The Duck Tales Bandit - Arno Funke

When a bomb went off in a department store, the police knew the man that demanded the money was serious... but maybe not quite as serious as you might expect.

This episode was written by Christy Arnhart, edited by John Lordan and is produced by LordanArts.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_Funke https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufhaus_des_Westens https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-strange-story-of-dagobert-the-ducktales-bandit   https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/04/23/berlin-police-say-theyve-caught-bomber-who-became-folk-hero/b9b8b3bd-caac-475f-80d9-266f4bcddff9/  
https://de.nachrichten.yahoo.com/ber%C3%BCchtigter-erpresser-37-jahren-versucht-073900969.html
https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/1994-Kaufhaus-Erpresser-Dagobert-wird-geschnappt,dagobert100.html  
https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/wiwo-history-was-wurde-eigentlich-aus-deutschland-auf-entenjagd-die-geschichte-von-kaufhaus-erpresser-dagobert/29970122.html  
https://www.zdfheute.de/panorama/kriminalitaet/arno-funke-dagobert-30-jahre-kaufhauserpressung-100.html   https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/Chronologie-Der-Fall-Dagobert-und-die-Kaufhaus-Erpressungen,dagobert118.html

Do you have any comments, or a case you’d like to suggest? You’ll find a comment form and case submission link at LordanArts.com.

This is not intended to act as a means of proving or disproving anything related to the investigation.  It is a conversation about the current known facts and theories being discussed.  Everyone directly or indirectly referred to is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

LordanArts 2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:20):
During the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, Berlin, Germany,
was a city caught between two worlds. Though the Berlin
Wall had begun to crumble, its shadow still loom large,
dividing not just streets but ideologies and lives. The city
was in transition, haunted by old ghosts and stirred by

(00:41):
new ambitions. It was in this atmosphere of political tension
and economic uncertainty that a most unusual figure stepped into
the spotlight. No one knew his name, and no one
could predict his next move. What followed would become one
of the most seriously mysterious crime sprees in European history.
I'm John Lorden and this is the solved case of

(01:04):
the duct Tails Bandit cooff house, dysvestens or kada V
is synonymous with luxury in Germany. This Berlin department store
sells a range of upscale goods. Founded by Adolph Jandorf
and designed by architect Emil Schaut, it opened on May
twenty seventh, nineteen oh seven, in the then independent city

(01:26):
of Charlottenburg. It's not only the most famous department store
in Germany, but one of the largest as well. In
May of nineteen eighty eight, the kada V received a
letter that was clearly an extortion attempt. In it, the
perpetrator demanded half a million Deutsche marks, which is about
eight hundred thousand US dollars today. At first, the police

(01:48):
didn't take the letter seriously, but to everyone's surprise, on
the night of May twenty fifth, a bomb exploded in
the West Berlin stores sports section, causing hundreds of thousands
of dollars in damage. Unbeknownst to the staff, a briefcase
with a false bottom had been dropped in the department
that night while no one was around. A bomb in

(02:10):
the bottom of the briefcase was detonated. During this time,
police were experiencing lingering coordination gaps in the immediate post
Wall years. Knowing this and hoping to confuse the police,
the extortionist called the West Berlin department store from a
payphone in East Germany and using a voice changer, gave

(02:30):
instructions on how the money was to be handled and dropped.
On June second, at eight forty three pm, Katav's store
manager boarded the train to Fronau with five hundred thousand
Deutsche marks at what seemed like a random point in
the journey, the two way radio crackled to life. This
is the blackmailer speaking, A man slurred over the radio speaker.

(02:53):
Throw the money out now. The manager did as he
was told and threw the money out the window. All
that anyone saw was a man stumble onto the tracks,
almost as if he were drunk, picking up the package,
and then running off. Police were hoping to catch the man.
Using officers on foot, in cars and in a helicopter,

(03:13):
they searched long into the night. Unfortunately, they found no
trace of the extortionist. The man had gotten away free
and clear with the loot. Investigators kept looking for their perpetrator,
but there were very few leads and none of them
were panning out. Over the years, everything went quiet, that
is until four years later in June of nineteen ninety two.

