The Spider-Man Burglar

On an afternoon in 2017, on a quiet residential street in Turin, a man identified a third-floor apartment as a target. The owners were away. The doors were locked. The ground-floor entrance was secure. Standing in the street and looking up, he made what must have felt, at the time, like an inspired decision.

He decided to climb.

The first two floors

He was not, by any reasonable measure, a climber. He was a small-time burglar with a backpack. He had no rope, no harness, no climbing shoes, no gloves. What he did have was a plan: floor by floor, balcony to balcony, up the wrought-iron façade of an ordinary northern Italian apartment building, the way film characters do. He approached. He grabbed the iron of the first-floor balcony. He pulled himself up.

It worked. He stood on the first floor. He paused. He reached up. He pulled himself onto the second floor. He paused again — this time, presumably, because by this point the climbing was significantly more tiring than it had looked from the street. But he was committed. So he reached up to the third floor. The target floor. And he began to pull himself up.

The flourish

Italian wrought iron is, on most older buildings, ornamental. Decorative twists. Fleurs-de-lis. Small flourishes welded along the railing. The fabric of his left trouser leg caught on one such flourish at the moment his weight was committed to the upward motion and his hands were still reaching for the third-floor balcony rail.

The fabric, against all expectations of denim, held.

He was suspended. Three storeys up. Hanging from a wrought-iron flourish by his left trouser leg. His hands could not quite reach the third-floor balcony. His feet could not quite reach the second. His weight pulled him downward. The fabric held him up. And, slowly, an audience gathered in the street below.

An hour

He was suspended for approximately one hour. The sound of a man hanging from a third-floor balcony attracts attention in any neighbourhood — particularly a quiet residential one. People came out of their flats. People came out of nearby buildings. People looked up. People realised what they were looking at. And then, because we live in 2017, people took out their phones.

Multiple eyewitnesses subsequently provided footage to investigators. From across the street. From the windows of nearby apartments. From the windows of the building immediately below his suspension point, with phone cameras held overhead. The total volume of phone footage submitted, by the time it was logged into evidence, was substantial enough that the prosecution did not, at trial, need to rely on any single piece of it.

He spoke, during the hour, to several of the people closest to him. He asked them, at one point, to please call someone. He asked them, at another point, why nobody had yet called the fire brigade. He asked, at a third point, whether anyone could push a ladder against the building. None of these requests was granted at the speed he might have preferred. The crowd was, by all accounts, sympathetic but indecisive.

The rescue

The Vigili del Fuoco arrived with a ladder truck. A firefighter climbed up. Reached him. Assessed the situation. Concluded, accurately, that he could not be rescued by simply lifting him — because his trouser leg was, in mechanical terms, structurally load-bearing. The firefighter explained the situation to him calmly. He was going to be cut down, with the trousers cut at the load point, and lowered by harness onto the ladder.

The man, by that point extremely cooperative, agreed. The trouser leg was cut. The fabric released him. He was lowered. He arrived on the street, slightly bruised, with abrasions on his hands, in front of a crowd of approximately seventy people, several of whom were still filming. The Carabinieri were waiting.

The trial

He was charged with attempted burglary under article 605 of the Italian penal code. The case was, in evidential terms, almost too complete. He had been climbing the outside of a residential building. He had a backpack. He had been hanging from a balcony for an hour with no plausible alternative explanation. There were, at conservative estimate, more than two hundred separate phone videos of him doing it. His face was clearly visible in many of them. His voice — including, at one point, a confession to a passerby that he had been trying to break in — was on at least thirteen of them.

He pleaded guilty. The defence had nothing to dispute. The custodial sentence was within the standard range. He was on the local Italian news that evening with his face pixelated, in the legacy media, and on every regional Facebook group within a hundred-kilometre radius with his face fully visible. The pixellation was, by that point, a courtesy. It was not, as anyone in Turin who used a phone could confirm, a meaningful one.

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Listen to the full story on Dumb Crimes Europe, Episode 9. Stream the episode here.