Cool Criminals
What makes certain types of crime cool and are there any rules? Why is it that the arts and media glorify different forms of criminality over others?
In this week’s podcast, we delve into the world of cool criminals. We discuss the difference between pirates and privateers, the Byronic hero, the mafia, Baader Meinhof and Narco ballads. Nick presents his theory on how to make crimes cool and we speculate on the origins of coolness itself. Finally, we share some of our favourite crimes and criminals.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Lance Gooden wants to make privateering great again
- Too Great a Cruelty: ARCHAEOLOGY's Top Ten Vicious Pirate Acts
- Baader-Meinhof: The glamorous and beguiling face of militant violence
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
It's inventive, though. Yeah, creative and cool.
Speaker A: irate from the olden days, in: Speaker B:To be fair, though, that is a really annoying thing to do, to drop the gold in the sea so nobody can have it. Dog in a manger.
Speaker A:We'll probably cover whether or not pirates' victims deserve it. We probably will. But so I'm just saying that pirates, even though we think of them as Captain Jack Sparrow and larks, you know, they were villains at the end of the day. Anyway, why do we think they're cool? And widening it slightly, not just pirates, but other kinds of organised criminals like Mafiosi, you know, from the films, the cool gangsters from the films, and then like cyber criminals. They're quite cool, aren't they? In hackers and things. Yeah. So yeah, what are the rules? How do you get to be, if you're a criminal of some kind, how do you get to be cool? Yeah, because I was about to say, hey, this is a really simple one. Classic phrase of response. Yeah. Because they're doing, because basically they're doing stuff that we would like to do, but can't do because we're just nice and normal and obey the law. But you could say that about murdering. And Yeah, I definitely like to murder people. But murderers are not cool. Right. But pirates are. Mafia are. I think there's some other stuff going on here. There's a lifestyle thing going on. But I definitely think there's a sense of freedom and being a bit maverick about this. Who wants to weigh in? Tom?
Speaker C:So I think one thing that we need to recognize is that pirates haven't always been cool. If you were around in the 18th century, you would have hated pirates. You know, they'd be like, you know, probably murdering a couple of your relatives. If you lived in the Mediterranean coast, they might have kidnapped you, you know, sold you into slavery. And similarly today, if you're part of the Merchant Marine, you probably don't like pirates much either. Yeah. Right.
Speaker B:Well, not only that, I mean, I would say like nobody really thinks of, you know, the pirates in the Malacca Straits or Somali pirates as as being cool, you know, in the same way as you
Speaker C:think about pirates historically. So, yeah, no, no one in the shipping industry is thinking themselves, boy, I'm really excited for this port call at Port Harcourt because I might get to see some pirates. They're thinking, oh, no, we've got to get extra armed protection and might get kidnapped.
Speaker A:Would they think that, you know, Captain Jack Sparrow is cool? I bet they would. Potentially. And so I think there's something going on here with literature and film and so on. But yeah, keep going Tom. I mean, but it also does suggest that it's not the piracy itself that's cool, but something about the way they do it. That's something to think about.
Speaker C:The aesthetics perhaps. Maybe. And I think there's also something to be said of mafia, you know, we're all used to kind of mafia films and things that was pretty suave and cool. But equally, if you, you know, if you are a citizen in a sort of mafia state who just wants to go about your normal daily life, but you constantly have to pay protection money and bribes, you're probably not their biggest fan either.
Speaker A:Don't care how cool their suit is. Yeah. But yeah, no, cool would be the last thing that you would sort of associate with them. Yeah. Right. Just scary thugs, essentially. So, yeah. Chris.
