Bambi Vincent – Page 27 – Thiefhunters in Paradise

Our National Geographic documentary “Pickpocket King”

Naples pickpockets dinner party pickpocket king national geographic documentary

dinner-with-thieves-4 — Dinner with thieves

Bob and I are thrilled to announce the world premiere of the documentary we shot late last year with National Geographic. Pickpocket King features us, Bob Arno and Bambi Vincent, as “thiefhunters in paradise.” The paradise we chose for the story is the warm and wild city of Naples, Italy, home to the world’s best pickpockets.

National Geographic has just posted a clip. [As of October 9, the clip is no longer available.]

In the film, stage pickpocket Bob Arno faces off against a gang of the world’s best criminal pickpockets. The thieves demonstrate their trickiest (and most lucrative) steals. Bob and Bambi are invited to a splendid dinner with thieves, where lively thefts intersperse the endless courses.

The #1 pickpocket’s conclusion: “Bob. You and I do the same thing, but you make people laugh. I make them cry.”

The documentary’s international premiere begins this month, region by region and week by week. Watch for it in your local listing. I will post schedules as I receive them.

AND, I will soon republish the series of behind-the-scenes, making-of posts I wrote during the shoot.

Edit: Watch the entire National Geographic documentary, Pickpocket King.

Hotel Oddity #21

I have no idea what this thing is. It’s on the floor in the carpet, in front of a window. About an inch and a half across, no screws in the holes that look like screwholes. I saw only one of them. With quite a bit of force, the rubbery center part can be depressed.

Where were we? Somewhere in England. In a hotel, of course. I forgot to ask the front desk staff what the thing might anchor or support.

hotel odd

Airport security belt steals

There goes our iPad. Swallowed by the security conveyor belt, immediately under the prominent sign that says “The tray stays until it is emptied.” After many uses, I came to
trust that sign.

I didn’t at first. I’d grab and hold the tray before it got to the dangerous end-of-the-line, and fight the force of it’s mechanized trajectory. Because I knew: at the end of the belt, the tray drops swiftly to a lower level and is carried back to the security officers and then on to line’s starting point, where passengers take an empty tray.

At some point I noticed all the stuff mounted above the end of the conveyor belt. There’s a video camera, a mirror, and some sort of sensors. I tested the tray-trap—warily, I left a jacket inside. The tray waited at the end of the line until I removed the jacket. Huh.

I became complacent. Next time, I didn’t pick up my jacket from the blue-bottomed tray until I had my computer re-stashed. I let my belt lie while I grabbed my mini-toothpaste.

And when Bob’s iPad sailed through with it’s light gray cover, I kept an eye on it but didn’t fetch it.

Bob takes a long time to get through security. He travels with his MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPad, video camera, and six or seven hard drives. (Gotta be productive on the road…) We have a strategy: I whiz through and pack up my stuff in 45 seconds or so, then keep an eye on his stuff while he’s spreading out equipment in multiple trays and taking off his belt.

Luckily, I saw the machinery swallow his iPad. If I hadn’t have noticed, it could have been forgotten in the confusion (and rush).

“Stop, thief!” Or no. I said something else. “Our iPad’s been eaten!”

“Would have made a nice little present for the security officers,” Bob said.

We could easily have walked away from it. I wonder how many people do? This security check point is at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport. London Heathrow has the same setup. I’ve seen it in other airports, too, but I can’t remember where. Copenhagen? Munich?

airport security

How pickpockets use razor blades

A Close Shave, or, Honey, There’s a Hole in my Handbag
Archil Zantaradze keeps a razor blade in his mouth the way someone else might store a tired wad of gum. Gently curved against his upper palate, he can dislodge the blade with a bit of tongue suction and discreetly arm himself in an instant.

True, pickpockets, by our definition, are non-violent. The razor, actually half a blade, is meant to slice a pocket or a purse; never human flesh. The technique is a specialty of Zantaradze, St. Petersburg’s most notorious Georgian pickpocket, and peculiar to his compatriots.

Zantaradze perfected this dangerous practice while just a teenager. (I can imagine the manipulation easily: as a kid, I removed my retainer the same way. But I never worried about drawing blood!) He was taught by his own father, as all his brothers were. And before he ever even scraped a razor against his first soft whiskers, he could shoot the blade with awesome skill from its wet storage place to his soft palm. His dexterous tongue snaps as quickly as a frog’s and he catches the razor in his hand as neatly as a magician palms a card.

