The Speedboat
Strängnäs, Sweden. 31 July 2018. A Tuesday morning. Eight AM. Strängnäs Cathedral — a working thirteenth-century church about a hundred kilometres west of Stockholm — is open to visitors. Two men walk in during visiting hours, smash a display case open in front of tourists, and run out with two funeral crowns and an orb from the Swedish royal collection. Four hundred years of heritage, in their hands.
They run four hundred metres through the city in broad daylight, reach the waterfront at Lake Mälaren, board a waiting speedboat, and disappear across open water before police can get to the cathedral. It is the most cinematic theft Maren has ever researched.
The boat is found abandoned. The thieves are not. The break in the case comes months later, in Denmark, from a routine traffic stop that connects a man named Stjepan Filipovic to a Romanian network trading in stolen Scandinavian art. The crowns come home — one from a duffel bag in a Stockholm suburb, the others from a coordinated European arrest operation.
Maren and Ellis on the heist that looked like an action film, and the very ordinary traffic stop that ended it.
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