The Spider-Man Burglar
Turin, 2017. A man identifies a third-floor apartment as a burglary target. The owners are away. The doors are locked. So he stands in the street and looks up. He grabs the wrought iron of a first-floor balcony and pulls himself up. Then the second floor. Then he reaches for the third — and his trousers catch on a decorative flourish of the railing.
He spends the next hour suspended three storeys up, hanging by his denim. His hands cannot reach the third-floor balcony. His feet cannot reach the second. The fabric, against all expectations, holds. A crowd gathers in the street. People come out of nearby buildings. Phones are pointed at him from every angle. The Vigili del Fuoco arrive with a ladder. A firefighter climbs up. Determines that he cannot simply be lifted because his trousers are structurally load-bearing. Cuts him down.
Kit and Eden on the man who made his face the most photographed object in Turin for an afternoon, the load-bearing properties of denim, and the day when wrought iron decided to do its job.
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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.
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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