Speaker B:Yeah. So I think as you as you hinted at, there's obviously something going on with sort of dubious morality, criminality and fascination, interest, attractiveness. And if you look throughout, you know, lots of areas. So if you look at, you know, literature, you obviously have famous kind of criminals within literature, you know, Long John Silver and Joss Merlin from Jamaica Inn. But but, you know, more more broadly, the whole. I think Long John Silver is a mutineer rather than a pirate. He's a pirate. All right. He's got the pirate aesthetic. If you said, you know, job title Long John Silver, most people would put him as a pirate. But equally, Joss Merlin is actually a wrecker. He's not a pirate. But, you know, but the point is they're breaking laws, effectively. So, you know, criminals and it involves ships. Ship based illegality of some sort. Right. But but the point is, it's not, you know, if you look outside the pirate genre, you know, there are all sorts of the Byronic hero is a very well trodden trope within within literature. In fact, kind of the key examples of the Byronic hero is Byron's poem The Corsair, where he he sort of, you know, one of the lines is lone, wild and strange. He stood alike, exempt from all affection and from all contempt, which I think sums up that that sort of sense of what it is we find. Can you say that again? Lone, wild and strange. He stood alike, exempt from all affection and from all contempt.
Speaker A:Could be a description of Chris himself.
Speaker B:I like that. That's nice. But it's this idea that, you know, we don't love them, but we don't hate them either. We there's something in between. And then you look at like films and you think about the most iconic characters in films. Darth Vader, the Joker, anything with Alan Rickman in, you know, the Javier Bardem character, the hitman in No Country for Old Men. You know, all of these these types of characters, they're all the ones that keep drawing us back are the ones that are criminal or, you know, morally dubious in some way. And then you look at history. You think of the most famous figures in history. It's Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler. They're not they're not. Yes, there are. You're shying away. They're a bit piratey in a way. They're a bit piratey. Exactly. They're they're sort of swashbuckling. Well, I wouldn't go as far as to say Hitler was swashbuckling. But but, you know, they are they're they're infamous. Right. That's that. And I think there's something about infamy that makes it, you know, you're more prominent than simply fame.
Speaker A:Yeah. But also, I definitely think there's something here about not obeying the rules and that we all kind of secretly lust for that.
Speaker C:Well, it's like if we go all the way back to Robin Hood. Robin Hood's kind of almost the archetypal hero criminal, at least in this country. In reality, he was a violent, you know, highwayman who who robbed and murdered people in the woods. Probably. Yeah. And distributed gold to kind of his lackeys. But there's a romanticism in the in the outlaw. I think the distinction between outlaw and criminal might be one of the things we need to investigate here.
Speaker A: the sort of the golden age of: Speaker B:Well, like the character I was talking about from No Country for Old Men. It's, yeah, everybody likes an old man.
Speaker A: ink of, you know, the kind of: Speaker B:Well, and also, again, within their community, there was a definite, you know, Islamist terrorism chic that occurred.
Speaker A:So sort of street gangstery people, I think, potentially cool. And, yeah, and I mentioned sort of fraudsters and conmen. I mean, if you watch, there's a film called House of Games by David Mamet, which is, you know, all about fraudsters, and they make it look very cool. Okay. So what do we make? Yes, that's your two piles. So here's my, let me present you with my theory now. Yeah. I think there are three things you can do to make your crime cool. First of all, you can just, and this is aesthetics, right, accepting that there is, forget about crime, accepting that there is such a thing as just being generally cool, you know, being good looking, potentially a bit rebellious, a bit sort of disrespectful of traditional hierarchies and rules, and wearing sort of cool clothes, right? Just take that. If you're like that, you've got a good chance of getting your crime to be cool. And I think that's what separates those... Highwaymen, by the way. Highwaymen. Yeah. Exactly. But those sort of, yeah, the 70s German terrorists who all looked unbelievably gorgeous while killing people. Yeah, see, they're in, but not because terrorism is cool, particularly. Yeah. Then there's skill. So I think there's a big return, if the thing you're doing requires quite a lot of skill, and that's why I think what separates, you know, kind of art forges from phone scammers is... What's an assassin from a murderer, for example. Right. Yeah, exactly. So I think there's that kind of element of skill, which you need to have to be cool. And then finally, and this goes back to Robin Hood, I think, it's the status of your victims. I think your victims, and it might be related to the concept of coolness being a thing about rebelliousness, but if your victims are high status, probably good. You've got to start there. Giving it to the man. I think that's probably, I think that's the biggest distinction between types. If you had to pick one feature that would make different crimes cool, the status of the... You're robbing a casino or a millionaire. No one cares. Get on with it. Not sure, because I think the mafia might fall down in this area. Let's pause... Well, right. But okay. See, now, not as cool. So I think you've pretty much cracked it, but keep going. I know Tom wants to say something, but... Yeah, not cool. The street thugs you talked about earlier who take protection money from a local businessman. Definitely not cool. But, you know, when they're blackmailing Senator Geary, who's a corrupt scumbag. Yeah. Yeah, that's all right. Give them a pass. But if that same person, also, he's got his racket where they're sort of protection racket for local grocery stores. It's the same person. It's the same people, but... Ultimately enabled by the same... Tom, you were going to come in on something.
