‘Robin Hood’ gang rob gourmet stores in bid to feed Hamburg’s poor
Tony Paterson
Independent
May 09, 2006
They dress up in pink catsuits, have names like “Spider Mum” and feel a social obligation to plunder the most expensive restaurants and gourmet delicatessens in town as part of a campaign to help the poor.
Last week the well-heeled citizens of Hamburg’s Altona district got a taste of their antics when 30 of them marched into the city’s luxury “Fresh Paradise Goedeken” supermarket and walked out five minutes later with €15,000 (£10,000) worth of stolen goods.
The gang’s booty included magnums of Champagne at €99 a bottle, filets of Japanese Kobe beef at €108 a kilogram, legs of venison, a salmon and several boxes of Valrhona chocolate.
Before leaving, gang members thrust a bouquet of flowers into the hands of a shop assistant. Attached was a handwritten note which proclaimed: “Survival in the city of millionaires would be impossible without us!” It was signed by “Spider Mum”, “Santa Guevara” and “Multiflex”.
Another note later released by the gang insisted that the haul had been distributed to Hamburg’s needy, to the “social workers, cleaning ladies and minimum-wage earners”. It added: “The places of wealth in this town are as numerous as the opportunities to take it.”
“It was a well-planned robbery,” Carsten Sievers, the store’s manager, said on Friday last week. “Somebody had obviously been in the shop before the main contingent arrived and had already filled up several shopping trolleys.”
Fourteen squad cars and a police helicopter scoured the Altona district for more than an hour after the robbery, but failed to find the perpetrators.
“The gang covered its tracks completely. They act like professionals,” Bodo Franz, the head of a Hamburg police unit investigating the robbery, said.
As they left the scene of the robbery, the gang, clad in masks, catsuits, dark glasses and rubber masks, posed for a group photo outside the supermarket and brandished their booty in front of the camera.
The incident was the latest attack perpetrated by this Robin Hood-style gang of so-called “Spontis”, whose activities have alarmed and baffled the Hamburg police and the city’s well-to-do. Yet the gang, which refers to itself as “Hamburg for Free”, does not strike often. Its last attack took place almost exactly a year ago, when 40 masked men and women stormed the Süllberg restaurant in the city’s wealthy Blankenese district overlooking the river Elbe.
Diners were appalled as the gang snatched titbits from the plates in front of them and started stuffing the stolen food into their mouths. Other gang members brandished a huge knife and fork made out of silver foil and cardboard above the diners’ heads. A placard declaring “The fat years are over” was strung between pillars in the restaurant.
Mr Franz, who has been trying to track down the “Hamburg for Free” gang since the incident a year ago, said that investigators had merely established that the group was probably made up of a mixture of students and anarchists.
“We don’t know much about them. They are very political yet one of their main motives is fun,” he said. “The problem is that they strike so rarely and so professionally that they are a major job to catch.”
German ‘Robin Hoods’ give poor a taste of the high life
Allan Hall
The Scotsman
May 09, 2006
A GANG of anarchist Robin Hood-style thieves, who dress as superheroes and steal expensive food from exclusive restaurants and delicatessens to give to the poor, are being hunted by police in the German city of Hamburg. The gang members seemingly take delight in injecting humour into their raids, which rely on sheer numbers and the confusion caused by their presence. After they plundered Kobe beef fillets, champagne and smoked salmon from a gourmet store on the exclusive Elbastrasse, they presented the cashier with a bouquet of flowers before making their getaway.
The latest robbery is part of a pattern over the past several months, suggesting that the thieves deliberately set out to highlight what they perceive as the inequality inherent in German society.
However, the authorities do not agree. Bodo Franz, a police spokesman, said: “They get off feeling they are just like Robin Hood. There are about 30 in the group. But whatever their motives, they are thieves, plain and simple.”
Carsten Sievers, the manager of a luxury supermarket in the wealthy Blankenese area of Hamburg, recently watched the robbers run off with trolleys full of expensive foodstuffs, including Kobe beef which, at more than £100 a pound, is always on their illicit shopping list.
In another recent swoop, the gang emptied a groaning buffet table in a top restaurant into sacks, while one of their number held up a sign saying. “The fat years are over” – the title of a hit film [aka The Edukators] currently doing the rounds in Germany.
