A colleague of mine has left contract archaeology to work for the police as a civil utredare, that is, someone with a university degree who works on crime cases despite not being a policeperson. He told me a pretty neat story about Gubbligan, the Old Man’s Gang.
The OMG were three professional bank robbers who never settled down. In the 00s they were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and still they kept committing armed robberies across southern Sweden. The police were onto them and had begun to tap the gang’s cell phones. This way they learned that the OMG had an arms stash out in the woods, where they had buried some pretty heavy weaponry and explosives.
The police now had a little problem. They weren’t quite ready to arrest the gang, and if they dug up the stash they would alert their quarry. On the other hand, it wasn’t very comfortable to let the gang keep their guns and explosives just like that. Then someone had a pretty neat idea.
The next time the OMG popped by to check on their stash out in elk country, they found it buried under half a ton of sugar beets. Across the clearing, just under the eaves of the woods, was a freshly built hunting stand.
The Old Man’s Gang were apprehended in 2010 and are currently serving another one of their usual long jail sentences.
For more about the OMG, see Anders Svensson’s blog.