(03:37):
There was no warning or ransom note, this time just
an explosion. A bomb had been hidden in the porcelain
section of Cardstadt, Germany's largest upscale department store chain. This
specific location was in Hamburg. When the ransom note finally
arrived in the mail, it demanded a million marks more
than one point five million US dollars today, I gave

(04:00):
you a demonstration of my determination to achieve my goal,
including with violence. The note warned the next time there
will be a catastrophe. If the department store management agreed
to comply with his demands, they were instructed to place
an ad in the Hamburger Abenblatt newspaper that read Uncle
Dagobert greets his nephews. Dagobert Duck is the German name

(04:23):
for Scrooge McDuck from Disney's Uncle Scrooge comics and the
Duck Tails TV show. Many German people love Donald Duck,
who outsells most superhero comics and action heroes. He and
Scrooge McDuck are two of the most popular comic book
characters in the country. He's not quite the same in
Germany as he is here in the US. His character

(04:45):
is more complex over there, with him often speaking in
monologues and using grandiose terms. But soon the name Dagobert
began to stick to the criminal. This time, Dagobert instructed
investigators to bring the money to a forested ana. There,
officers found a linen bag attached to a box on
a telephone pole. The bag bore the ductail's logo and

(05:08):
a picture of Scrooge McDuck. They were instructed to attach
the bag to a contraption that used electro magnets to
hold the bag underneath the train. At a certain point,
Dagobert would disengage the electromagnet, allowing the money to fall
to the tracks wherever he chose and be picked up
by him. However, this drop would be a bust, maybe

(05:31):
due to the over complicated planning. The police actually tied
the bag to the train instead of allowing only the
electromagnet to hold it. Another drop letter was sent to
the department store instructing officers in the same way as before,
this drop would take place on August fourteenth. On that night,
they tried it again, and this time it worked. But

(05:51):
when the magnet let the bag loose, officers were watching
and waiting. Stand still or I'll shoot, an officer yelled
as he fired his gun into the air. Despite their efforts,
Dagobert got away, but not with what he had planned on.
The bag only contained around four thousand dollars and the
rest was filled with Mickey mouse money. The game of

(06:14):
cat and mouse, or rather duck and mouse, would be
cute if this was a cartoon, but don't forget this
is a criminal who enjoys explosives. The press would latch
onto the details of his crimes and the games being played.
They also began referring to the criminal as Dagobert. Dagobert
threatened the store with more bombs if they didn't pay

(06:36):
his demands, and this back and forth game continued, causing
card stock stores millions of dollars in damages. Surprisingly, public

(06:56):
opinion was actually in Dagobert's favor. Radio station took a
poll that showed that nearly two thirds of their listeners
were sympathetic towards the extortionist. He had made a laughing
stock of the police and was quickly becoming as popular
as his namesake. T shirts were sold that exclaimed I
am Dagobert, and he was called Gangster of the Year

(07:17):
by one newspaper. For years, he gave the police in
Germany a run for their money, while never hurting anyone
physically with his bombs. He devised more and more contraptions
and ways for police to make intricate drops, and always
extorted from large department stores. Each time he risked being caught,
and there were close calls, but Dagobert would always seem

(07:39):
to slip through their fingers in the most unforseeable ways.
At one point, an officer literally had his hands on
a running Dagobert, only to slip in dog poop and fall,
losing the criminal yet again. The stories entertained the people
of Germany, who saw him as a harmless prankster, one
that even ended up with his own rap song. A

(08:01):
reward of one hundred thousand marks was offered for information
leading to Dagobert's capture. Thousands of tips were called in
and investigated. The help of astrologers and fortune tellers was offered,
but they couldn't help find the man, which raised an
interesting question. Was it a single man or was it
a network of men. Could Dagobert be an ex operative

(08:23):
or even a policeman himself. Nobody knew. Investigators tried to
lure Dagobert to handoffs that were done in person, but
he always refused, seeing it for the trap it was.
Public opinion was firmly turned against the police with each instance,
as reporters detailed drop after drop where Dagobert was never caught.

(08:43):
One of the lead investigators on the case said that
Dagobert was making his officers the idiots of the nation.
Police even began to plant their own non lethal explosive
devices in these drops, but somehow Dagobert always knew and
he didn't fall for their tricks. On April nineteenth, nineteen
ninety three, the police were attempting yet another convoluted drop.

