Bucharest, 2015. A medium-security Romanian prison runs, as part of a sanctioned rehabilitation programme, a small pigeon-keeping loft in one of its exercise yards. The inmates raise the pigeons from hatching. Some of the inmates are, in their pre-incarce
Show Notes
Bucharest, 2015. A medium-security Romanian prison runs, as part of a sanctioned rehabilitation programme, a small pigeon-keeping loft in one of its exercise yards. The inmates raise the pigeons from hatching. Some of the inmates are, in their pre-incarceration lives, experienced pigeon racers. Pigeons return to where they were raised. Pigeons can be trained to carry small loads. Pigeons can be carried out of a prison by visiting volunteers, released across Bucharest, and they will fly — by every measure of homing-pigeon biology — back home through the air over a twelve-metre concrete wall.
For about eight months, the inmates run an air-mail smuggling operation. Tiny custom canvas backpacks. Cannabis pellets. Wrapped SIM cards. Approximately fifteen to twenty deliveries a day, in aggregate, several kilograms of contraband and over four thousand SIM cards.
The operation ends because a pigeon gets lost on a delivery flight. A child finds it on a Bucharest sidewalk three streets from the prison. The child, after some consideration, opens the backpack.
Maren — sorry, Kit and Eden, on Roman-empire-era logistics, the limits of pigeon reliability, and what gets through a security camera tuned to detect humans.
What is Dumb Crimes Europe?
They planned the perfect crime. They failed spectacularly.
Dumb Crimes Europe tells the funniest, most absurd true crime stories from across the continent , from the burglar who forgot to log out of Facebook on the victim's computer, to the five tonnes of Nutella that vanished from a German town called Bad Field.
No murders. No violence. Just the purest stupidity European criminals have to offer, delivered with the deadpan seriousness it deserves.
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