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25 October 2017
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41750080
Japanese police say they have finally caught a prolific thief who dressed as a ninja to carry out raids – and were surprised to find he was 74.
After his usually covered face was caught on a security camera this year, he was put under surveillance which led to his arrest in July.
Police now believe he is the so-called “Ninja of Heisei”, thought to have carried out more than 250 break-ins.
He has been charged with thefts worth 30m yen ($260,000; £200,000).
Police had been baffled by a series of burglaries over eight years carried out by a suspect wearing black, assuming they had been carried out by someone younger.
Investigators observed the suspect, whom they say seemed little different from most elderly men, during the day.
But they say he then went into an abandoned building and changed clothes before waiting until it got dark to steal.
“He was dressed all in black just like a ninja,” a senior official in the western Japanese city of Osaka said.
Police said the thief displayed great physical ability, running effortlessly on top of walls instead of taking the streets.
After his arrest, the man was quoted as saying: “If I were younger, I wouldn’t have been caught. I’ll quit now as I’m 74 and old enough.”
Masterminds was a true crime documentary television series produced in Canada with truTV (formerly Court TV).
49. The Great Escape: Jeffrey Manchester
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterminds_(Canadian_TV_series)-
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-burglar-with-his-very-own-mac-attack
Geoff Manaugh
Updated 04.13.17 3:55PM ET / Published 05.01.16 12:01AM ET
Before they knew his name, they called him Roofman. He would cut holes in the roofs of chain stores and fast-food restaurants—usually a McDonald’s—then drop down through the ceiling and rob the startled employees. Sometimes he’d come in through the back wall, slipping in through a hole of his own making, only to pop out in the kitchen or storeroom; but it was mostly the roof and so the name quickly stuck.
The employees he held up were usually teenagers paid minimum wage working the morning shift or wearily closing up shop for the night, getting the day’s take ready to be counted. They didn’t have much incentive to try to stop Roofman; in any case, he was known for his gentle demeanor, without fail described as polite—in one oft-repeated example, even insisting that his victims put on their winter coats so that they could stay warm after he locked them all in a walk-in freezer.
An official spokesperson for McDonald’s offered perhaps the simplest explanation of the ongoing crime spree: Roofman was just “very brand loyal.”
But there was more to it than that. Hidden inside the repetitive floor plans and the daily schedules of these franchised businesses, Roofman had found the parameters of a kind of criminal Groundhog Day: a burglary that could be performed over and over in different towns, cities, and states—probably even different countries, if he’d tried—and his skills would only get better with each outing. In a very real sense, he was breaking into the same building again and again, endlessly duplicating the original crime.
For Roofman, it was as if each McDonald’s with its streamlined timetable and centrally controlled managerial regime was an identical crystal world: a corporate mandala of polished countertops, cash registers, supply closets, money boxes, and safes into which he could drop from above as if teleported there. Everything would be in similar locations, down to the actions taking place within each restaurant. At more or less the same time of day—whether it was a branch in California or in rural North Carolina—employees would be following a mandated sequence of events, a prescribed routine, and it must have felt as if he had found some sort of crack in space-time, a quantum filmloop stuttering without cease, an endless present moment always waiting to be robbed. It was the perfect crime—and he could do it over and over again.
For Roofman, it must have looked as if the rest of the world were locked in a trance, doing the exact same things at the exact same times of day—in the same kinds of buildings, no less—and not just in one state, but everywhere. It’s no real surprise, then, that he would become greedy, ambitious, overconfident, stepping up to larger and larger businesses—but still targeting franchises and big-box stores. They would all have their own spatial formulas and repeating events, he knew; they would all be run according to predictable loops inside identical layouts all over the country.
With overconfidence came carelessness, and after committing an estimated 40 burglaries in a little less than two years, Roofman was caught. He was arrested and sent to North Carolina’s Brown Creek Correctional Institution. Now the police finally knew his name and backstory: Roofman was Jeffrey Manchester, a former U.S. Army reservist with a peculiar eye for spatial patterns. But as quickly as they locked him up, he broke out, escaping from Brown Creek—the first person ever to do so—by hiding underneath a delivery truck. He was carried to safety by the easily memorized and predictable schedule of a package-delivery van.
Manchester made a beeline for nearby Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where he’d been told by his fellow inmates that sentences for commercial burglary were not as severe as in surrounding areas. There, his architectural proclivities took an especially bizarre turn. His (second) arresting officer, Sergeant Katherine Scheimreif of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, spoke to me about how it all unraveled.