(09:04):
This time they were instructed to look in a locker
at the railway station at Berlin Zoological Gardens. The note
inside instructed them to stuff two freezer bags with money
and put them into a grit box, a bin filled
with sand used for de icing roads that could be
found at a location in Berlin called Britz. Rather than
drop actual money, police decided to include a motion sensor

(09:27):
in the drop bag with a bunch of cut strips
of paper. It was left just as they were instructed.
Tactical units hidden nearby, waiting for the censor to go off.
At eleven oh seven pm, even though no one had
approached the box, the motion sensor went off. As units
flocked to the grit box and lifted the lid. They
found out exactly how smart this criminal was. Dagobert had

(09:51):
built a replica grit box that was sitting right over
a manhole cover. Dagobert simply removed the lid from the
sewers below and he could remove his tail, leaving the
box on top in place. However, when he saw there
was no money in the bag, he simply left it
for the police to retrieve, and he once again escaped.
Even the police department had to admit that this time

(10:13):
Dagobert got them good. Due to his numerous successful escapes,
it seems that Dagobert was becoming a little lazy. By
nineteen ninety three, he had quit using the voice changer
when talking to the police and would just modify his
voice to sound like Huey Dewey or Louis screwed his
grand nephews. By this point, he had also left a
lot of evidence behind using these intricate drop methods. The

(10:36):
police had been disassembling these devices for years and were
getting a beat on where the technology had come from.
At one point, officers staked out an electronics store called
Conrad in Berlin. Many of the parts for Dagobert's contraptions
were being bought there. One day, he entered the store
to buy more parts and noticed that the store technician
was acting funny and there appeared to be too plain

(11:00):
clothes officers in the store. He once again escaped and
was still not deterred by the near miss. On January
twenty second, nineteen ninety four, Dagobert conducted his biggest extortion
to date. He instructed police officers to place one point
four million marks on a miniature train carriage that he
had built on an abandoned railway track. Once it was loaded,

(11:22):
officers hit a button. The train was battery powered and
raced down the tracks. Trip wires on the tracks were
attached to bundles of firecrackers that went off as it
sped by. Confused officers at first thought that they were
hearing gunshots, which slowed down their pursuit. Half a mile later,
the train derailed and before Dagobert could collect his money,

(11:43):
he heard officers nearby, and he chose to escape rather
than to press his luck. Even though most of Dagobert's
money transfers didn't go through, by nineteen ninety four, he
had cost the German government twenty million dollars. That's when
they decided to take a new approach instead of using
security consultants provided to police by Cartstadt, they would use

(12:04):
one of their own, and she wanted to use a
totally different method to catch their thief. Maybe he feels excluded,
unfairly marginalized. Officer Claudia Brockman said she felt they needed
to treat their suspect with respect, no more fake money
and empty promises. She had been building a psychological profile
of Dagobert for some time and she wanted to build

(12:26):
a rapport with him. She believed that if they could
keep him on the telephone long enough to trace a call,
that they would have their man. But Dagobert was smart.
He wouldn't fall for that so easily. An experienced hostage
negotiator named Klaus Springborne was used to talk with Dagobert,
disguising himself as a middle manager at Krtstadt. The man

(12:47):
had an easy, polite manner and was able to connect
with the people that he spoke to. This is where
Brockman's profile came in handy. She knew how Dagobert wanted
to be treated and spoken to, and using Springbourne's voice
and middle manager character, she was able to gain Dagobert's trust. Finally,
a call in April of nineteen ninety four would bring

(13:08):
it all to an end. While Springbourne received instructions on
where the next drop would take place, he pretended to
mishear a street name. As the extortionists slowly spelled out
the name. For Springbourne, officers had enough time to trace
the call to a payphone. Although their suspect had already
left by the time officers were on scene, they were

(13:28):
able to get a full description and even a composite
drawing from witnesses in the area. They now had his face.
Their next conversation was again long enough to be traced,
this one to a telephone booth in Potsdam, where a
nervous looking man was seen leaving the phone and getting
into a rental car. The rental company was tracked down

(13:49):
and questioned, and it was found that the car had
been rented to a man named Arnault Funk. Officers didn't
recognize the name, and when looked into, found that he
never had any previous trouble with the police. It was
then decided to place the man under surveillance. Arnaud Funk
was born on March fourteenth, nineteen fifty into a working

(14:09):
class family in West Berlin, Germany. He spent his childhood
playing with chemistry sets, where he would make homemade rockets.
He was said to be mischievous by his school teachers,
with one giving him the nickname Mickey Mouse. However, science
was not where Arnot's heart was. He actually wanted to
be a cartoonist. He quit school at the age of

