Pushkin.

I'm Jeff mash and I wrote the Strange story of Dagobert, the Ducktail's Bandit for The New Yorker, and it's the Story of the Week.

When I was eleven years old, ABC canceled the very best show ever to be on television, the Greatest American Hero.

I was so upset, I didn't know what to do.

I tried to find some way to organize the masses to help reverse the network's idiotic decision.

I was upset about this for months.

My parents assured me that one day I'd get over this.

They were wrong, So I know how you're about to feel.

This is the very last episode of the Story of the Week.

The reasons we're not coming back are way too complicated to get into here, but I'll just say that we were losing a lot of money.

This is in no way your fault.

It's your friends and family's fault for not listening.

But don't let this destroy your Thanksgiving dinner, or maybe you can just a little.

Writing is hard.

Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy trying to feed you all stand So it turns on a mic made the twitles enough because a journalist trand has got in that Jule time put single story.

Just listen to smart people speak, conversation, film and information.

It is the story of for our very last episode.

I wanted to do the kind of story that made me want to do this podcast the first place.

In fact, this is the story that was the very first interview we recorded for the pilot episode, but we never aired it because I sucked.

Since I've gotten a little bit better at this, despite what our low listenership numbers imply, We've re recorded the interview.

The writer who's so nice he let me interview him twice about the same article is Jeff Mash.

In fact, this is the second time he's had a story on our podcast, having last told us about the dea impersonator.

He wrote this one, the strange story of Dagobert that Ducktails bannit for The New Yorker.

It's an insane story that takes place in the very early nineteen nineties in Berlin, right after German reunification, at a time when the East Germans didn't yet have the infrastructure to secure their banks from savvy West German criminals, and crime just ran wild.

One of these criminals named Arno Funk was obsessed with Scrooge McDuck, as was the rest of Germany.

It's terrific, But more importantly, I get to hear Jeff's sexy British accent one more time.

Dagobert's real name is unbelievably Arnaut Funk.

What was Arnaut Funk like as a kid?

Arno Funk was an eccentric kid who loved playing with rocket kits and kind of gunpowder and things like that.

He was a bit of a nerd and he was often in trouble at school.

His teachers called him Mickey Mouse because he was always playing the fool.

That's what Mickey Mouse used to be like before he became just a corporate symbol.

That's right before he sold out totally.

Okay, so it was Dagobert, the kind of nerd who was at least good in school.

Did he go get himself a teasing career?

He was incredibly talented at art, drawing, painting.

He always dreamed of being a professional cartoonist, but it never worked out for him.

And okay, I'm going to try and picture what a guy who's kind of a failed artist in West Berlin in the nineteen eighties late eighties, looks like does he have a mullet?

Like?

What does he look like?

He's got the kind of we call it a bog brush haircut in England, like when the hair all stands on its end, like a toilet brush.

Imagine the toilet brush, but bleach blonde with a pushbrum mustache.

What's this hairstyle called in England?

Bog brush?

A bog brush?

A bog is a toilet.

You know what you clean a toilet with us the brush.

I can't believe I'm fifty two.

I'm still learning the English words for things.

Every time we talk, I teach you a little more English.

What's his life like by the time he's thirty eight, which is when the story really starts.

Yeah, the story starts when he's at his lowest point.

He's really depressed.

He's got stories to speak, Right, if Jeff mash ever comes to write a story about you, run things are not going well and they're not going to get better.

That's right.

His life was aimless.

He wanted to be this famous comic book artist, this famous cartoonist.

But of course you can't do that unless you've got lots of money.

So he decided to become a criminal.

But he realized that he didn't have the guts to hold up a bank, you know, it seemed too hard, too risky.

So he decided to become an extortionist instead.

And so what's his plan.

He decides to threaten a big department store that he's going to bomb them in exchange for money.

Why department stories.

I think he just wanted the easier path.

He didn't want to get shot in a shootout in a bank robbery.

The plan was he was going to plant a bomb in the store and send them a ransom letter demanding half a million Diutge marks.

It's about half a million, six hundred thousand dollars quite a lot.

Yeah, but he really makes the bomb and he really puts it there.

Yeah, he got a bunch of books out the library and taught himself how to do it, which is quite impressive, really.

Yeah it is.

And did they hand over the money?

Not at first, but then one night he actually let the bomb explode.

Oh do people die?

Like?

How how serious is this?

No, So he set a timer to make sure that the bomb went off after the store was closed, to ensure that no one was hurt, just a lot of German sports.