When Scheimreif and the Charlotte Police found him again, Manchester had been living for several months inside an apartment of his own making, disguised behind a bicycle display in the walls of Toys “R” Us. He had actually burrowed so far into the wall that he ended up in an abandoned Circuit City next door. There, he constructed an even more elaborate home for himself, tucked beneath a stairwell. It was a twenty-four-hour burglary headquarters hidden inside the walls of an American chain store, taking his brand loyalty to a strange new level of spatial intensity where ever-more-elaborate plots could be hatched.
Scheimreif referred to Manchester’s unlikely abode as “his little spider hole,” and my first reaction was to assume that this was a condescending analogy, a cop’s put-down, as if comparing Manchester to vermin or to a bug. To an extent, it was—but Scheimreif was also being amusingly literal. Manchester had been sleeping on Spider-Man-themed bedsheets, with Spider-Man film posters tacked up on his makeshift walls, surrounded by DVDs stolen from the children’s toy store next door. This pirate of space-time, ritualistically breaking his way into identical commercial moments across the country, convinced of his own genius, had constructed for himself the escapist bedroom of an 11 year old.
But Manchester didn’t stop there. He also installed his own, parallel surveillance network inside the Toys “R” Us, using stolen baby monitors to spy on the movements of guards and employees, looking out for rhythms, patterns, and times of weakness as he planned his next blockbuster caper. “He would just watch the baby monitor and know exactly when everyone was coming and going,” Sergeant Scheimreif explained to me. It was a more sophisticated version of his old days as Roofman.
“Everything in these businesses is so procedurally organized,” she pointed out. “They put the money away at the same time; they cook the fries at the same time. These corporations organize things like this for a reason, but they’re not thinking about these other kinds of people.”
A McDonald’s or a Toys “R” Us is designed to facilitate a specific retail sequence in which customers enter, choose their goods, stand in line, and pay. But Sergeant Scheimreif’s “other kinds of people” have discovered something like a parallel world hidden inside all of this: these sequences also entirely accidentally contain a kind of countersequence, a crime nestled in the building’s lulls and blind spots. It’s the flip side of all those regularized floor plans, daily schedules, and employee rhythms. It’s the same dots connected to make a different picture.
With his own surveillance network in place, Manchester made perhaps his best discovery of all: he could actually rearrange and interfere with the building’s rhythms until they began to form the pattern he was waiting for. Indeed, Manchester “had become so attuned to his Toys ‘R’ Us,” Sergeant Scheimreif added, “that he actually began changing its security system and changing the schedules of the employees.” No longer content simply to wait for the perfect moment to show itself, as he once did at McDonald’s, he was now rescheduling guards and store managers alike in order to engineer the right circumstances into existence, as if assembling a puzzle. Then he struck.
These elaborate preparations for the world’s most ambitious takeover robbery of a children’s toy store were thwarted, however, by an event outside the perfect world Manchester had created. An off-duty sheriff’s deputy unexpectedly arrived, throwing off his meticulously arranged plans. Roofman resorted to violence, punching the female deputy, stealing her gun, and fleeing the premises.
For the police, a slew of random details began falling into place. An earlier false alarm at the toy store had been blamed on a rodent, but suspicions had nonetheless been raised. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police had already searched the abandoned Circuit City next door—even tugging on an odd piece of drywall that was an entrance to Manchester’s burrow. His bizarre hiding spot was now soon discovered.
While going back through his case, including a review of his behavior at the Brown Creek Correctional Institution before he made his escape, Sergeant Scheimreif found that Manchester had apparently spent a lot of time in his cell drawing up plans for his future dream home. Not a mansion on a tropical island or a fantasy castle somewhere in the Alps, his dream house included a maze of trap-doors and what Sergeant Scheimreif called “escape holes.” It was everything he seemed to want a building to be—with near-infinite ways of getting from one room to another and no upper limit on the places he could hide.
Secret passages, “escape holes,” apartments hidden in the walls, and makeshift entrances sliced down through ceilings: this was the architectural world Roofman lived within and moved through, a universe of spatial possibilities tucked away deep inside our own. Sergeant Scheimreif laughed and deadpanned, “He definitely had a different way of looking at things.”
Excerpted from A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2016 by Geoff Manaugh. All rights reserved.