In internet statements, the gang have made a point of saying their booty is distributed to Hartz IV recipients – the poorest of Germany’s long-term unemployed. The benefit is named after the disgraced Volkswagen personnel director Peter Hartz who, before he lost his job with the car-maker in a prostitutes-and-bribes scandal, devised the new means-testing which is loathed and derided by society’s most economically challenged.
When the gang robbed the gourmet store in April – triggering a massive police investigation that cost £20,000 in taxpayers’ money without an arrest being made – they left a note behind saying: “Without the abilities of the superheroes to help them, it would be impossible for ordinary people to survive in the city of the millionaires.”
Police say they are concentrating their investigation on a loose collective of anarchists and malcontents called “Hamburg in Vain”, to which they believe the superheroes belong. But they admit there is a certain panache and skill about their robberies, indicating a strong criminal element as well.
The gang are also behind black market cinema tickets which they distribute free to the poor, and they have printed leaflets telling passengers how to dodge ticket inspectors on the city’s underground and buses.
Mr Franz said: “They try to make crime fun but are politically motivated.”
:: Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and Vice Chancellor in the government of Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005, was once a ‘sponti’: in an article in The Boston Review, Paul Hockenos writes: “With a dose of anarcho-syndicalism [sic], they called themselves spontis, a riff on the impulsive, spontaneous left-wing activism deplored by Lenin. The spontis wanted to be the opposite of the Soviet communists: provocative, emotional, and irreverent, living—as they put it—“politics in the first person.” Although RK [Fischer’s group] distanced itself from the RAF’s murder campaign, it shared many of the RAF’s views on capitalism and condoned violence against the state. For RK, rocks and molotov cocktails were permissible, guns not. It was a very fine line.”
Whatever.
Further reading on the Spontis:
Katsiaficas, George. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, Humanity / Prometheus Books, New York, 1997.
Von Dinke, Sabine. All Power to the Imagination: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1997.
See also:
Biehl, Janet. ‘Farewell to the German Greens’, Left Green Perspectives (formerly Green Perspectives), “A Social Ecology Publication”, Number 23, June 1991.
Free as in Nicked
M28:: 6.07.04by Dresden for Free & Hamburg for Free
Who is a city for if not for those who live there? Why do we have to pay to take a bus, go swimming, eat, or watch a movie? Beginning with such simple but, under capitalism, explosive questions, a wave of ‘for free’ campaigns have spread across German cities. Projects such as Hamburg for Free and Dresden for Free attempt to challenge the dominion of money in the increasingly gentrified and privatised metropolis. The Hamburg group have led mass free eat-ins at university canteens in protest against price rises and student fees (students and staff all joined in), organised a free night out at the local multiplex cinema for 70 activists (quickly aborted by the police) while Dresden for Free have staged actions in swimming pools, on public transport, and in theatres, a direct response to ongoing closures and cutbacks. Mute spoke to some of the activists involved…
Predictably, the state, as Statewatch reports, has attempted to infiltrate ‘the Hamburg scene’, but the piece of shit informant was busted by an old school chum.
I really liked the sound of them up until I read this quote:
“Without the abilities of the superheroes to help them, it would be impossible for ordinary people to survive in the city of the millionaires.”
I mean, I hope it was taking the piss, but fuck, that just reeks of vanguardness to me…still, they do seem to be doing good stuff (although why not nick vegan food? 😉 )
Hey Ash,
I read their antics as the acting-out of a brilliant, Oscar-winning script.
It’s got everything:
action and adventure;
superheroes;
keystone kops;
romance and;
a cast of thousands.
Re vanguardiness: I disagree. Obviously, ‘ordinary people’ *do* survive without the aid of superheroes. So, as I see it, the political utility in making such a statement lies in elaborating on the fact that German society is unjust. Or, as the hack writing for the bourgeois press writes: “The latest robbery is part of a pattern over the past several months, suggesting that the thieves deliberately set out to highlight what they perceive as the inequality inherent in German society”.
(Honestly, I think you’d have to have a head stuffed full of cabbage not to acknowledge that German society is stratified by CLASS — a concept the expression of which appears to be verboten in the pages of the English press, however. Well, perhaps unless it takes the form of ‘All praise boss’.)
The police are doing their bit, reading from a script which I would be proud to have authored myself —
“We don’t know much about them. They are very political yet one of their main motives is fun,” he said. “The problem is that they strike so rarely and so professionally that they are a major job to catch.”
“They get off feeling they are just like Robin Hood. There are about 30 in the group. But whatever their motives, they are thieves, plain and simple.”
