Dumb Crimes Europe

Arnhem, Netherlands, 2019. Two drug dealers get a tip from a colleague: there's a new bar in town where the manager is specifically interested in cocaine. Cash buyer, no questions asked. They drive over with nine hundred grams of cocaine in a backpack. They walk in. They order two beers. They sit at the bar discussing prices in front of about fifteen quiet patrons. The bar is not a bar. It is a Dutch Politie tactical training facility. The fifteen patrons are officers. The bartender is a sergeant. The colleague who passed the tip got it, several hops upstream, from a police asset. Twelve minutes after the dealers walk in, one of the seated patrons stands up, walks over with a badge, and says — politie, Arnhem, you're under arrest. Then every other patron stands up at the same time. Fifteen of them. With sidearms. Kit and Eden on guided rails, the cleanest sting in Gelderland, and why a brand-new bar that is specifically interested in cocaine is, without exception, the police.

North Rhine-Westphalia, 2012. A couple in their fifties leave for a two-week walking holiday in Italy. On day two, a man forces a kitchen window. Climbs in. Has a shower. Changes into the husband's clothes. Makes a sandwich. Watches German game shows. Decides not to leave. For four days, he lives in the house. Sleeps in the spare bedroom. Eats their food. Drinks their beer. Reads their books. Uses, the police later confirmed, their toothbrush. And then — for reasons that the German press, the police, and several psychologists subsequently spent considerable time on — he begins to clean. The kitchen counters. The oven, scoured. The fridge interior, reorganised. The bathroom mirror. The carpets, vacuumed. The skirting boards. The windows, cleaned from inside with the family's own Windex. On day four, the neighbour with a key lets herself in to water the plants. She finds a man she has never seen before, in her neighbour's pyjamas, vacuuming the spare bedroom carpet. He says — I am the cleaner. The German police arrest him at the train station. Kit and Eden on the man who left a thank-you note.

Leicester, England, 2012. A man burgles a terraced house. Forces a back door. Lifts a laptop, a games console, some cash. He's been inside about twenty minutes. He's hungry. He opens the fridge. On the top shelf, wrapped in foil, is half a doner kebab — the owner's saved-from-last-night lunch. The burglar takes it out. He sits down at the victim's kitchen table. He eats half of what's left. He wraps the rest back in foil. Returns it to the fridge. Continues the burglary. That evening the owner gets home. Notices the laptop is gone. Calls the police. A constable opens the fridge looking for disturbed items, finds the kebab, asks — is some of this missing. The owner looks more closely. There are fresh bite marks. There is an unfamiliar bite pattern. There is, on this kebab, somebody else's saliva. Leicestershire Police bag the kebab. Forensics extracts DNA from the bite marks. The DNA matches a man with a previous conviction, three miles away. He confesses on arrest. There is no defence. The kebab is the prosecution. Kit and Eden on the British forensic sub-discipline of food-DNA recovery, of which the kebab is the foundational text.

Calabria, 2010. A small house in a small town. A married couple. An African Grey parrot. A regular visitor named Roberto, who comes round to play cards and stay late. Over many months, the parrot — listening to the wife call to her guest — learns the name. Eventually, the parrot says "Roberto" continuously. Apropos of nothing. As background. The household stops noticing. What they don't know: the Carabinieri have placed listening devices in the kitchen, in connection with an unrelated investigation. The devices record the husband and Roberto planning an armed robbery of a jewellery shop. They record the post-robbery debrief. And, in the background of every recording, they record the parrot. Saying Roberto. At the trial in Reggio Calabria, the defence attempts to argue the audio is unreliable because of the bird's contributions. The judge declines, observing that the parrot is, in fact, a remarkably consistent witness — saying Roberto whether Roberto is present or not, which independently confirms it has been hearing the name for a long time. Kit and Eden on Italian wiretap procedure, fifty-year-old parrots, and the tactical mistake of saying anyone's name twenty-three times during a felony.

Stockholm, 2010. A former gym member identifies the perfect window: Saturday night to Monday morning. Thirty-six hours of free run at the safe in the manager's office. He climbs onto the roof. Removes a ventilation cover. Crawls twelve metres along an industrial duct. Drops into the men's changing room. He has tools, a torch, and — for some reason — a sandwich. The sandwich proves wise. Because the moment he crosses into the main gym, the changing room door clicks shut behind him. Magnetic. Then the front door. Magnetic. Every door in the building. Magnetic. Released only by a security panel he does not have the code for. He is locked in. Until Monday morning. Fifty-six hours. With access to the smoothie bar fridge. The deputy manager, opening up on Monday at seven AM, finds a tired man on a bench drinking a protein shake, who quietly asks to be arrested. Kit and Eden on electromagnetic locks, the importance of an exit plan, and the burglar who left a Stockholm gym in measurably better physical shape than he entered it.