A Burglar’s Guide to the City is out now from FSG Originals. Geoff Manaugh wishes to thank Douglas McGray and Pat Walters for their editorial feedback on an intermediary version of this text.
S. NEWS
Japan’s ninjas heading for extinction
By Mariko Oi
BBC News, Japan
23 November 2012https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20135674
Japan’s era of shoguns and samurai is long over, but the country does have one, or maybe two, surviving ninjas. Experts in the dark arts of espionage and silent assassination, ninjas passed skills from father to son – but today’s say they will be the last.
Japan’s ninjas were all about mystery. Hired by noble samurai warriors to spy, sabotage and kill, their dark outfits usually covered everything but their eyes, leaving them virtually invisible in shadow – until they struck.
Using weapons such as shuriken, a sharpened star-shaped projectile, and the fukiya blowpipe, they were silent but deadly.
Ninjas were also famed swordsmen. They used their weapons not just to kill but to help them climb stone walls, to sneak into a castle or observe their enemies.
Most of their missions were secret so there are very few official documents detailing their activities. Their tools and methods were passed down for generations by word of mouth.
This has allowed filmmakers, novelists and comic artists to use their wild imagination.
Hollywood movies such as Enter the Ninja and American Ninja portray them as superhumans who could run on water or disappear in the blink of an eye.
“That is impossible because no matter how much you train, ninjas were people,” laughs Jinichi Kawakami, Japan’s last ninja grandmaster, according to the Iga-ryu ninja museum.
However, ninjas did apparently have floats that enabled them move across water in a standing position.
Kawakami is the 21st head of the Ban family, one of 53 that made up the Koka ninja clan. He started learning ninjutsu (ninja techniques) when he was six, from his master, Masazo Ishida.
“I thought we were just playing and didn’t think I was learning ninjutsu,” he says.
“I even wondered if he was training me to be a thief because he taught me how to walk quietly and how to break into a house.”
Other skills that he mastered include making explosives and mixing medicines.
“I can still mix some herbs to create poison which doesn’t necessarily kill but can make one believe that they have a contagious disease,” he says.
Kawakami inherited the clan’s ancient scrolls when he was 18.
While it was common for these skills to be passed down from father to son, many young men were also adopted into the ninja clans.
There were at least 49 of these but Mr Kawakami’s Koka clan and the neighbouring Iga clan remain two of the most famous thanks to their work for powerful feudal lords such as Ieyasu Tokugawa – who united Japan after centuries of civil wars when he won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.
It is during the Tokugawa era – known as Edo – when official documents make brief references to ninjas’ activities.
“They weren’t just killers like some people believe from the movies,” says Kawakami.
In fact, they had day jobs. “Because you cannot make a living being a ninja,” he laughs.
There are many theories about these day jobs. Some ninjas are believed to have been farmers, and others pedlars who used their day jobs to spy.
“We believe some became samurai during the Edo period,” says Kawakami. “They had to be categorised under the four caste classes set by the Tokugawa government: warrior, farmers, artisan and merchants.”
As for the 21st Century ninja, Kawakami is a trained engineer. In his suit, he looks like any other Japanese businessman.
The title of “Japan’s last ninja”, however, may not be his alone. Eighty-year-old Masaaki Hatsumi says he is the leader of another surviving ninja clan – the Togakure clan.
Hatsumi is the founder of an international martial arts organisation called Bujinkan, with more than 300,000 trainees worldwide.
“They include military and police personnel abroad,” he tells me at one of his training halls, known as dojo, in the town of Noda in Chiba prefecture.
It is a small town and not a place you would expect to see many foreigners. But the dojo, big enough for 48 tatami mats, is full of trainees who are glued to every move that Hatsumi makes. His actions are not big, occasionally with some weapons, but mainly barehanded.
Hatsumi explains to his pupils how those small moves can be used to take enemies out.
Paul Harper from the UK is one of many dedicated followers. For a quarter of a century, he has been coming to Hatsumi for a few weeks of lessons every year.
“Back in the early 80s, there were various martial art magazines and I was studying Karate at the time and I came across some articles about Bujinkan,” he says.
“This looked much more complex and a complete form of martial arts where all facets were covered so I wanted to expand my experience.”
Harper says his master’s ninja heritage interested him at the start but “when you come to understand how the training and techniques of Bujinkan work, the ninja heritage became much less important”.