Speaker C:I think I want to add a little bit to your victim categorization approach, which is that I think it's either the status of the victim or an abstract victim. Because I think I'm going to add to your list of cool criminals, smugglers. Smugglers are cool. Yeah. Right. You know, think of Prussia Cove. Think of sanctions busters. Han Solo. Yeah, Han Solo. There we go.
Speaker A:What about the geese who comes up and tries to sell you a packet of fags outside the pub for five quid? Well, they're the real smugglers, right? Yeah, I'm not sure that person's necessarily a smuggler. The way you've separated this out, and I think it's good, is maybe it's a filter. So it's kind of like first step is, okay, one, is the victim abstract or high status? Yes. Right. Then you go on to point two. Are they dressed nicely? And is it a luxury product? Because at that point, your cigarette smuggler starts to fall down and gets separated out from, I don't know, your jewel smuggler or something. I don't know, something like that. Yeah.
Speaker C:At the same time, there are people who kind of meet those categorizations. So I'm thinking they're kind of gemstone clearing houses in places like Jaipur or in Thailand, which are part of a criminal industry that I think we'd all agree is cool. You know, gemstone smuggling, rubies going around, getting cut, disguised, you know, sent around the world. But they're not actually that cool themselves. They sit in an office sorting stones, right? So I think that reinforces your point about there is an aesthetic element. And I think that aesthetic element comes both from ideas of what we think are cool, but also from kind of not so deliberate, but almost conscious cultural creations, defining these activities as cool, adding them to the list of things that are cool.
Speaker A:That's true. And I guess we only see the public face of that crime. I mean, because I was thinking to myself, you're Byronic Hero. He's lone, right? So, you know, lone wolf type criminals plan everything themselves in out, you know, operate by night. Yeah, that's pretty cool. But organized crime, organized doesn't sound very cool, does it? I mean, if you're the mafia, you're going to have to have HR people. Disorganized crime is way better. It's way cooler. You're going to need things like, you know, you're going to need HR policies, aren't you? And health and safety and that kind of thing to be the mafia properly.
Speaker B:I think there's two things that the mafia is an interesting case in point because it does. It does have cachet, you know, it is. It is cool. And I think it highlights a couple of things. I think one is coming back to Tom's point. I don't think it's necessarily how administrative or something might be. I think it's about the position of the individual that we're holding up to be cool. Are they the one taking the risks and doing the glamorous stuff or are they simply an administrator within an organized crime system? And I think generally one of the things that makes a criminal attractive, provided it's got these other things around it, is they're taking the risk. They're the ones doing something that we can vicariously enjoy in some way. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C:And contender that the administrators are taking a risk as well by being involved with it. It's just not an exciting risk.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's difficult to sell. You want to see someone sort of leaping across.
Speaker C:I think I want to rephrase your statement. So it actually is the generation of anecdotes. If it generates stories, no one's going to tell a story about how, oh yeah, I stamped, you know, expenses claims for the mafia. But you might tell a story about a more active risk.
Speaker B:If you were smuggling the things, smuggling the gems yourself and you had to go through and it was all very visceral, you know, then I think that's cool. People can feel their heart beating.
