The World's Worst Getaway

The robbery took less than four minutes. Three men entered a jewelry store on a commercial street in Marseille, produced weapons, and cleared the display cases. The staff complied. No one was seriously hurt. By any operational measure, the first part went exactly as planned.

Then they walked outside to the getaway car. And everything stopped.

Method one: the car that wouldn't start

The vehicle — a mid-sized saloon that had been positioned outside the store before the robbery began — had a flat battery. It would not turn over. The men tried for approximately a minute, by later accounts, before accepting that the car was not going to start.

This is, in the taxonomy of getaway failures, a known risk. Professional robbery crews in France and elsewhere have historically maintained backup vehicles, used stolen cars checked within hours of the job, or positioned a driver who keeps the engine running. This crew had done none of these things.

Method two: the push-start

One of the three men apparently knew that some vehicles could be started by pushing them to build momentum and then engaging the clutch. This is correct. It is correct for cars with manual transmissions.

The getaway car was an automatic.

Push-starting an automatic transmission vehicle does not work. The torque converter that replaces the manual clutch cannot be engaged from outside the car through momentum alone. The men pushed the vehicle a short distance down the street before this became apparent.

They abandoned it where it stopped.

Method three: the carjacking

With the original vehicle unusable, the men approached a car that had stopped nearby and attempted to take it. The driver — who had watched three men unsuccessfully try to start a car and then push it down the road while visibly carrying bags — assessed the situation correctly and locked the doors.

Modern central locking engages quickly. The driver did not open the window. After a brief and unproductive exchange, the men moved on.

The driver called the police.

Method four: the taxi

Taxis in Marseille are a standard and functional form of urban transport. They are also, in the normal course of things, willing to stop for fare-paying passengers on commercial streets in the middle of the afternoon.

None of the taxis that passed stopped for these three men.

This is not entirely surprising. By this point the men had been standing on and around the same block for several minutes following a robbery, had attempted to start a broken car, had pushed an automatic transmission vehicle down a slope, and had tried to carjack a stationary motorist. Their body language, accounts suggest, was not that of men looking for a normal fare.

Several taxis were later identified on traffic camera footage as having passed without stopping.

Method five: running

The men ran.

Marseille's Noailles district, where the incident occurred, is a dense urban neighborhood with narrow streets, market stalls, and irregular block patterns. It is not, in short, an area designed for uncomplicated foot escapes. The men ran down one street, turned, and found themselves at a dead end.

They stopped running. They sat down on the curb. They were still holding the jewelry.

The arrest

Police units, responding to multiple calls including the carjacking attempt and the original store alarm, located three men sitting on a pavement in the Noailles area. The men were out of breath. The bags they were carrying contained the jewelry taken from the store. The abandoned car — still with a flat battery — was located one street away.

All three were arrested at the scene. The jewelry was recovered. The car was towed.

French prosecutors later charged the men with armed robbery. The trial, according to local court coverage, included detailed examination of the sequence of failed escape methods — a sequence that the presiding judge described in his summary with what the journalists present noted was visible difficulty maintaining appropriate formality.

What the case reveals about getaway planning

The Marseille case is unusual not because the getaway failed, but because it failed so completely and so publicly across five separate attempts. Most failed getaways collapse at a single point — a car that won't start, a roadblock, a witness. This one collapsed at every point.

French security researchers have noted that the proportion of violent robberies in which the perpetrators are arrested at or very near the scene has increased significantly since the widespread adoption of mobile phones, which allow witnesses to report incidents in real time. The average response time for police to an armed robbery call in central Marseille is under seven minutes.

Five failed escape methods took longer than seven minutes.

The robbery had been, in its way, competent. The planning that preceded it had not extended to the moment the door of the jewelry store closed behind them. That gap — between executing the crime and escaping it — is where this case, and many others, fell apart.

The jewelry was returned to the store. The car was eventually scrapped. The dead end street remains, as dead ends do, exactly where it was.

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Listen to the full story on Dumb Crimes Europe, Episode 3. Stream the episode here.