'This had to be about vengeance': the mysterious case of the Lego Bandit
An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.On October 4, 2018, a young Frenchman named Louis came home from work to find the window in his front door smashed. A practical-minded 20-year-old with short dark hair, he figured it was just another petty crime in the rural outskirts of Paris, where he lived with his parents. But when he saw the familiar gleam of a tiny red plastic brick on the driveway, his stomach plunged. It was his Lego.
Now, his collection appeared to have been blasted by a Death Star Superlaser. Whole models had vanished, mint-condition boxes were ransacked, and scattered across the floor were the remnants of his most valuable builds. The boom has also given rise to a multimillion-dollar secondary market for the most sought-after builds. Researchers at the Higher School of Economics in Russia found that from 1987 to 2015 Lego investments returned about 10% annually — better than stocks, bonds, gold, and collectible items like wine and stamps. A Space Command Center Lego set that sold for $25 in 1979 is worth over $10,000 today.
After school and on weekends, Louis would spend long hours constructing and filming his builds for his YouTube channel. His videos were labors of love: a Star Warsstyle"Republicattak Productions" logo; long, loving pans over his clone bases accompanied by a piano rendition of"Rondo Alla Turca." Though mocked at school, Louis found a legion of like-minded Lego fans online. He traveled to conventions and Lego-building tournaments.
They were also growing apart in the way childhood friends often do. They had known each other since the sixth grade, a couple of nerdy kids obsessed with X-wing fighters and colored bricks. Now they were growing up and following divergent paths. Living in Paris, Victor became the cool city kid: growing his hair long, adding chill hip-hop tracks to his videos, pursuing his dream to be a director and an actor.
Lego is well aware of the value of its adult fans; the company estimates that 20% of its sales are grown-ups buying sets for themselves. At its headquarters in the center of town, it maintains a Masterpiece Gallery of AFOL MOCs. A 50-foot Tree of Creativity, made of over 6 million pieces, soars up from the lobby. There are intricate Lego flowers, elaborate Lego Rube Goldberg machines, a broom-size pop-art Lego toothbrush achingly detailed down to the bristles.
Even more distressing, the case was still unsolved. After searching Louis' home, the police found no evidence tracing the break-in to any person. Though it must have taken a truck to haul away all of Louis' Lego, no neighbor reported seeing anything suspicious. The police bristled over Louis' video, telling him he'd done the case a disservice by giving the thief a reason to unload the stolen goods, making an arrest even more difficult.
So Victor appeared to have both a means and a motive. But when Louis raised Victor's name with his parents, they urged him to be rational."You can't judge somebody like that," they told him."You don't have any evidence. Maybe this person is fully innocentbesides Victor was the Lego bandit. But then the police told him something that fueled his doubts.
The moment he saw Victor at a Paris café, Louis felt a shot of nerves. He didn't know what to think, and he was afraid his doubts would be obvious."It was really awkward," Louis recalls."I knew I had to pretend. I had my suspicions, but at the same time, I was still balancing. I don't know if he did it or if I'm, like, behaving badly because he's innocent."
Later that month, Louis got some news from the police. Eighteen months after the break-in, they had finally spoken with Victor. The dynamic duo of French AFOLs was no more. There would be no more MOCs, no more miniature Rebel ships attacking miniature Imperial bases crawling with Minifig clones, no more YouTube livestreams."The biggest victim of your robbery is me," Victor wrote,"because I lost my friendship with you."Watching the videos of Victor destroying his own Lego builds, it's easy to imagine the violence that went into smashing Louis' beloved MOCs.
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