Speaker A:Yeah, there was a really good film from the 80s called The Accountant with, who's the chap who plays Dr. Octopus? A good one. Nick pointed at me as though I knew. Alfred Molina. Alfred Molina. Yeah. As a North London accountant who accidentally ends up doing accountancy for the mob. Yeah. That's really good. A really good film. That's what happens in. He's probably not a cool character, I suppose. No, exactly. Which actually makes me think of The Ozarks, where, are you familiar with? The mountain range, yeah. Well, yeah, no, but I think they're lakes actually. Well, maybe they're mountains as well, but they're definitely lakes. But it's on Netflix. No, I recommend it. It's very good. What you've just said is with an accountant starts working in this case with drug cartels, actually not by accident, but he's not a cool guy. And that's kind of almost the premise of the whole thing.
Speaker B:Well, they're us in the story. Yeah.
Speaker A:And I do think, I know I keep going on about this and, you know, and it's great that we are analysing this stuff. However, I definitely do think it goes back to this sort of, this vicarious thing. We all live normal lives. We all live by the rules. And so something like your example, Tom, where, well, the guy actually doing the accounts is not that cool. I mean, immediately just a knee jerk. We know that. And of course, we don't want to be that guy. We want to be the guy doing, you know.
Speaker B:I think there's also another thing that is at play here, which is about codes. Right. We talked about the mafia. And I think this sort of relates to ethics and morality. Right. So we like ethics being about, I suppose, the codification of behaviour that's endorsed by society or valued by society and morality being about our personal decisions about good and evil and the choices that we make, I suppose. And it has religious connotations as well. But essentially what I think what we're looking for in a cool criminal, when you think of the sort of Han Solo trope, you're looking for somebody who breaks the rules but has some level of morality. Right. Their heart is in the right place. The honour among thieves kind of things. Now, where the mafia is really interesting is that they break everyone else's rules, right, the ethics of society, but they have their very own strict code of rules, as do other, you know, criminal sort of ecosystems. And I think that's interesting and something that we like. We like to see good people or we like to see rules that have their own internal logic being followed.
Speaker A:I like that. That's a nice distinction. I know Nick was raising his hand, but I also want to hear from Tom.
Speaker C:So I want to bring that back to the criminal versus outlaw distinction. A criminal is just someone who breaks rules. And, you know, they could be cool. Whereas an outlaw is someone who exists outside of the set of rules that we have. And I think that is where then their own set of rules comes into play. And I think that you're much more likely to be cool if you're an outlaw than if you're a criminal.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:No, I like that. I feel this is actually going. I think we've kind of wrapped this up, have we not? No, because I wanted to widen it further. We've got more, we've got more, we've got more.
Speaker C:I've got all this culture stuff.
Speaker A:Brilliant. But I just, Chris, what Chris was just saying that did made me think of, you know, the sort of the big distinction, I suppose, in societies between honour based societies and kind of transactional type societies and how you can see that in some ways as a clash between sort of farmer ethics and hunter ethics, you know, that the, it feels to me like when we're thinking about these cool criminals, what we're really doing is thinking about people who still live by the ancient hunter ethics, you know, of honour. And, you know, they don't really believe in having people should have big possessions and be settled and, you know, own huge palaces. And, you know, they kind of and they have a small band of people that they're loyal to and they share in that band of people. And, you know, so it feels to me like actually perhaps what these cool criminals from literature represent is a yearning to be back in a hunter gatherer society. And, you know, yeah. So I just feel immediately like I just want to go out and be a hunter gatherer. Yeah, we all do. I'll do the hunting. We're living a lie. You do the gathering. I'll do the hunting. Yeah. Tom, yeah, you said you wanted to move on to something cultural stuff.
Speaker C:Yeah, so I think this has got a book out. Yeah, what are these books you've got in front of you? Well, I have a lot of books about smuggling. Can I see the titles of these two books? How to be a smuggler. If anyone is interested in the history of smuggling and exciting stories, this one's called Smuggling Seven Centuries of Contraband by Simon Harvey. And I've got here Patriots and Profiteers by R.T. Naylor.
Speaker A:It doesn't look like that other one. The second one's been read at all.
Speaker C:I'm partway through this one. I'm like you're like 10 pages through. I don't I don't crack my books when I read them. I don't like doing that.
Speaker A:Well, you should bend the spine first.
Speaker C:No, I refuse. Why? This is a bit of a digression. Of course, let's go for it. Why don't you bend spines? I just don't like it. I don't like it. But then you run the danger of cracking it.
