The Courthouse Robber

Naples, 2016. A man cases a small commercial-looking building across the street from where he is sitting. He sees a counter, clerks behind it, modest cash transactions, people walking in and out with briefcases. He concludes — without entering, without reading the brass plaque on the door — that the building is a small private bank. It is not a bank. The plaque, in plain Italian, reads Tribunale di Napoli, Annesso. The annexed offices of the Naples courthouse. He chooses a Wednesday morning to rob it, which is — for reasons he does not yet know — the day Naples processes preliminary criminal hearings on organised-crime cases. The building, when he walks in with a balaclava and a handgun at 10:31 AM, is full of lawyers, court clerks, judges, and twelve Carabinieri. Kit and Eden on the man who chose, of all the buildings in Naples, the one with the highest concentration of armed police, on the day the police were already inside it, at the hour they had assembled.