This stuff really was straight out of a cartoon:<p>"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."<p>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 German translator of the comics made the Disney characters more complex: Dagobert speaks in grandiose language; his nephew Donald Duck often quotes the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller.<p>It's a shame they didn't mention the name of the translator: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs</a> - 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.
I had the pleasure of meeting him during a a rare inside seminar of the Berliner Unterwelten, where he did a tour of the train track used by his one rail battery car gadget for one of the failed attempts and had a beer with him afterward.<p>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).<p>Turns out he‘s a really nice and humble true nerd with a bad childhood and background.<p>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.
> <i>The state police eventually offered a hundred-thousand-mark reward for information that led to his capture. Astrologers and fortune tellers chimed in, and bored citizens called the phone lines with thousands of tips.</i><p>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.
<i>"In fact, Funke did build a remote-controlled submarine that could whisk money packages away underwater, to scramble the signals from tracking devices, but he did not end up using it."</i><p>He could have just sold that for money!
> In Germany, Donald Duck comics are extremely popular, outselling even superheroes like Superman.<p>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.<p>The death of Carl Barks also went largely unnoticed in the US, I think. In Germany, it was prime time national news.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa</a>
This is his personal website with some of his caricatures: <a href="http://www.arnofunke.de/" rel="nofollow">http://www.arnofunke.de/</a>
That is somehow the most German thing I've read in a while. It's also really droll to see all these very typically German personalities given the high-middlebrow US magazine nonfiction "a thirty-two-year-old psychologist with blond hair and a steely demeanor" treatment.
I always wonder about relationship dynamics in which a spouse can be completely unaware that their significant other is a wanted criminal actively committing crimes.<p>Although, I guess by the time they were married, he wasn't actually making any money from his schemes.
Im honestly surprised that there aren't unemployed mech/elec/chem engineers out of a job, making and setting off bombs and demanding to be paid in cryptocurrency.<p>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.