Where was hurt?

Oh man?

Does he get the money?

Well, they know he's serious.

Now he blows up the shop and they think, okay, he's serious, we need to pay him.

Yeah, So he has specific instructions for them.

He tells them that on a certain date that they should load the money onto the certain train out of Berlin to a place called fro Now and that when he gave them the word via a two way radio, that they should throw the money out the window.

But then he's going to go grab the money, and can't they just catch him.

The reason why it worked is that the police wouldn't know until he made the call where he was, and the train's moving at high speed, so he's going to have a little bit of time to go and grab the money and run away before the police know what's up.

Okay, so he gets the money.

Does he then like retired at Baden Baden to become an artist.

No, he goes on holiday, which is what everyone should do if a criminal scheme like this works out.

He went to the Philippines, which.

Well he just went instead of like there's money, he said he needed to survive instead he's going on vacation.

He's not good with money.

And what does he do in the Philippines.

He meets a young lady.

And what happens with him and the lady?

They get married and they have a little boy, and they move back to Germany.

It's nineteen ninety now, and Germany is a completely different.

Place because there's been unified, correct, and.

The Berlin walls down.

Hasselhoff has done his thing.

Germany looks completely different.

The rents have gone up, everything's more expensive.

He starts running out of money, basically, and before long he's spent almost all of the money that he got from his extortion.

Yeah, so he has to go back to his life of crimes.

He's not going to make money as an artist.

Well, it worked once, he thought, so let's do it again.

So it's nineteen ninety two now and he plants another bomb, this time in the porcelain department of another store, a.

Different store that's so much better.

Right, this one's called karstat Are.

Those like humble figurines?

Those are made in Germany.

Right, And they're really expensive.

So expensive.

Okay, this is so smart.

So he blew them all up, showcases full of fancy vases and plates and things.

Like that, because they didn't respond to his extortion attempt.

Hism was quite strange.

He would explode the bomb first and then ask for the money, not the typical way that extortionists work, but it kind of worked because they knew that he was serious.

I think the message was pay up or the next one could be bigger.

How does he communicate with the department stores?

Does he just ask for the manager or what does he do?

So to safely communicate with the stores, he would take out classified adverts in the local newspaper, and to let them know who they were dealing with, he would sign them off as Dagabat, the German word for Uncle Scrooge.

Okay, this is the part of the story that makes no sense to me.

So Dagobert is the German term somehow for Scrooge McDuck.

So the German versions of the Disney comic books are slightly different to the American ones, so a lot of the characters have different names.

Uncle Scrooge is called Dagabert.

So he destroys all these humbre figurines, and then how much money does he ask for?

He mails a ransom note to the store and he asks this time for a million marks, which is about a million bucks.

Wow, okay, and they give it to him.

Well, this time it was he got a a bit more technical with his handover technique.

So he sends the police on a wild goose chase into a forest where the police find this mysterious box attached to a telephone pole and inside there's a weird bag and the bag has a logo on it.

The logo is Scrooge McDuck and the instructions included in the box are that they should fill the contraption with the money and use the electro magnets to strap the device to the back of a fast moving train, and when the train roared past wherever his location was, he would use the transmitter to deactivate the device and the package would drop and he would pick it up and then assumingly disappeared back to the Philippines.

Does this work at all.

No, because this time the police get clever and they decide to attach the device with some string to the train so that when it detached it would just get pulled along by the train.

They would discover where Dagobert really was.

So did they catch him they didn't.

He was watching, he saw the string, he knew that it wasn't going to work, and he ran away to safety.

But he did manage to grab the package, and when he opened it, he saw that there was fake money inside.

So how far does Arnolfunk take his association with Scrooge McDuck.

His extortion tactics become more and more like the activities of Scrooge McDuck.

He starts using more and more gadgets.

There was often a lot of gadget tree in the comic books.

There's a character called Giro Gearloose who is like a kind of a Maguiver character, and there's always lots of funny business going on with hidden compartments and remote control this and electromagnetic that.

You know, it's a kid's cartoon.

I feel like Ductails has almost no cultural relevance in the US, but in Germany it's a big deal.

So I don't know if you know this, but in Europe millennials of a certain age they're known as the Ducktails generation.

Show still that it's true.

I think in Hungary what millennials are called the Ductails generation.

I think early model millennials, like myself.

