The World's Worst Getaway
Marseille, 2018. Three men rob a jewelry store. The robbery goes perfectly. Everything after that goes catastrophically wrong.
The getaway car won't start — flat battery. They try to push-start it — it's an automatic. They attempt a carjacking — the driver locks the doors. They try to hail a taxi — nobody stops. They run — straight into a dead end.
Police found them sitting on the curb. Out of breath. Still holding the jewelry.
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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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