Speaker A:And so therefore, you have to read your book like that. Just a little this. Oh, Tom.
Speaker C:That's what I do. I read my book like that. Not like that. I don't need to open it the whole way. Again, maverick piratey behavior. What was the second book in which you've not read? Patriots and Profiteers. Patriots and Profiteers. OK, go on.
Speaker A:I bet Fraser hasn't read either of these books. Yeah, of course I haven't.
Speaker C:I'm not brandishing them. So one thing that Smuggling or Simon Harvey touched on a lot is the cultural concept surrounding smuggling. So you have things like the Narco Corridos in Mexico. The drug runners. No, they're the ballads that sprung up. These kind of narrative ballads. So Corrido is a type of song, a narrative ballad, very popular. And there's this entire industry of Narco Corridos now, which are narrative ballads about the adventures and exploits of Narcos. And they're now kind of their Narco Corrido bands are sponsored by cartels to essentially glorify them. And these songs have become incredibly popular, increasingly in America as well as in Mexico, where they've kind of originated from. We also have things like you have telenovelas in Colombia, things like a song called La Guajira, which is set on the Guajira Peninsula and is, you know, the smugglers in it are presented as heroes. They sort of fight against the central government and stand up for the locals. And similarly, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has lots of stories about smuggling, that sort of thing, where smugglers are similarly presented almost in a slightly sort of Marquez kind of take on the sort of ironic hero. They're a bit more enigmatic and so on.
Speaker A:Well, you couldn't get a and you couldn't get a more high status and annoying victim than the tax man. Well, yeah, and I think it's also abstract, crucially, who's the victim?
Speaker B:But also, if the if the best kind of criminal surely is the one who is actually undermining a corrupt institution, you know, so they're actually the good guys in this if they're redistributing. It's very Robin Hood again. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker C:I think the other thing is coming all the way back to to Privateers and Letters of Mark is criminals who this is a theme in Patriots and Profiteers, which I have read some of. It's definitely an emerging theme is that the first when the state is kind of co-opting criminals to join their endeavors. So whether that be the CIA working with with opium rings in Southeast Asia or privateers or, you know, sanctions busters, for example, or one of my favorite examples is the in the sort of golden age of smuggling of plant products when the British and the French would hire adventurers. Yeah. Also known as criminals. Yeah. To go into China and steal botanical samples.
Speaker A:And they did that in South America with rubber as well. I think the Byzantine Empire did that with silkworms.
Speaker C:Yeah, two monks who smuggled the silkworms back in their rogues.
Speaker A:So you're talking about cooperation between the state and criminals.
Speaker C:Because at that point, the criminals kind of they have almost a higher purpose. They are, well, as they say, they're profiteers, but they're also, you know, they're patriotic. They're doing something for a purpose. Interestingly, often when the state doesn't need that service anymore, they go back to being normal criminals out for their own good.
Speaker A:This is also like Lucky Luciano. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker C:And the landings in Sicily. Nice.
Speaker A:I've just got a nice little diversion. I like that. One little interesting theory I discovered, which is a quick one, but I just thought I'd add it in the end. Just about the idea of coolness at all. Yeah. In the 19th century, as I understand it, the concept of coolness in Europe was essentially what aristocrats did, where they were sort of, you know, literally, sort of emotionless and behaved like they had ennui. There is a theory. Exactly. Robert Farris Thompson, this guy at Yale, thinks that all of the sort of modern coolness ideas of sort of, which probably the word cool comes from jazz, right? He thinks that this might have come from the Yoruba people, a concept called etutu, which is basically being sort of almost stoical and emotionless in the face of kind of annoying oppression. And he thinks this idea might have been imported to the US with the slaves and has sort of emerged, I guess, from black culture in the US over the course of the last hundred years, which, you know, it's got a bit of anecdotal evidence to it. Quite like it. But anyway, I just thought I'd throw that in because it was interesting. It feels a little stretched, but I like it. At the very least, we can say it probably contributed to that concept. Something about that I like as well. Yeah. Cool. OK, I've got lots of stuff I want to ask about. Anything before I move on to a couple of things? OK, nice. I thought we sort of gave that a good going over. A couple of things. I just want to shout out to one of my sons, Lewis, who, when he was younger, used to do this brilliant impression. He used to do a brilliant impression of a French person. OK. But even better than that was his impression of pirates. We're talking about when he was about four years old. And he had two impressions of pirates. And the first one was this. Arrrr. That first impression. I think it's quite good.