I was born in eighty two, so I was seven or eight when the TV show hit, and it had a theme tune that people of my age millennials know by heart, and I'm assuming that you don't.

I don't know this song, but I wanted to play it for you because it talks explicitly about solving a mystery, just like in the Dagobert case.

Can we listen to it together and you can provide a level of analysis and interpretation that our lawyers say is required for us to satisfy the fair use laws.

Sure, all right, Oh that's a banger.

Wow.

I did not know that.

It's a bop.

The song mentions solving a mystery and rewriting history.

Every episode on every comic book was basically about someone trying to beat the bad guys, get the prize, still the bag of loot.

It directly corresponds to this extortionist and his mo o.

First of all, thank you that our lawyers are going to be very satisfied with that.

You didn't actually play the woohoo bit, which is the best bits.

You missed the woo woo.

This is why our show didn't make it.

Yeah, these kind of mistakes.

In Germany, the comics are a little different than the American version, right, Yeah, you.

Probably wouldn't recognize Scrooge McDuck's he's a different character.

So obviously, in America he's this miserly money bags kind of billionaire, but in Germany he's more of a deep thinker.

He's a theologist, and he he's always he's very well read and well versed.

He's often dropping quotes from theorists and things like that.

Yeah, you mentioned Gert and Fridrick von Scheller.

All the big ones.

Yeah, Okay, why is Dagobert Sah Scrooge McDuck so popular specifically with Germans?

At this point, I think Scrooge McDuck became a kind of a weird embodiment of capitalist greed in a time when Germany was reunifying and it wasn't an easy process.

Industry that was once controlled by the state was becoming commercialized, private entities were taking over.

There was basically looting going on.

So Scrooge McDuck became this kind of symbol for that, like this kind of anti establishment symbol.

He is beloved by the readers of the comics.

What does the German public think about this guy who's climbs of Dagobert, who's committing kind of dangerous and properly destroying crimes around Berlin.

The public fall in love with Dagabert.

He becomes this kind of folk hero that everyone gets behind and people start wearing I Am Dagabert t shirt ishpin Dagabert if you like I do, and he becomes this icon for anti establishment movement that's bubbling up in Germany at the time.

The media start to paint him as like an everyman.

He's like a blue collar guy, you know, putting one over on these posh stores.

And I think for that people respected him, and the things he did were kind of symbolic, you know, he was blowing up that silly crockery that people can't afford.

People felt like he was saying something.

After the break, will meet Daggerbert's biggest fans.

But first, our advertisers are going to try and sell you something, but you do not have to buy it.

We've been canceled buying.

It's not going to help us at all.

Go buy something from one of their competitors.

And who are his biggest fans in Germany?

There's a fan club in Germany called Donald and they are incredibly serious fans of the dagabout Scrooge McDuck comic books.

They take it incredibly seriously.

So this group Donald, which is an acronym for something, what is it stand for?

Something like the German Organization of non commercial devotees of pure Donaldism.

They act as if Duckburg, the city in which Donald lives, is a real place.

They study and analyze it scientifically.

They're made up of academics, scientists, economists.

They use clues in the comic books to answer questions such as how rich is Scrooge McDuck.

So this group that Donald or Donald pre exists before Arnold Funk starts blowing up barms.

Right, oh yeah, very well established, five hundred members, annual conferences.

They're a serious organization.

So they must be pretty excited when this happens.

Could you imagine?

No, I mean, they've been studying comic books line by line for decades and suddenly there's a real criminal on the loose that appears to be using those comic books as inspiration, and they become obsessed with this criminal and obsessed with catching him.

Did people particularly like the gadgets that you using.

People became obsessed with the gadgets reading about them.

The newspapers were printing photos of his latest gadget.

It became a national obsession.

In the course of his criminal career, Dagobert created miniature trains that ran on train tracks.

Built a submarine maybe twelve inches long.

He made it out of VCR parts, like video machine.

Parts, and it would run in a real train track.

Yeah, it would grip one single train track and when you pushed a button on the top, it woul whizz away.

And he asked that police put half a million Deutsche marks in the back of this train.

Pushed the button and it whizzed away.

Did that work?

He didn't get the money, but it certainly worked.

It fell off the track before it reached his hands.

But that was one of the things that got the Donaldists excited.

Because there is a remote control train heist in one of the books.

He's overtly copying the comic books.

The Donaldists claim he is, and the police believe them, So the police start reading the comic books to see next.

Oh, correct, this is insanity.

