Even the Way Italians Do Crime is Better
Robin Hood meets Oceans 11, only with a wicked guitar riff.
Medieval villages populate the Italian countryside like colonies of mushrooms, always where you least expect to find them, and all the more welcome for the surprise. One such is the borgo of Faleria, which boasts 1,980 inhabitants and is situated roughly 50 kilometers north of Rome.
By car, you can pass through the entire village in less than three minutes. A ruined castle once belonging to the Farnese family sits on a weedy lot, surrounded by squat stone buildings with laundry fluttering. There’s a pharmacy owned by a kind-eyed dottoressa who listens patiently while an apricot-haired nonna in a print housecoat, light summer cardigan, and sensible, chunk-heeled shoes describes a phantom pain. The corner restaurant specializes in what is a rarity for Italy: bad pizza; a floppy, tasteless crust with grease puddling in the middle. The tabacchi is where all the old men gather to complain about government, soccer, and their ungrateful children. Occasionally, one will buy a lottery ticket or let his gaze linger a little too longingly on the local women.
Then you’ve seen all there is to see in Faleria.
On one of the side streets, there used to be a bank called Unicredit. Oh, how I loved running errands there. It was air conditioned by a single fan that blew strands of sticky dust, and a transistor radio with a broken antenna that played bad Italian pop tunes. You accessed the bank by stepping inside a glass cylinder, waiting for the outside access door to slide shut and the interior door to slide open.
The entire experience was a far cry from the Bank of America lobby I left behind in Houston: recessed lighting, velvet stanchions, and glossy brochures with phrases like, “Let’s Talk Rates.”
On a Monday at 10AM, October 19, 2015, three men entered the bank, each wearing wigs, hats, neck warmers and scarves to cover their faces. One man pointed a gun at the teller and demanded all the cash in the vault. The others tied up four bank customers with black, self-locking cable ties. One elderly customer went faint, nearly collapsing in fear, which didn’t go unnoticed by the leader of this band of robbers. In the true spirit of Robin Hood, he gallantly peeled off a 100 euro note for each of the customers, apologizing for the inconvenience, and then he and his fellow criminals hightailed it out of the bank and into a waiting vehicle.
Witnesses later described the men as “definitely Italian, with strong Roman accents”—a distinction lost on none of the Italian newspapers reporting the crime. Italian newspapers are always quick to discover the nationality of any perpetrators (the word “stranieri,” or foreigner, is used liberally in such descriptions). What is less clear is how the men entered and exited the bank without arousing suspicion. Did they stagger their entrances one by one, or did they all pile into the narrow cylinder together? Also, where were the carabinieri? Their outpost is within a short walking distance of the bank.
The inconvenienced customers were, sadly, asked to return the money given to them.
Whether security measures were beefed up after the incident is doubtful. This is, after all, Italy. Rapid decision making and rapid execution of a plan are mostly unknown to this ancient land of fatalists.
Regardless, about four months later at 2AM on February 24, 2016, the same thieves or different ones managed to yank the bank’s ATM machine right out of the wall
This gang of thieves was just as careful to cover their faces with balaclavas. One broke through the armored window of the bank and dislodged a plate anchoring the ATM machine to the wall by shooting half a dozen holes into it. The men were then able to wrap a thick chain around the ATM, attach it to their van, and pull the whole thing free. After loading it, they took off, careful to avoid any county roads that had video cameras, but leaving pieces of the ATM in their wake.
The bank manager of the Unicredit was soon transferred to another branch, which is just as well. The one time we went into his office to conduct business, we were bowled over by his putrid b.o., all the more puzzling since his office was the only one with air conditioning. Even his breath made our eyes water.
Stress does terrible things to people.
The bank robbers who heisted the vault, however, were eventually apprehended. There were three: Massimiliano Meridiani, 45, Domenico Palumbo, 55, and Simone Franciosa, 43.
Months earlier, they’d knocked off a Banca Cooperativo of Oriolo Romano, but made off with only 13 thousand euros after the bank manager gleefully locked them outside.
The robbers were arrested by an investigative unit of the Viterbo carabinieri after another robbery went wrong. The police caught a break in the case when it emerged that the black, self-locking ties the robbers used to bind customers in Faleria had been used in all the robberies. These ties were covered in DNA evidence incriminating all three men.
At some point, the people at Unicredit just gave up. They closed the branch, which years later remains a vacant, sad-eyed storefront, abandoned by all who once cared for her. The wind whips up little tempests of leaves in front of her dirt-streaked doors. The families who live upstairs scarcely notice her absence.
But I will always remember the bad pop tunes and grimy linoleum, the branch manager’s staggering b.o., and the day when three thieves, long past the first flush of youth, had the good manners to “tip” their victims for the inconvenience.
Like all things Italian, even crime is sometimes committed with elegance and civility. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
I always want to hear your thoughts! Feel free to leave any comments below.
If you're going to do something, even commit a crime, why not do it with "elegance and civility?" No one likes a boor.
Robbing banks has never been a particularly good way of getting cash. There's never enough to get you very far, there are too many variables (too many things can go wrong), and people in power take a really dim view of it as a form of employment. On the other hand, if the assholes cut my social security, since it is considered a federal crime it is on the list of possible options for my "alternative government subsidized retirement." (Federal is important: really do not want to end up in any state pens.)
I was wondering about how they got in (and out!) of the bank as well. That part sounded like a Three Stooges routine. I can just hear the "nyuk, nyuk, nyuk" as they drove off.