The Snitch Parrot

In a small house in Calabria in 2010, an Italian Carabinieri wiretap captured a kitchen conversation in which two men planned an armed robbery, executed it, returned, and divided the proceeds. The recording would, the following year, become the prosecution's central evidence at trial. The interesting feature of the recording was not the conversation itself. It was the third voice on the tape.

The household

The kitchen belonged to a married couple. The wife, in her forties, kept an African Grey parrot. African Greys are, as parrots go, in the upper percentile of their species for vocal mimicry. They live for fifty to sixty years. They learn names. They repeat them. The parrot's name itself was not relevant to the case, the wife later told the court, and the court file does not preserve it.

What was relevant was the name of the household's most frequent visitor. A man named Roberto. Who had, for some years, come over a great deal — to play cards, to eat, to sit in the kitchen, occasionally to drink with the husband until late at night and sleep on the sofa. He was addressed by name, in the household, often. Roberto, do you want a coffee. Roberto, hand me that. Roberto, you cannot smoke in the kitchen.

The parrot, listening, learned. Within months, the parrot could imitate the wife's voice saying Roberto. Within a year, the parrot was saying it on its own initiative — apropos of nothing — sometimes in conversational tones, sometimes as a shout. The household had stopped noticing.

The wiretap

The Italian Carabinieri had, for unrelated reasons, been investigating the husband. They had obtained a court order. Listening devices had been installed in the kitchen and were recording continuously. The recordings, by the time of trial, ran into hundreds of hours.

On one specific afternoon in 2010 — when the wife was visiting her sister — Roberto and the husband sat in the kitchen and planned the robbery of a small jewellery shop in a nearby town. Routes. Timings. The location of the shop's safe. The division of proceeds. They executed the operation that evening, returned to the kitchen, congratulated each other, and discussed the contents of the haul. The wiretap captured all of it.

Throughout the planning conversation, the post-robbery debrief, and most of the surrounding domestic background, the parrot said Roberto. Repeatedly. Sometimes between the two men's lines. Sometimes during them. On at least one occasion the parrot said Roberto immediately after the husband said the words is your half here, followed by a male voice answering yes, here. The parrot's intervention served, almost accidentally, as an audio bookmark — providing the prosecution with a clean way to demonstrate that the speakers had been audibly identifiable to the recording device.

The investigation

Within weeks, the Carabinieri identified Roberto as a person of interest. The name was common; several Robertos were on a list. They eliminated all but one — a man with a previous conviction for theft, who lived two streets away. They obtained a warrant. They went to his house. They searched it. They found, in a drawer in his bedroom, several pieces of jewellery from the robbery, still in their original cases, with the price tags still attached. He had not yet attempted to sell any of them.

The trial

The case was prosecuted at the Tribunale di Reggio Calabria. Both men were charged with armed robbery under article 628 of the Italian penal code. The prosecution case rested on three pillars: the audio recordings, the physical evidence in Roberto's bedroom drawer, and the connection between the two via the audio bookmark of the parrot.

The defence attempted, briefly, to argue that the audio recording was unreliable because of the contamination from the parrot. The judge declined the argument. He noted, drily, that the parrot's contributions could be excluded from the analysis without altering the prosecution's case. He also noted, more interestingly, that the parrot was generally consistent in its statements — saying Roberto when Roberto was present and saying Roberto when Roberto was not present — which independently confirmed that it had been hearing the name for an extended period before the wiretap was installed.

Both men were convicted. The husband received a longer sentence due to the unrelated investigation that had originally produced the wiretap. Roberto received a sentence within the standard range for armed robbery. The jewellery was returned to the shop. The wife kept the parrot.

The case has been cited, occasionally, in Italian legal scholarship on the admissibility of incidental audio captures from domestic surveillance. The parrot has not, in the years since, given a follow-up interview.

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Listen to the full story on Dumb Crimes Europe, Episode 11. Stream the episode here.