Zantaradze’s sleight of tongue is not unique among the criminal population of Russian Georgians. Those who aren’t taught at home learn in jail, where the razor blade is a vital commodity. Desperately creative, inmates find inconceivable functions for the simple object. Indeed, when attached to a short length of wire and pushed into a power outlet, the lowly blade miraculously becomes both a little heater and a water-boiler. And, “a skillful cut of veins may lead a tired prisoner if not to death, then into the relative comfort of a prison’s hospital bed,” my Russian journalist friend Vladimir explained. “Life accounts in prisons are also known to be settled with this small metal device. Not to mention the ordinary functions of the razor blade, like shaving or paper-cutting.”

Vasily Zhiglov, our St. Petersburg Police informant, arrested Zantaradze some months before my questions to him, and thereafter had ample opportunity to interview him. Lounging in prison, Zantaradze was unembarrassed but surprised that he had failed to bribe his way out. Officer Zhiglov acknowledged that not all policemen can resist this “easy-sounding temptation,” as the sum represents full or at least half of a policeman’s monthly wage. (The bargaining usually starts at 500 rubles—$25 at the time of this research.)

It was not without a certain pride that Zantaradze admitted to Zhiglov that he, along with at least four other Georgians, spent the summer of ’98 in France, “working” the streets and stadiums of cities hosting matches of the World Cup. Zantaradze maintained that a skilled thief could easily make three to five thousand U.S. dollars a day by extracting cash from the pockets and bags of the hordes of often-drunk soccer fans cruising the streets and shops of every hosting city. The French towns, unaccustomed to such crowds and crime, were unprepared and understaffed for the deluge.

Officer Zhiglov estimated that there were about 70 Russians, mostly from Moscow and St. Petersburg, who combined the pleasure of watching World Cup matches with the labor of cleaning out other fans’ bags and pockets. He said that before heading to “work” in a foreign country, a pickpocket would thoroughly study the criminal code of that country. “And one would certainly prefer to work in France or another European nation where the law is much softer on this particular crime than, say, in Arabic countries,” Zhiglov said. Each year Russia receives about a dozen of its returned citizens caught stealing abroad.

Igor Kudelya, Senior Lieutenant of the St. Petersburg pickpocket squad, said that on frosty winter days, when other pickpockets’ fingers “have frozen senseless,” the Georgian can be spotted warming up his fingers by exercising them with two or three small metal balls before entering a chosen work spot.

Excerpt from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams

Chapter Five: Rip-offs: Introducing…The Opportunist

pickpocket purse razor blade Russia St. Petersburg

Bob Arno and Bambi in a den of thieves—21

Denouement. None of us wanted to leave the park. After the demos, the dinner, and the as-yet-untold experience on the buses, after the conversation, the exchange of trade secrets, the trust, and yes, the new friendships, we sort of bonded. And I mean all of us: the band of thieves, the filmmaking crew, and the Arnos in the middle.

We stand there in the park in two concentric circles. The inner circle is Bob, Michele, Frank, Andy, and Marc. The outer circle is Van with the Red on his shoulder and his assistant holding his shoulders to guide him, director Kun, producer Kath, fixer Rosie, and me. None of us want to say goodbye.

Work finally pulls Marc and Andy away, but Frank remains. And finally, after two complete rounds of hugs and kisses, Frank straddles his bike, snaps on his helmet, and rides away. Van follows him with the camera until he’s out of sight.

We’re all physically and mentally exhausted; spent. I don’t know how the crew kept going; they were up hours before us every day and working for hours after we said goodnight. Yesterday they went nonstop from the market to the thieves’ restaurant to the second restaurant without a break, setting up and taking down equipment repeatedly. They are champions, all of them.

Making this documentary allowed Bob and me to fulfill certain long-held dreams. It allowed us the time in which to develop relationships with our subjects. It allowed us to have top-notch translators, especially my hero Michele. It enabled us to host our gang of thieves at a meal that Bob and I alone would need investors to fund, but which was integral to the building or our relationship, which gave us the ability to dig deeper into the life and times of pickpockets. And lastly, the documentary gives a soapbox to the subjects, a platform for the pickpockets themselves to explain their methods and motivations, their regrets and their desires.

Writing these stories has been difficult for me. The “easy difficulty,” if there is such a thing, has been simply finding the time to write in the midst of our action-packed days, and then finding an internet connection to get them online. But that’s just a technicality. The true difficulties have been several.

