A Jailbreak Artist | Hacker News Reader

A Jailbreak Artist

gq.com

42 pointstacon11 comments

Fascinating life story, but as the other commenter mentioned, there are some serious ethical quandaries with glorifying this character. Especially, in my mind, because he seems to be only concerned with money and not “social justice,” I.e. Robin Hood.

The article mentioned a number of other heist movies but conspicuously left out The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which is an amazing film that delves into the complexities of why criminals are popular. I really can’t recommend that movie enough.

Otherwise, as a big fan of heist films, I think this is why I always appreciated the Ocean’s series. No one is killed (or even injured) and the heists are conducted through mechanical and social trickery, not violence.

The 'Hustle' UK TV series is similar, showing con artists grifting people out of fortunes, but never with any violence. Lots of social engineering (and luck in timing) but not violence.

Redouane Faid was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2010 after a failed attempt to rob an armored car moving cash around. As the operation failed, the team behind it fired shots and killed a 26 years old policewomen.

This was all after he first quit the gangster life and appeared in documentaries about his life.

I don't understand this guy being glamorized in GQ.

They had multiple paragraphs dedicated to exactly that, with multiple quotes from authorities unreservedly stating Faid’s culpability

What a fascinating read.

The fact that someone died, a mother, is the greatest stain on that guy’s conscience and criminal career.

the architect of a flurry of dazzling heists and blockbuster robberies

Fuck off with your glamorizing of crime. He took part in armed robberies which lead to someone being killed. Scum.

It's recursive: he was dazzled by Hollywood movies that make armed robberies look dazzling, so he copied the dazzling heists himself, and now gets dazzling coverage about his exploits.

Exactly. There may be smart and even genius criminals. But they're still criminals who don't care about morals, which can't be tolerated in my opinion.

> But they're still criminals who don't care about morals, which can't be tolerated in my opinion.

Law breaking is criminal. Laws don't always coincide with morality. Often there's a lot of overlap, but there can easily be laws which are immoral, and that determination is going to be a matter of some subjectivity/interpretation in the first place.

But in this case it's not someone going to prison for smoking a joint, it's someone who robbed and in one incident led to a policewoman being killed.

That is true. I guess you can take my comment and replace "criminals" with "assholes" ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com