloe having an epic self-destructive tantrum because her teachers stopped letting her get away with everything. Meanwhile, her actions distracted everyone from Lila quietly stealing personal items from Gabriel Agreste and Tomoe Tsurugi, the city's two most influential figures, including one of Tsurugi's dedicated laptops.
• Phineas and Ferb: In part one of "Where's Perry?", Doofenshmirtz uses a device that locks away everyone's gym equipment with the supposed intent of making his enemies too out of shape to stop him from taking over the world. After Perry the Platypus destroys the device and leaves, Doofenshmirtz reveals that this scheme was just a smokescreen to distract from his true goal: planting a mind control device on Major Monogram, the head of O.C.W.A.
• Young Justice:
  • "Revelation": The Light come to believe that the heroes might suspect an alliance of supervillains has formed, so they have one of their minions, Count Vertigo, organize a separate supervillain team, the Injustice League, to openly attack several major cities around the world. The heroes take them down and assume the crisis has been averted, leaving the Light free to keep scheming (at least until the heroes do eventually become aware of them).
  • "Misplaced": Klarion and his allies cast a spell that splits the world in two, with one dimension for adults and one for children and teens. While the heroes are eventually able to trace the magic to its source and stop them, they fail to notice that in the confusion, Sportsmaster and the Riddler have stolen Starro's tissue sample from STAR Labs. Since Klarion loves causing chaos for fun, the heroes had no reason to suspect a larger scheme.

Real Life

• This Cracked.com article talks about some of the methods drug smugglers use. One method of keeping the smugglers' cars from being noticed is to have a "heat" car go barreling down the highway at full speed and get pulled over for speeding. While the police are detaining the driver, the actual smuggler drives by undetected.
• Mark Hofmann committed three bombings (one of which he was the target) in order to divert attention away from his fraud schemes.

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