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.
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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.

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.
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