During one of his extortions, Dagabert demands that a bunch of money is concealed in a grit box in the middle of Germany.

Is that another British term?

No, it's you probably have a term for it.

It's where they keep the salt to make the roads.

When it's icy, they throw salt on them.

Anyway, they keep the salt in these boxes throughout the city.

So Dagobert says, here's the location of a grip box.

I want you to leave half a million deutsch marks or whatever in the grip box.

So the police think this is an incredible opportunity to grab him, so they put a package with a tracking device in the box and they pretend to leave, but of course they're surveilling it.

Everyone's watching this box for Dagobert to arrive and take the money.

So with half of the Berlin police department watching this box, suddenly the track is moving, but no one has been anywhere near the grip box.

So eventually they opened the box to see if the money's still there, and it's gone, and they quickly discovered that what Dagobert had done was build a replica grip box over the entrance to a subway like a sewer, and he navigated the sewer system, climbed up, grabbed the package and run away before the police knew what they were doing.

So he built his own grit box, which is a term I now used.

Really it had like a door in it so that would fall into a sewer when he press some button or something, and then he would catch it while he was in the sewer and escape.

You see, now I'm rooting for him.

That's pretty amazing.

Did he get away with that one?

Did you make money on that?

It was fake money again, and by now he's furious, sure the money.

The police are pretty pissed as well.

Well, because they look like idiots.

Right, absolutely, So immediately after that there was a close call and the police got their hands on Dagabat.

He went to pick up a package and the police were there and one officer tried to grab him and slipped apparently on some dog poop.

No and yes, very slapstick.

Yes, And of course the journalists went to town.

It was front page news that gag headlines.

You know, you can imagine.

So the lead investigator actually said that Dagabat has made his men look like idiots.

Oh, they can't let this stand.

They've got to catch him now just for honor, right, just for their dignity.

What are the cops doing at this point to catch him?

They bring in the big guys, the special Einsat's commandos.

Well, I like when you say that, what was that again?

Special SAT's commandos.

And who's the chief investigator here working on this?

So the main police officer is de Lecky and he's like your traditional police chief.

He's losing sleep at this point.

And they bring in a criminal profiler.

Oh is that a big thing?

Back then?

No, it wasn't big.

It had just come in that year.

Before then it was looked upon as like hocus pocus.

So who does the lackey bring in as a profiler?

The lucky brings in Claudia Brockman, who is a female officer.

She's a specialist in profiling.

She's a bit of an outsider.

Her office is in the police academy, you know, in the school.

They don't treat her with any respect.

They think her work is kind of pointless.

What's she wanted to build up a rapport with him, you know, build a friendship with him, keep him on the phone longer so that they could track him.

I mean, he's calling from phone booths, but they think the more he talks, the more clues he's going to give away.

How much money are the cops spent on this manheunts by this point?

And how many years have gone by?

He's been at large for thousands of days, many years, and they've spent something like twenty million dollars trying to catch him.

Wow, they've spent way more than he is destroyed in how more figurines and other mar goods?

And is he super rich by now?

No, he's running out of cash.

Ideas all of his crazy schemes are failing.

The remote control train falls off the track.

He doesn't get to use his submarine.

The police keep putting fake cash in places, but.

He doesn't get to use his submarine.

He's about to use his submarine when things start going wrong.

Was there a submarine in the comic books?

I assume in the theme song he uses Dagabat, uses a screwge uses a submarine underwater.

He did build a submarine.

I've seen it.

It was incredible.

I've got to tell you.

The submarine is absolutely incredible.

It's in the private museum at the Hamburg Police Departments.

It's too small for a human to get in.

It's it's remote control.

It's probably about three foot long.

Everything is like a fun toy that he makes.

It's like a remote control car or train or a little tiny submarine.

Like it's all cuter because it's small.

Exactly, it's fun.

So they're starting to profile him and are they able to start to figure out who he is or how do they catch him?

They start to keep him on the phone longer and longer, and they bring in a guy who's really good at talking.

They keep him going whenever.

He meant what's this character?

He's an older and older guy, former hostage negotiator, veteran hostage negotiator.

He's basically spent his career talking to terrorists and bombers and extortionists, so he knows what to do.

They're always like tough, but empathetic.

I think you're looking for grizzled.

Grizzled grizzled and yet like are able to connect on a human level and understand someone who listened to them exactly.

There's one time they're talking on the phone and the cop says to Dagabert, or would you mind not doing an extortion this weekend?

