The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “DuckTales” Bandit
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"Inside was a note ordering them to stuff two freezer bags with money and deposit them in a grit box—a kind of bin filled with sand for de-icing roads—in Britz, a section of Berlin...At 11:07 P.M., though no one had come to the box, the motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole that fell deep into the sewers below. Funke had built an exact replica of a city grit box and placed it over a manhole cover, then opened the cover to retrieve the package."
Reading the article, I can't help thinking what a different era it's from. The guy extorted money from department stores with bombs for years, engaged in all kinds of Pink Panther shenanigans, and when he was finally caught he got 9 years, a work release, and the career in cartooning he'd always wanted. Nowadays in the US he'd probably be shot dead within a month, or barring that end up locked away for life. There's very little sense of proportionality left in the justice system these days for those who wrong the rich.
The amount of corruption, sheriffs getting to pocket the money for prison food, judges getting kickbacks for convictions, guaranteed prison quotas, exceptions from slavery laws, etc. don't help either.
IME the excuses made for it and cherry picking from it have only reinforced bad habits. Stuff like appeal to authority, survivorship bias, and trusting intuition over data.
There are certainly other factors, like the presence of a large group of “othered” people with less opportunity, but there is no doubt a vengeance streak running through the American conversation on criminal punishment.
> According to official ballot materials promoting the original Three Strikes law, the sentencing scheme was intended to “keep murderers, rapists, and child molesters behind bars, where they belong.” However, today, more than half of inmates sentenced under the law are serving sentences for nonviolent crimes.
https://law.stanford.edu/three-strikes-project/three-strikes...
Despite the high incarceration rate, the US is ranked third in the OECD for homicide, fourth in rape, eighth in robbery, sixteenth in assault, thirteenth in burglary and tenth in vehicle theft in the OECD. The US generally also jails people longer than most other countries; the ratio of people in prison to people who get convicted per year is much higher than in other countries, and those weren't the first "tough-on-crime" laws by any means.
And so for the highest imprisonment rate in the world, amongst the OECD the United States is still amongst the top half of the 32 OECD countries for every category of violent crime. It's not like these are short-term effects either, we've been jailing people under three-strikes for a generation going on two. It's pretty clear evidence that a high rate of imprisonment is not actually reducing crime.
https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/crime_stats_oecdjan...
After a while we lost our optimism about the penitentiary concept and decided that being locked up was just a pointless ordeal, which made it popular with people who believe the goals of criminal sentencing should be punishment, deterrence, and keeping dangerous people separated from society, and less popular with those who favor a benevolent approach.
Cheap labour. The 13 amendment of the U.S. constitution prohibits slavery, except as a punishment from crime.
Prison labour is a multi-billion dollar industry.
On the other hand, if he did the cash drops with Bitcoin instead, it would be much harder to catch him -- but there wouldn't be any Gyro Gearloose devices, so we'd never heard about it either.
Any kind of private person or company cannot install cameras looking into public spaces at all (and yes, that includes Ring doorbells that can see the street or even just part of the sidewalk). While many of those illegal uses might fly under the radar the general ban of those uses also means that they are relatively rare and not something just anyone would do.
Public institutions can install cameras seeing public spaces but they are limited by law (there needs to be a valid obvious reason for the camera to be there and the use needs to be proportionate), so blanket complete coverage of public spaces is just not happening (yeah, public institutions can probably find a bullshit excuse for any place but the culture these laws create mean that cameras are just used a lot less). Cameras in general are where you would expect them to be (e.g. around high profile government buildings), not in some random street somewhere.
Actually, the most recent episode of "Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelöst"[0] (a German TV show that is basically the same as "Crimewatch" or "America's Most Wanted", but predating both of them) mentioned such a case [1].
