At the mercy of idiots

The current compilation of evidence against a former police inspector turned lawyer, which has saved the media from the usual December drought and desperate stories about Christmas shopping and the weather, has tones of black comedy – the Guy Ritchie ‘Snatch’ and ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ sort.

It reminds us that so much that is bad is also banal and absurd, a fact that often comes as a surprise to people but shouldn’t. Think about it: the decision to be bad can rarely be rooted in true intelligence.

Yes, there are criminal masterminds, but they are the exception and they depend for the exercise of their powers on human ‘tools’.

This David Gatt appears to believe that he falls into the criminal mastermind category, at least if the current testimony is anything to go by. But that testimony reads like a film-script about small-town hooligans dreaming about the big-time and bungling their way to what they think is the top while modelling themselves on their Mafia heroes.

With all that talk of initiation rites involving burnt holy pictures, drops of blood from pricked hands, candles, codes and the use of Italian, it’s like the story of a bunch of bored teenage boys trying to enact a fantasy in the garden shed before being called in for supper.

The fantasy element is heightened by the use of the names of real Mafia people as code for the plotters in the shed.

But the thing is that they’re not teenage boys. They’re grown men with connections in the police force, the law and heaven knows what else, besides access to lethal weapons, so when they decide to act out their criminal fantasies they are in the ideal position to do so.

Guns kill and maim, whether they are shot by a criminal mastermind or a bungling idiot who sends text messages in pidgin Italian and calls himself Toto Riina.

I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to discover that this was the gang responsible for the farcical attempt at busting open an armoured car with a mechanical shovel (not a bulldozer, as was reported – that’s a different piece of machinery). Nothing can break open an armoured car, except a bomb placed beneath it or a building collapsing onto it.

But those two latter options would also destroy the contents, which defeats the purpose.

Some people were shocked when it happened. I was shocked that such jackasses are allowed out in broad daylight without warning-bells on. I had written about it at the time, calling it something like ‘A Maltese heist’.

Now I find myself reliving the vicarious embarrassment of their idiocy, enlivened by the fresh detail that the ‘criminal mastermind’ who is supposed to have planned it was utterly dismayed at the cunning plan’s failure, because he had “researched it so thoroughly for five months”.

But, as I howled with laughter in print back then, only Baldrick would have failed to begin plotting this scheme without first examining the construction of an armoured car and the ability of a mechanical shovel to break through its doors. If it were possible for mechanical shovels to crack open armoured cars then everyone would be doing it, and mechanical shovels would be Al Qaida’s new secret weapons.

That bad people are usually of limited intelligence continues to surprise us, but it shouldn’t. When I think of all the bad people I know and know of – though none on such a scale, I hasten to add, because most bad people confine themselves to pettiness and compulsive trouble-making rather than going into crime – the common factor is that they’re not bright.

They’re cunning and scheming, in the way that bad people usually are, but they’re not bright. What they think are such smart decisions are, cumulatively, one great big poor decision, the result of short-term thinking, lack of insight and self-awareness, and a very average intelligence quotient.

Bright people generally lead good lives, not because they are innately pure of soul or naturally ‘good’ – but because their decisions tend to be sensible, insightful and based on long-term thinking.

I was reminded by this of a scene in a television drama. An illegal immigrant in England is hounded by a taxi-driver with National Front views, who threatens to report him to the police when he sees him seeking help for serious illness at a hospital. The immigrant tries to flee in panic, but is stopped by a doctor, who tells him “Forget about that man. He’s just an idiot.”

But the immigrant, who comes from sub-Saharan Africa, tells her: “That’s exactly why I must take him seriously, and why I am afraid of him. I am here because I ran away from idiots – idiots with knives, idiots with guns, idiots with machetes, idiots with fire who burned my house down and murdered my wife and children. Idiots are the most dangerous.”

He was right. We think we are the mercy of the powerful but, in all spheres of life, we are really at the mercy of idiots.

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday on 19 December.