“They try to make crime fun but are politically motivated.” —
and thus witlessly reinforcing the message that class war can be *fun*, *popular*, of *real benefit* to the poor (or in Hall’s tortured phraseology “society’s most economically challenged”!) and, if done with proper acknowledgement of the 7ps — proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance — something you can also get away with, leaving the police flat-footed and the subject of richly-deserved ridicule.
The fact that the German state has responded to the re-appropriation of food items from rich swine by mobilising “Fourteen squad cars and a police helicopter” and invoking “a massive police investigation that cost £20,000 in taxpayers’ money without an arrest being made” means, I think, that the people who really matter — the poor — cannot fail to get the message:
“The places of wealth in this town are as numerous as the opportunities to take it.”
To put it bluntly, reading about those krazy kats in Hamburg made my day!
All hail Spider Mum, Santa Guevara and Multiflex!
Made me think of that German film The Edukators. Sort of.
I’m not surprised… it’s referenced in the body of the post after all.
😉
Oh, my complaint about that quote was very half-arsed, and I totally get the humour-inducing value of it.
I stand (to some extent) behind my vegan comment though. This could be just like with Food Not Bombs, in a way – while giving food to people who otherwise couldn’t otherwise afford it is fantastic, why not give them vegan food and introduce them to a healthier way of living with less impact and animal torture at the same time?
Shows how well I read!!
Interesting articles for the most part @ndy , I shall call again…
1. This might interest the protestant hawthorn AFL scotch college macintyre members of the Melbourne Anarchist Club part of your background Andy:
Robin Hood was Scottish.
Although represented as a hero of Anglo-Saxon England against the Norman catholic oppressors, most Hoods including my ancestors and Robin are originally from Scotia.
2. Was reading the Gaia Peace Atlas from the 80s here in Bangkok at my new campus with an introduction by Petra Kelly (assassinated East German Green), she blames the whole environmental catastrophe and war on the patriarchy and not on junkie single mothers who claim they need a car to drive their smack retarded kids around when actually it is used for late night runs to Collingwood.
3. BA Santamaria was a known fascist who did his unimelb MA Thesis on Italian fascism. The catholic anti British draft dodgers of 20th century Australia were not for the most part anarchists but pro axis continental (sympathizing) fascists or tools thereof. His was a deliberate ploy to stop the left and erode the somewhat more liberal British umpire.
Ormond was part of the Scottish brigade that used to slaughter aborigines on masse to create Lotchfarms. LaTrobe was of Norman (now protestant missed the 1066 boat huguenot) descent and his ancestors were Enniskillen men who felt so badly done by Frankish catholic fascism that they were willing to take up arms against it in Ulster.
4. William Patrick Hitler was Adolph’s Irish half brother and he moved to Liverpool and joined the US Navy later on. His house was bombed by the Luftwaffe (he was not in it). How is that for a family feud?
5. Mary Donaldson’s father became a visiting professor at Korea University (like me) after she became crown princess of Denmark.
6. Take Nige out to one of your bi nights in Collingwood, he really needs to get out.
(Isle of) Mull and Cones 1 Skull and Bones 0
at half time here in Bangkok where they sell Brooksy t-shirts (I will pick one up for you)
“Ormond was part of the Scottish brigade that used to slaughter aborigines on masse to create Lotchfarms.” (unquote from your page)
I’m descended from the Gunai Aborigine in S-E Gippsland, Victoria Australia.
I recently heard about the Scottish brigade, and believe it’s possible they played a part in the massacre of my ancestors.
If so, what else do you have on those you refer to, and on whom they slayed and where in Victoria?
My Great-Grandparents were slaughtered and my Grand-dad and other young children were taken to be raised as white in the late 1890s, near Walhalla, which is why that village gets that name (“Halls of the slain Immortals”).
It’s an hidden story, for ulterior purposes and a long term plan, basically of untold evil by my adoptive family – the “Sutherlands”, the Rosses, the Willis’s, et al.
Unfortunately, the Sutherlands are one of the wealthiest clans on Earth, and are doing everything – especially bribery – to keep the plot under wraps.
Also, their opponents, the current monarch of England’s mob – MI6 I think – will be in touch too, I expect, with a bigger offer.
Yours,
Omaxa bin Eartha
aka Max Cook
Expect a call from them offering “30 pieces of silver”.