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.
Also in the network
More from 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.
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.
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.
New episodes every week
Get notified when new cases drop across the network.