Hatsumi’s reputation doesn’t stop there. He has contributed to countless films as a martial arts adviser, including the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, and continues to practise ninja techniques.
Both Kawakami and Hatsumi are united on one point. Neither will appoint anyone to take over as the next ninja grandmaster.
“In the age of civil wars or during the Edo period, ninjas’ abilities to spy and kill, or mix medicine may have been useful,” Kawakami says.
“But we now have guns, the internet and much better medicines, so the art of ninjutsu has no place in the modern age.”
As a result, he has decided not to take a protege. He simply teaches ninja history part-time at Mie University.
Despite having so many pupils, Mr Hatsumi, too, has decided not to select an heir.
“My students will continue to practice some of the techniques that were used by ninjas, but [a person] must be destined to succeed the clan.” There is no such person, he says.
The ninjas will not be forgotten. But the once-feared secret assassins are now remembered chiefly through fictional characters in cartoons, movies and computer games, or as a tourist attractions.
The museum in the city of Iga welcomes visitors from across the world where a trained group, called Ashura, entertains them with an hourly performance of ninja tricks.
Unlike the silent art of ninjutsu, the shows that school children and foreign visitors watch today are loud and exciting. The mystery has gone even before the last ninja has died.
Did ancient priests fool visitors to a sulfurous subterranean stream that they had crossed the River Styx and entered Hades?
By Mike Dash
October 1, 2012
-https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-unsolved-mystery-of-the-tunnels-at-baiae-56267963/-
…if you just think Ninja are cool and just want another book about them you’ll find the history section fascinating. The main premise of this book is to think differently…
Italy hunts bear after ‘genius’ escape over electric fences
17 July 2019
A fugitive bear likened to a superhero for its daring escape over an electric pen in northern Italy is being hunted by forest rangers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49018141
The brown bear, named M49, was snared in the Trentino region on Sunday.
Italian authorities had ordered the wild bear’s capture after deeming it a danger to humans and farm animals.
But the animal fled just hours after it was caught, reportedly scaling three electric fences and a 13ft (4m) high barrier.
Park rangers with sniffer dogs are hunting the animal, which is currently believed to be in the Marzola woods near Trento.
Trentino’s governor Maurizio Fugatti gave forestry authorities permission to “shoot it down”, saying the bear’s escape over an electric fence “carrying 7,000 volts shows how dangerous it is”.
But his orders provoked fury among animal rights activists and were rebuked by Italy’s environment ministry.
“M49’s escape from the enclosure cannot justify an action that would cause its death,” said Environment Minister Sergio Costa.
Clarifying Mr Fugatti’s orders, the regional forestry and wildlife department told the BBC that the bear would only be shot if it poses a danger to people.
“It’s a decision that has to be taken soon because it’s a matter of public safety,” department spokesman Claudio Groff said.
“This bear has tried and probably will try again to enter homes. In this case a dangerous situation may arise.”
WWF Italy, a global conservation organisation, questioned how the bear was able to climb the electrified fence, suggesting the structure was probably “not working properly, since bears do not fly”.
Italy’s League for the Abolition of Hunting (LAC) gave the bear credit for a getaway Italian media have compared to the 1963 WWII film, The Great Escape.
“Evidently, M49 is an escape genius… gifted with superpowers akin to a hero of Marvel Comics,” it said.
Michela Vittoria Brambilla, president of the Italian Defence League for Animals, told M49 to “run and save yourself!”
Mr Groff said the animal’s break-out was surprising as the electrified pen in which it was held had hosted other “problem bears” since 2007 without incident.
He said the “very brave and strong” bear did not care about the electric shock.
“It [the fence] was bear-proof two days ago,” he told the BBC, adding its voltage was about the same for rhino pens at zoos.
The bear has received support on social media, too.
The hashtag #fugaperlaliberta – meaning #escapeforfreedom in Italian – has been shared widely on Twitter as animal lovers cheer on the runaway bear.
Although WWF Italy insisted the animal’s “danger to people is still to be demonstrated”, there was a case of a brown bear attack in 2017.
A female bear was shot dead by foresters in the Alps after it seriously mauled an elderly man walking his dog.
M49 is part of the Life Ursus conservation project, and is one of around 50 to 60 brown bears living in the Trentino region.
Since the 1990s, conservationists have worked to reintroduce brown bears into the region, where they had been exterminated by hunters.
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