First, whitewashing our incredible host city, and by necessity, the characters and true identities of the men in our story. How I had to restrain myself! As a writer, I tend to be of the descriptive sort. I would never say we drank “liqueur!” I want to say what kind, what color, and how lovely the fruit it was made from. I want to tell about the marvelous restaurants we visited and the wonders of the local cuisine. I want to praise our cliffside hotel and describe the view from its terraces, that you can see all the way to …

Sigh.

And—wait a minute! What will this film do to tourism in this mystery town? Will we repel visitors, or intrigue them? Our goal is to balance the stardust with the dirt, to spotlight the unique riches this place has to offer. We hope it comes through in the film. I certainly left it out of these stories.

And there is something of a moral dilemma. In an exchange of thievery techniques, are we teaching known criminals how to steal more and better? We don’t think so, but how do you see it? What about the techniques the general public will learn from watching the film—should we be concerned about how that knowledge may be used? We don’t think so, but we agree that it looks bad—as if we’re teaching how to steal.

I’m afraid of what the public will think of Bob and me in our pursuit of thieves. Will you chastise us for not stopping thefts when we see them? Or will you understand that our method, getting “in” with these criminals, has a greater end? Will you think us awful for liking the pickpockets, despite knowing what havoc they wreak, what distress they cause? In the film, it will be up to Kun to portray us honestly alongside our motives. But here in these writings, it was my responsibility. Do you think it’s all fun and games for us, that we dine with thieves for a lark? Do you understand that as outsiders, allowed into an underground brotherhood of thieves, we are able to gather knowledge for the greater good? Please comment. We need to know if we should hide under a rock when the film comes out.

We are incredibly grateful to film director Kun Chang, who has pushed this project forward for more than four years already. Bob and I have complete faith in him and have no doubt that he’ll put together a documentary that is as beautiful and dramatic as it is fascinating and educational.

While the shooting isn’t over, the exciting part is. What’s left is hard work, mostly by Kun and his editing team. It’s impossible for me to imagine how they’ll make sense of the vast amount of gripping footage we have accumulated. I also recognize that my perception of the experience is not the same as Kun’s. The sterile, stripped-down story I told here, missing highlights (believe it or not), missing local color (of which there’s tons), genericizing everything for the sake of the eventual film, may have little resemblance to Kun’s vision. We will all be surprised at the film: you, readers; and Bob and I.

Part one of this story.

Bambi Vincent Bob Arno documentary film filming thieves

Bob Arno and Bambi in a den of thieves—12

We may have caused a divorce. Or maybe a murder. Though it’s unclear who might have killed whom.

As a research expedition, the whole gang of us takes a train to a nearby UNESCO World Heritage Site, one packed with visitors. The goal is to speak with tourists and find out if they’d been warned about pickpocketing before visiting this area. Bob approaches a number of people on the street, introduces himself, and interviews them. He steals from some of them, just to prove how easy it is.

Not everyone wants to be interviewed on camera. Some have limited time to see the site and don’t want to be detained. One man, a 75-or-so-year-old American, is curious about our subject, but his wife is not. She drags him away. He looks lugubriously over his shoulder as he retreats.

Five minutes later the couple is back. The wife is shouting at her husband, “you crazy!” She is Chinese, 50ish, mad. The man heads straight to us and says he wants to be part of our survey. Bob explains why we’re asking, what the cameras are for, and that he’ll only need a few minutes of their time. But the wife won’t have it. She complains loudly to the man and pulls on his arm. He’s patient, and tells her “Look, we came here to do something interesting. I find this interesting.”

From left: Kath Liptrott, our producer, with big brown bag; man in red shirt, random interviewee; Bob Arno; sound recordist Michele; director of photography Van Royko; director Kun Chang.

The argument escalates as we seven (Bob, me, director, camera guy, his assistant, sound man, producer) stand in a semi-circle around the couple, cameras and microphones rolling. The woman starts hitting the man, demanding money. The man refuses. The woman kicks him, shoves her hand in his pocket, screaming for money, her money, crying that she’ll go alone. The man is firm but quiet. He makes no apology to us. It’s as if we aren’t all standing there, staring at them. He must be mortified, but he just deals with the lunatic woman.

Van and Michele have turned off their cameras and sound, but we’re all still frozen in place. Without a word, the man turns away and walks toward the train station. The woman follows, still yelling, enraged. They do not return. We’re left to wonder about them, each of us a little devastated.

Part one of this story. — Next installment.

PICKPOCKETS, CON ARTISTS, GANGSTERS, THIEVES, AND TRAVEL