Back Off to What?

On older people and organised crime

The “Grandpa Gang,” a clutch of French hoodlums in their 60s and 70s who, in 2016, disguised themselves as police and robbed Kim Kardashian in Paris without - they claim - having any idea who she was, is a tale of our age, as well as our aged. There are many salient details emerging as the case comes to court this month. "This has you written all over it," Yunice Abbas’ wife is said to have “grumbled” to him after he awoke from a post-heist nap to find her glued to the TV news, according to the BBC’s report. Abbas is 72 now, his co-defendant Aomar Aït Khedache (70), is known as “Omar the Old.” Another of the accused in their 80s has been excused trial due to advanced dementia, and one has died.

The ‘Last of the Summer Crime’ whimsy attached to the case ought not obscure the fact that these men tied up and terrified a person, however famous and ambivalent, at gunpoint. What’s telling perhaps is that the assumed narrative which had enfolded the case, that of an ‘elite’ crew separating a celebrity from their £3 million pound engagement ring as part of a meticulous operation, has been replaced by the more prosaic truth, outlined (with what feels to me like disappointment) by the author of a book about the heist, Patricia Tourancheau:

"This isn't the creme de la creme of French banditry. They're a bit of a bunch of losers, really. They're the same kind of people who in the 60s and 70s would burglar banks or post offices and who then rebranded to drug trafficking and then moved on to jewels because it was easier,"

Tourancheau goes on:

"These are a group of elderly down-and-out thieves, they're always broke, they're forever involved in convoluted plans… and they're facing a huge celebrity and they don't even know who she is."

It is the last line that appeals, perhaps. To not know who Kim Kardashian¹ is and to think a stick up is a viable way to make money – how many people like that are left on the planet? But are these men the snow leopards of villainy – a dwindling breed - or just the visible cusp of a great, grey wave of older gangsters whose full, if frail, force has yet to be appreciated?