Speaker C:So far. Was that a pirate or a West Country farmer?
Speaker A:A second impression. OK. And this will clarify it for you. Arrrr. Pirate. That was the second impression. Very good. Is that a West Country farmer who's just seen a pirate? Right. You know that, I think, it was, I've forgotten who. Lots of pirates were from the West Country. I've forgotten who the actor was. They weren't. That's a myth. Really? Yeah, it's basically the first time it's portrayed on screen. I think in an adaptation of Jamaican Reign or so. It's because of Jamaican Reign. It was one of the guys from the Wurzels, wasn't it? Yeah, like Long John Silver. If you read the book, I think he's a Cockney. Right. There's no evidence that he's a, you know, Cornishman or anything. Lots of smugglers, though, were actually from the West Country. All right. Easy to get your smugglers and pirates mixed up. That's the first thing. I just wanted to get a nod to my son. I think the second thing, I think I've got a bit of pirate blood in me. Oh, OK. Because I've never felt so thrilled. And as once and you're not going to like this story, Nick, but as once when I was at university and I was punting and often you go in a flotilla of people and and we sort of and we said, right. And whenever you go punting, it's always like with lots of nice sort of things to make, you know, like drink and stuff and other recreational stuff to make it more fun. And we decided to steal everything from one of the other punts. Brilliant. That was fun for you, but not for the other punters. Exactly. You were the pirates of the punt. And let that be a lesson.
Speaker C:I think your victims probably weren't quite high status enough for you to be cool. I think that might have been. They were high status. That might have just been crime. They were fellow Oxford students. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:I've got no sympathy for any of them. Yeah. I wish I wish you'd all drown. Yeah. A right bunch of punts. Nice one. OK, question. I don't know if you want this one or a different one. I was going to say, I could say, you know, who's your favourite criminal? I could say, who's your favourite antihero? Similar, same thing. Let's go with that, shall we?
Speaker C:I don't have one yet. Has anyone got any ideas? I've got a story about how I think I met a smuggler once in the wild.
Speaker A:Let's go with that. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C:Well, so I was on holiday in Rwanda near the border with DRC. Yeah. In quite a volatile region. Yeah.
Speaker A:When are we talking? It's always volatile, but it goes up and down.
Speaker C:2019, I think. Oh, OK. All right, yeah. Yeah, so a few years ago. It was pretty volatile at the time. They'd actually just shut the border. And I was trying to get a bus, but the bus was full, so they just wouldn't let me on. And then a car came past, and the guy offered to give me and my friend a lift. And he said, oh, I'll just charge you what the bus ticket would have been. Suspiciously cheap. He seemed very nice. He was playing some great tunes in his car. What did he look like? And what did the car look like? The car was a... Nondescript. Yeah, almost studiously nondescript car, as was he, actually. Right. But, you know, he was chatting away to us. He very much wanted to emphasize that, you know, he was legit. He showed us his passport. It's like, my name's Gabriel. Right, OK. That's my Christian name. And then he explained to us that he was on his way to Congo with a friend, and then pointed at a lorry in front of us and said, that's my friend. You know, we've come all the way from the coast. I thought, oh, that's interesting. Maybe he's like the relief driver for, you know, long, long lorry journeys. Then I thought, hold on, he's the relief driver. Why is he driving another car? You're not going to be an effective relief driver if you've also been driving. And he never let this lorry out of his sight, including when we got to the city we were trying to get to. He refused to go down a side street to drop us off.
Speaker A:But you accepted his lift. Oh, yeah, yeah. By the way, just at this point, I would imagine in a Netflix series, you know, you would briefly appear at the bottom of the credits somewhere, as you know, right? You were just in that one episode, unfortunately. But anyway, keep going on.
