Dumb Crimes Europe

The Instagram Fugitive

A Dutch fugitive convicted in absentia in 2010 spent nine years on the run — through Spain, Portugal and Greece, on four fake identities, paying in cash, leaving no digital trail. By 2019 he had settled in Mallorca and concluded, after nine quiet years, that the European Arrest Warrant was no longer being actively pursued. He began a routine. Every Thursday afternoon he ate lunch at the same beachfront restaurant — seafood platter, white wine, coffee, view of the Mediterranean. He photographed the meal. He posted it to Instagram. He let the platform attach the geotag. He used his actual face. He used the name on his most recent fake identity, which was traceable through standard means. A relative of one of his original victims, scrolling Instagram in Rotterdam, recognised him. She called the Dutch police. The Spanish Policia Nacional set up a surveillance position at the restaurant. The next Thursday, at the table he had been using for months, two plain-clothes officers were already seated — holding menus, ordering drinks. He arrived at 2 PM. He photographed his lunch. He was arrested before the food got cold. Maren and Ellis — sorry, Kit and Eden, on the geotag as a calendar invitation to the police, and on the fact that the European Arrest Warrant is, in every case, still active.

The Unlucky Bike Thief

Copenhagen, 2016. In a city with five times more bicycles than people, a man levers open a low-grade wheel lock on a black Christiania cargo bike — a recognisable, expensive three-wheeled bike, the kind a Copenhagen parent uses for a school run — and rides it northbound up a narrow side street. He has been riding for ninety seconds when a car hits him from behind at twenty kilometres an hour. He is thrown over the wooden cargo box onto the pavement. The driver of the car gets out and walks over. The driver is not a stranger. The driver is the owner of the bike — who had been at a café across the street, returned to the rack, seen the bike was missing, seen the back of a man riding it up the street, got into his car, and given chase. The thief, lying on the pavement next to the stolen bike, has a brief and confused conversation with the owner. He asks, by police record, whose bike it is. The owner tells him. The thief says, in Danish, oh — three times. The Politi arrive seven minutes later. Kit and Eden on Copenhagen civilian engagement, the wrong vehicle for a getaway, and the four-thousand-kilo collision that ended a ninety-second crime spree.

The Snoring Burglar

Cologne, 2014. A burglar forces a kitchen window of an empty apartment, takes a laptop, takes some cash, finishes the job in under an hour. Then he sits down on the homeowner's bed for what he tells himself will be sixty seconds of rest. The owner returns at 2 PM. Opens the door. Hears, from the master bedroom, the sound of a stranger snoring in his bed. The bed had been made that morning. The shoes are now placed neatly at its foot. The German Polizei arrive seven minutes later and walk through an entry that one of them later describes as one of the most relaxed arrests of a burglary in progress they have ever conducted — because the suspect, throughout, is snoring. They can hear him from three rooms away. Kit and Eden on the man who came to Cologne to commit a burglary, brought twenty-six hours of accumulated sleep deprivation with him, and lay down on a memory-foam mattress. The homeowner replaced the bed.

The Courthouse Robber

Naples, 2016. A man cases a small commercial-looking building across the street from where he is sitting. He sees a counter, clerks behind it, modest cash transactions, people walking in and out with briefcases. He concludes — without entering, without reading the brass plaque on the door — that the building is a small private bank. It is not a bank. The plaque, in plain Italian, reads Tribunale di Napoli, Annesso. The annexed offices of the Naples courthouse. He chooses a Wednesday morning to rob it, which is — for reasons he does not yet know — the day Naples processes preliminary criminal hearings on organised-crime cases. The building, when he walks in with a balaclava and a handgun at 10:31 AM, is full of lawyers, court clerks, judges, and twelve Carabinieri. Kit and Eden on the man who chose, of all the buildings in Naples, the one with the highest concentration of armed police, on the day the police were already inside it, at the hour they had assembled.

The Drug Delivery Pigeons

Bucharest, 2015. A medium-security Romanian prison runs, as part of a sanctioned rehabilitation programme, a small pigeon-keeping loft in one of its exercise yards. The inmates raise the pigeons from hatching. Some of the inmates are, in their pre-incarceration lives, experienced pigeon racers. Pigeons return to where they were raised. Pigeons can be trained to carry small loads. Pigeons can be carried out of a prison by visiting volunteers, released across Bucharest, and they will fly — by every measure of homing-pigeon biology — back home through the air over a twelve-metre concrete wall. For about eight months, the inmates run an air-mail smuggling operation. Tiny custom canvas backpacks. Cannabis pellets. Wrapped SIM cards. Approximately fifteen to twenty deliveries a day, in aggregate, several kilograms of contraband and over four thousand SIM cards. The operation ends because a pigeon gets lost on a delivery flight. A child finds it on a Bucharest sidewalk three streets from the prison. The child, after some consideration, opens the backpack. Maren — sorry, Kit and Eden, on Roman-empire-era logistics, the limits of pigeon reliability, and what gets through a security camera tuned to detect humans.