(14:30):
fifteen and became an apprentice sign maker. In the years
that followed, he worked to perfect his drawing skills. At
the age of twenty one, he sent in his first
sketches to a satirical magazine, with a letter included that
asked for advice on how to become a cartoonist. Sadly,
no one ever answered. By nineteen eighty eight, he was
thirty eight years old, divorced, and struggling for money. While

(14:54):
he was able to make ends meet by painting billboards,
he also found work painting vehicles and motorcycles. This, however,
was very upsetting for Arnaut. He felt that the fumes
from the solvents he used in his small workshop were
giving him brain damage. I had this feeling of not
being clear in my head, he stated, like when you've

(15:14):
drunk a bottle of whiskey, but without the positive feelings.
That's when he had the brilliant idea, if I have
enough money, I can really focus on my art. Not
wanting to hurt anyone, he chose to be an extortionist.
In the beginning, Arnaud used the money he extorted to
pay off debts and take care of his children, but
greed always seemed to win out, and he soon began

(15:36):
to spend his money frivolously. He was usually his own
worst enemy. At the first successful money dropped, the one
where the money was thrown from the train, he waited
for the train with the bottle of vodka. When the
actual drop took place, he was drunk and he barely
got away. He would take vacations all over the world,
bought new cars, and eventually met and married a young

(15:58):
woman in Manila. After the Berlin Wall fell, however, rent
rates went up and more money seemed to fly out
of Arnot's pockets. That's when he decided to extort money again,
this time from Karstadt. He lived a whole second life
as a criminal mastermind with his new wife and family.
Never knowing, I guess I felt like a secret agent.

(16:19):
He later said April twenty second would be Daggobert's last
phone call as he stood in a booth talking to Springbourne,
officers swarmed the area, finally catching the man they had
pursued for so long. The arresting officer was the same
one that had slipped in dog poop and lost him
years before. Now you've finally caught me, Arno said with

(16:39):
a smile. Today you'll definitely pop the corks. Unfortunately, I
won't be able to celebrate with you, but you can
at least toast to me. Officers all over Germany celebrated
that night. Those in Hamburg drank from bottles that had
been printed with special Scrooge mc duck labels. The German
newspaper de Zeit wrote, Germany breathes a sigh of relief.

(17:03):
Dagobert is caught, the police are rehabilitated, and the media
have a new star. The sign painter from Trepto In court,
Arnot stated that his motive was just money. He was
depressed and considering suicide at the time he came up
with the idea. Arnaut was found guilty and sentenced to
more than nine years in prison in nineteen ninety six.

(17:25):
After he went through examinations from doctors, it was proven
that he did indeed have brain damage. Arnaut, then in
his forties, had an IQ of one hundred and twenty,
but the solvents in his shop did cause injuries to
his brain, injuries that resulted in depression. This was considered
a mitigating factor in his appeal. His prison sentence was

(17:45):
reduced to seven years and nine months. He served six
years and four months before being paroled in August of
two thousand. Public opinion had never turned against Arnau. He
was still a darling in their eyes, so much so
that he had to be released from prison a day
early to avoid the crowds and spectacle. While in prison,
he wrote a book about his exploits and worked on

(18:08):
his drawing skills. He has since worked as a cartoonist
at a publishing house. He also still likes to be
in the public eye by appearing on various talk shows,
game shows, and reality shows. Claudia Brockman also benefited from
Arnaut's capture. For her outstanding work, her office was moved
into the state police headquarters in Hamburg, where she used

(18:29):
criminal profiling to help solve several major crimes in Germany.
She is now head of the Department's criminal psychology program. Today,
as he lives out his life in relative peace, Arnaut
has only one regret quote, I feel sorry that I
chose department stores. Banks would have been more deserving, But

(18:50):
the thing is, with a store, it's easier. Do you
have any insights for even a case you'd like to suggest,
Feel free to send it to me. You'll find a
comment forum and submission link at Lordenarts dot com. Thank
you The New Yorker, the Washington postde dot Nocreten dot
Yahoo dot com, NDR dot de e, wi WO dotd e,

(19:13):
zdf houta dot de e, and Wikipedia for information contributing
to today's story. This episode was written by Christy Arnhardt,
edited by John Lorden, and produced by Lordenarts. Thank you
to our audience here for the live recording session hosted
on the YouTube channel lord and Arts Studio Too Special.
Thanks to seriously Mysterious financial supporters Robert Martin, Susie Lindsey Morgan,

(19:37):
Candybishop and Mike. Most of all, thank you for listening.
I'm John Lordon. Please join us again next week for
another case I know you'll find seriously mysterious