Speaker C:So, yeah, he even refused, he made us get out of the car in about 10 seconds flat because he had to maintain visibility of this lorry in front of him, which made me think, you know, this is all conjecture. But I reckon he was escorting that cargo somewhere.
Speaker A:I think he was just probably a very kind gentleman who's offered you a lift. And you've now, you know, besmirched his, you know, yeah.
Speaker C:I think you mean I've assumed he's an incredibly cool smuggler. Yeah, yeah. In a way, it's a compliment.
Speaker A:Anyway, right, let's move on. Nick or Chris? Well, I've got my, it's sort of anti-hero. I suppose it's more my favourite crime of all time, which was the first London great, the first great train robbery. Is that different to the one that everyone's familiar with? Yeah, where they were stealing gold, I think was being transferred to France on a train. And it was months and months of planning. And they, you know, had to sort of, they involved having to break into the train company's offices and take impressions of keys and, you know, get inside people to find out exactly where things would be. And they did it, but they did it all without, in the end, they carried it off without anyone noticing whatsoever. They, you know, got the gold out of the safe, sort of replaced everything. So it looked like it was, you know, completely untouched. And they didn't find out till they, you know, replaced it with like similarly weighted bits of lead and stuff. And then in the end, you know, they didn't find out till they opened the safe and they're gone. It's brilliant. Yeah, but Michael Crichton did a kind of literary retelling of it, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants a kind of roaring adventure story. Like it. I like it. We'll come to, I'll just briefly go, Drake. Francis Drake. Yeah. Not Drake the rapper. Not Drizzy. No, the rapper. Oh, yeah. The privateer. But also I've lived in Cadiz as well. And he famously, you know, singed the beard of the king of Spain with Cadiz. And there's also something about something I really like about pirates. Let's call him a pirate for a minute that I like, which is that daring do that swashbuckling. I think that movement going exotic places. But also the thing about ships is you've got nowhere else to go. It's a kind of it is tends to be no quarter stuff. There's no you can't run off anywhere. OK, when two ships come into fight, that's it. And I kind of like that about pirates as well. Unless you actually had to live it with the scurvy. I would be horrific. It could be awful. Well, look, if it was that bad, people wouldn't have done it. Must have had some some benefits. Yeah. I just like the idea of charging in somewhere, like smashing all up and then running off again. Yeah, yeah. Agreed. It's very nice. I don't know.
Speaker B:Yeah, for me. So my my dad grew up on a on a like in terrorist slums in Sheffield. Right.
Speaker A:Terrorist slum. Oh, sorry. Terrorist slum. But in those days.
Speaker B:Yeah. With, you know, outdoor loo and all that kind of stuff. But he he always used to tell me and and my grandmother as well about the guy who lived next door to them who was called Crabtree. I don't know what his first name was, but he was called Crabtree. Crabby Crabtree. First name Crab, surname Tree. Yeah, exactly. And he was he was basically a sort of black marketeer con man in the post-war. A spiff. A spiff. Exactly. Yeah. An old school spiff. And so I used to get told all these stories about and whenever I imagine him, he's always in black and white for some reason, like the whole world. Pencil moustache. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Zoot suit type thing. So, yeah, I remember being told these stories and one of his one of his cons so much, you know, they'd overhear the conversations he was having with his his victims and things over the, you know, the fence or whatever. And one of his his classic cons was selling a truckload of coal that never existed. Yes. He he sort of went in, you know, and then effectively, you know, these people would end up apologising to him for him having lost even more money than they had. You know, he was obviously so convinced. It was like the advanced fee scam, presumably. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. You front. And he was your hero. He's your he's your favourite hero. I suppose he's the criminal. I mean, I've also actually my my ancestor, you know, my great grandfather was in jail for stabbing a man there. My my Austrian relatives were all con men. So there's actually quite a lot of criminality in my past. So it's not that I think they were cool. It's just that they exist.
Speaker A:Well, with Austrian ancestors, it could have been worse. Yeah, exactly. If you're going to pick any, go with those ones. Yeah. All right. Nice. I very much enjoyed that. I think that paid off nicely. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Tom Spence, Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.
