'Robin Hood' Gang Rob Gourmet Stores in Bid to Feed Hamburg's Poor by Tony Paterson
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.