Some guy in Berlin sent bombs via mail back in 2017/2018 and demanded a ransom paid in Bitcoin. They didn't explain the details, but apparently police did trace a transaction to that wallet back to some Bitcoin vending machine and got a nice picture from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktenzeichen_XY_…_ungelöst
[1] https://wikixy.de/Sendung_vom_12.05.2021#Die_Studiof.C3.A4ll...
It's hard to compare the serial bombings in your link to the Dagoberto ones. The Austin ones all seem to be attempted murders, not extortion of large companies. I suppose that could mean the Austin bomber should actually be more likely to be killed by police. But, another big difference is that the Austin bomber wasn't humiliating the police the way Dagobert was.
Hard to speculate how it would go down, but I doubt the police would blast down a high profile suspect. The higher your profile, the more professional and high ranking your adversaries are going to be.
> ...
> ...motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole...
That line immediately had me thinking of the movie "Speed", but funny enough, this story actually pre-dates the movie by roughly 2 years. But it does make me wonder if they had the same source of inspiration.
It's a shame they didn't mention the name of the translator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs - her creativity, together with the popularity of the comics has left a lasting impression on the German language. She basically invented a new grammatical form, named "Erikativ" in her honor.
Translations straying from the source material to make it more popular with German speaking audiences were very popular in dubbed movies and TV shows, too. I was kind of dismayed to learn that Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill aren't all that funny in the original Italian. This might be kind of interesting to non-German readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_humour#Humorous_dubbing
Lots of these things are caused by the Disney "rules" at the time - no human characters for example (everyone "human" is technically a dog), and there may have been additional rules about "real places" - though enough adventures involved GOING to real cities and locations.
Depending on which story you started with I could easily see the misunderstanding - the "three nephews" refer to Donald as "Uncle Donald" and to Daisy as "Aunt Daisy" at times - but if Donald and Daisy aren't married the way to make that work is to make them cousins. And then you get a second story to translate where it's clear they're dating, and you are now kind of stuck.
Within a few clicks of a google search for Erikativ I found this paper that analyzes it: https://silo.tips/download/the-erikativ-form-and-the-nature-...
He told lots of stories from his exploits which were truly brilliant and funny among others, a remote operated submarine and fake tunnel systems. Also from prison and even some of the social hacking he did in the upper circles inbetween (he was super famous and gave interviews to tabloids at day while still spending time in prison at night).
Turns out he‘s a really nice and humble true nerd with a bad childhood and background.
He‘s a cartoonist now, but eschews the limelight these days and his brain is pretty damaged from paint fumes when he worked as a car painter.
Note to self: next time I’m on the run, post a bunch of fake reward notices so that the investigators get overwhelmed with noise.
He could have just sold that for money!
I remember being shocked a few years ago when I learned that the hero of my childhood, and in my opinion one of the greatest comic book artist of all time (only surpassed by the master himself, Carl Barks, of course), is virtually unknown in the US: Don Rosa [0]. I read an interview once where he confessed that his neighbor doesn't know what he does.
The death of Carl Barks also went largely unnoticed in the US, I think. In Germany, it was prime time national news.
Although, I guess by the time they were married, he wasn't actually making any money from his schemes.
We're already seeing a digital version of this terrorism with cryptolocking ransomware... And it's always been the most dangerous part of criminality is getting paid. cryptocurrency solves a lot of that problem.
You can read it here: https://archive.is/6PfeI
I had never heard of him. The story reminds me a bit of the old Tim Hutton movie Turk 182.
https://mapologies.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/scrooge-01-3....
Incidentally, the article seems somewhat wrong in attributing the comics that inspired "Dagobert" to the US and Carl Barks. A lot, if not most of these, were Italian originals that got translated into German (pretty well, which at least the article gets right). One could even nitpick the "outselling superheroes", because Phantomias, Donald Duck's alter ego is a thing.
Of course Bark's work seeded a secondary tradition of Italian artists with stories set in some alternative universe Duckburg. They are popular in Germany as well, but generally of lesser importance and historical value.
These matters are very important to some serious people, https://www.donald.org/ ;-)