Happy Friday! If you're new to Now I Know, you'll notice that today's format differs from the rest of the week. On Fridays, I pause to write the "Weekender," my  "week in review" type of thing, or to share something else I think you may find interesting. Thanks for reading! — Dan

How the Heist Story Came Together

Hi!

Writing Now I Know is fun. I find interesting little facts, explore further, fall into rabbit holes, and dig my way through by sharing what I discover with you. Sometimes, though, the story ends up being a dead end, and with nothing to share, I move on. That’s annoying but not a big deal. A couple of weeks ago, though, something weird happened: I found a story that may actually be shareable, but not for the reasons I originally thought, and that totally threw me off. And I couldn’t validate the coolest part of the story, which tainted the whole thing, at least to me. I gave up and instead decided to share the story of my defeat in a Weekender.

But as I was moments away from sharing my tale of failure with you all, I decided to dig in a bit more — and found out the validation I was looking for. I had to pivot quickly, and I ended up sharing a non-story, available here, two weeks ago today. I promised you all I’d explain what happened. Here’s the explanation.

A few years ago, someone posted the following fact on reddit: “a bank robber in France made a fictitious, coded document which he claimed as evidence during his trial. While the judge was distracted by the document, Albert Spaggiari jumped out of a window, landing safely on a parked car and escaped on a waiting motorcycle. He was never seen again.”

That’s awesome. And a lot of redditors agreed; more than 30,000 people gave it an upvote. I came across that reddit post earlier in the week and began exploring, as I often do. The reddit post linked to a questionable source, to say the least, but Spaggiari has a Wikipedia entry. So I started there. It supports the reddit post:

Seems good! A Google search for Spaggiari showed a lot of other great story fodder, too, which I’ll get to in a second. But I had a problem: none of the credible English-language sources referenced a coded fictitious document. (And if the French ones did, Google Translate wasn’t finding anything like that either.) Try as I might, I couldn’t validate the most fun part of this fun fact.

I probably should have read the reddit comments first because, toward the top, someone asked an obvious question: “This makes no sense to me. Was the judge the one responsible for keeping him from escaping? Even if he wasn't distracted, would he have been able to stop someone from jumping out of the window?”

All great questions, so I dug deeper. The Wikipedia entry names the judge in question, so I searched for his name with Spaggiari’s — and nothing new came up. Fine: the story is still interesting without the coded message, right? A bank robber and his coconspirators enter the sewers of Nice, France. For weeks, they built a tunnel toward the bank, ultimately breaking in through the floor. While inside, they seal themselves inside the vault by welding the door from the inside. By the time authorities realize that someone is in the vault and gain access, the thieves are gone, and they’ve left a note saying that this was a theft without violence. They’re caught months later because, per some reports, one of the conspirators broke up with his girlfriend, and his ex turned them in. Spaggiari, the mastermind, was arrested but, during his arraignment, jumped out of a window, landed on a car, and rolled safely to a motorcycle driven by an accomplice and sped off. He’s never seen alive again.

That’s a great story! But I hated it because I really wanted to make the story about the coded message, and I couldn’t validate that fact. I was prepared to give up, and had the above written and ready to share with you as a Weekender.

But in the last moment before I hit send, I had the idea to use Microsoft Copilot for help. I’ll use AI chatbots to help with research here and there — never to write, in part because they’re bad at it but mostly because writing is the fun part, why would I want some bot to do that for me? Research, though, they’re typically decent at (of course, you have to check their sources). And in this case, Copilot did something I couldn’t: it searched and understood (I use the term loosely) French-language sources. It discovered this article in Paris Match, in French, which I never would have. (In retrospect, I bet a Google search in French would have.)

This isn’t intended to be a love letter toward AI — I’m skeptical about most of its uses — so please don’t take it that way. I’m just glad the story came together, especially when it was just moments from falling apart.

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The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: How Much Metal Would a Woodpecker Peck if a Woodpecker Could Peck Metal?: A woodpecker has been banging away at my metal chimney pipe for weeks now. Here’s why. (And yes, he’s still at it — he got started at about 5:45 AM today.)

Tuesday: It's Not Easy Driving Green: Jim Henson in his natural habitat — not a Studebaker.

Wednesday: And $998,328.45 is Your Change: There’s no such thing as a million dollar bill (at least, not in the United States). But this person didn’t realize that.

Thursday: The Secret Code of Central Park’s Lamp Posts: Never get lost in the Park again!

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And thanks! — Dan

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “The Unabomber’s Brother Turned Him In. Then Spent 27 Years Trying to Win Him Back.” (New York Times/gift link, 21 minutes, April 2025). I’m old enough to remember the Unabomber’s story unfolding in real time, but I never realized the depth of it. (I also conflate the story with Jeffrey Dahmer’s, even though they were arrested five years apart.)

2) “The Most Mysterious Book in the World” (Earthly Delights, 12 minutes, May 2022). The book in question is the Voynich Manuscript, and I’ve written about it before, but I can’t really do it justice in 500 to 1,000 words. This is a much better dive into it.

3) “‘Is Your Blood Clean?’: The Paranoid Pastor Who Turned His Church into a Violent Cult” (The Walurus, 24 minutes, April 2025). This story, as the title says, has a good amount of violence in it — it may not be for everyone. But it’s unfathomably wild if you can handle it.

4) A bonus, because it’s behind a paywall — I could get around it by registering at first, but not when I went to write this blurb: “Who is the bad neighbor? How a South Tampa feud made it to Worldstar.” (Tampa Bay Times, 18 minutes, May 2025). The line that hooked me: “Things might have stayed typically placid in this historic enclave of finance executives and impeccable shrubs. Instead, a feud so intractable took root that the next four months would bring more than 100 police visits amid accusations of trespassing on 4 inches of yard, video voyeurism, and battery via a garden sprinkler.”

Have a great weekend!

Dan