It's my daughter's wedding.

You know, I've got to be there.

He connects with Dagobert and they start laughing together and they make jokes and they make friends because remember Dagabert's lonely.

Yeah, does he hold off for the wedding and not do any barmings that weekend?

He did.

He actually jokes that he hoped he was going to get an invite to.

The CoP's wedding.

Mm hm okay, So there's do any figure who he is and how do they how are they going to catch them?

So that cool.

About the wedding, the police traced it to this area called Potsdam, so they scrambled officers to the area and they saw a man leaving in a white rental car looking really nervous, so they called the rental company, and the rental company said that car was registered to a man named Arno Funk, so they started to watch him.

So now they have his name, so now it seems like there's nothing left except catching it.

A few days later, he makes another call and just as he connects to the store to talk about his latest extortion, a black BMW rars around the corner and a bunch of cops jump out and.

Arrest him while he's in the phone.

Both.

Yes, apparently one of the cops was the guy that slipped on the dog poop oh.

Just by happy happy coincidence, he happened to be there ready for revenge.

And what are no Funk's reaction when he gets arrested?

Dignified, He's resigned to his fate.

He says, he finally caught me.

Do you think he kind of wanted to get cut?

I think by that point he was so tired.

How did the police finally celebrate?

They went crazy.

There were scenes where they were dancing around their squad cars and drinking this special bottles of beer that they had made with Scrooge labels on.

They obviously had them pre prepared for the day that they caught him, so it was basically a party German Germany's cops just letting loose.

What did the public think?

Were they upset that he was arrested though?

I mean, this was their hero.

Yeah.

There were people making banners that said freedom for Dagobert, and even journalists apparently were bringing him flowers.

He I think he wore I seem to recall that he wore a Disney tie in court.

That made everyone smile.

Does he end up getting time in prison?

He's sentenced to nine years in prison.

When he gets into the prison, the inmates break out into raptuous applause.

Come on, real state hero, Yeah, nine years.

He has to have gotten out a long time ago.

So he's been free for a long time.

What's he been up to?

Yeah, he's been free.

This story has a happy ending.

So Dagobert gets a letter in prison from this famous German magazine.

It's kind of a satirical magazine that features a lot of comics cartoons, and they ask him to draw for them.

And then when he's allowed out into the halfway house, they let him come into the office and draw cartoons and he basically becomes what he always wanted to be, which was a famous cartoonist.

Well that was his dream.

All on, Oh that's great.

You went to Germany to meet Dagobert.

What's that guy like?

He is still incredibly eccentric, and he certainly doesn't regret any of his actions.

He told me his entire story, and I think he still finds it quite funny.

Some of the capers that he did.

I found him to be like a cartoon character.

The way he tells his stories.

He pulls funny faces, and sometimes he mimes his heart beating outside of his chest like a cartoon character when he's talking about nearly getting caught.

He's a larger than life character.

Yeah, well, Jeff Mish, you wrote the strange story of Dago Bert the Ducktail's bandit for The New Yorker.

I wish we could have you on every week, but there's no more weeks.

I can't believe they binned this.

It's probably my favorite podcast.

Oh this is a hard way for you to find out.

Then, guys, I'm really going to miss you, not really you, because this is a one way medium, so more like I'm in a miss listening to myself.

I still believe in the initial pitch for this podcast, which is that people want to spend less time scrolling and more time hearing long stories.

Maybe a podcast wasn't the best format for them, but sitting down and actually reading these stories definitely is.

Also, I want to thank all the writers who came on here as guests.

We did not pay them at all.

They were suckers.

Also, I want to thank all the people who worked on the show, which is what their credits are for just roll.

Them at the end of the show.

What's next for Joe Stein?

Maybe he'll take a nap for Poker Round Online.

Our show Today was produced by Kate mcculliffe and Nisha Benkott.

It was edited by Lydia gen Kott.

Our engineer is a Manda kay Wang and our executive producer is Katherine Shira d'ah and our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Coleman and a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer Laurence Elastia.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Joe Stan and this is the story of the week.

Do you want to let people know your real American voice?

Every time I try and do an American accent, I sound like Arnold schwartznigger.

That's not an American accent, that's Austrian.

No.

But what I'm saying is my American accent doesn't sound very good.

So you know when you call the bank and it's automated, yeah, it doesn't understand my British accent, so I try and do an American accent.

So I say, speak to an operator, you

Do sound like Arnold