Turin, 2017. A man identifies a third-floor apartment as a burglary target. The owners are away. The doors are locked. So he stands in the street and looks up. He grabs the wrought iron of a first-floor balcony and pulls himself up. Then the second floor. Then he reaches for the third — and his trousers catch on a decorative flourish of the railing. He spends the next hour suspended three storeys up, hanging by his denim. His hands cannot reach the third-floor balcony. His feet cannot reach the second. The fabric, against all expectations, holds. A crowd gathers in the street. People come out of nearby buildings. Phones are pointed at him from every angle. The Vigili del Fuoco arrive with a ladder. A firefighter climbs up. Determines that he cannot simply be lifted because his trousers are structurally load-bearing. Cuts him down. Kit and Eden on the man who made his face the most photographed object in Turin for an afternoon, the load-bearing properties of denim, and the day when wrought iron decided to do its job.

Berlin, 2009. A man decides to rob a small branch bank in the Tiergarten district. The plan is light. He has not brought a weapon. He has not brought a disguise. He has not brought a getaway driver. What he has brought is a piece of paper. With three sentences on it. Money. Now. Or I shoot. The paper, unfortunately, is the back of his most recent German payslip. A Lohnabrechnung. A document that bears, on the front, his full legal name. His residential address. His date of birth. His tax identification number. The name and address of his employer. His personnel number. His salary. His marital status for tax purposes. He slides the note under the cashier's window. The cashier turns it over. Reads it. Quietly presses the silent alarm with her foot, tells him she is waiting for the manager to authorise the withdrawal, and waits with him for three minutes until the Berlin Polizei arrive. Kit and Eden on the man who brought to a robbery the one document specifically designed to identify him — and then handed it to a stranger.

Vienna, 2008. A burglar enters an empty first-floor apartment. Lifts a laptop, a camera, stereo equipment, watches, and — for reasons the court papers do not fully explain — the bedroom curtains. Walks out. Closes the window behind him. By any conventional measure, a clean job. Within forty-eight hours, he has listed everything for sale on eBay. From his own verified account. Linked to his own real name. His own home address. His own bank details. He has photographed the items in his own kitchen. Hanging in the kitchen window, behind the laptop in the listing photo: the curtains. The same curtains. From the same apartment. Now in his apartment. The owner of the burgled flat — searching online for her own things, as the modern victim does — recognises the laptop's serial number, then recognises her own curtains in the background, then phones the Bundespolizei. Kit and Eden on what happens when a thief discovers an online marketplace and forgets that an online marketplace can also be searched by his victims.

Surrey, England, 2014. A man broke into a house. He was, by the standards of his profession, competent — efficient, methodical, prepared. There was just one detail he had not accounted for. The phone in his front pocket. His pocket dialled 999. Surrey Police picked up. The dispatcher heard a man calmly listing items, naming an accomplice, and discussing routes — through the muffle of a pair of jeans. She did not hang up. She kept the line open for twelve minutes. Officers triangulated the call to a specific house in a specific street, drove there, and walked in on the burglary in progress. Kit and Eden on what may be the single most complete piece of disclosure evidence ever produced in a UK burglary trial: a twelve-minute audio recording of the entire crime, made by the criminal, narrated by the criminal, and submitted to the police by the criminal's own front pocket.

Barcelona, 2014. A man stripped naked and climbed into a chimney to rob a clothing store. He got stuck. For two days. The firefighters had to demolish the chimney to get him out.

A man arrived at Dublin Airport in a wheelchair. He said he couldn't walk. The wheelchair was made of eleven kilograms of compressed cocaine.

Three men rob a jewelry store in Marseille. Five getaway methods. All five fail.

Three countries. Three criminals. Zero combined IQ. In England, a robber spends 30 seconds fighting a pull door while CCTV records everything. In Gateshead, a man throws a brick at a shop window and it bounces back into his face. And in a small Irish village, two men attempt to disguise themselves using nothing but a permanent marker.

In 2012, a burglar broke into a house in the Dutch town of Drachten. He stole valuables. He took electronics. And then, for reasons that defy all logic, he sat down at the victim's computer and logged into his own Facebook account. He forgot to log out. The homeowner came home to a ransacked house and a glowing screen displaying the burglar's full name, photo, hometown, and current employer. Police knocked on his door within hours. He was genuinely surprised they found him. This is the story of the man who left more personal information at a crime scene than most people put on a dating profile.