Read Siege at the Villa Lipp for Free Online Page A

that between member states there is an elaborate system of import-export subsidies. What these clever rogues did was to buy a large consignment of butter, a trainload of the stuff, and send it on a European tour, claiming each time it crossed a frontier, subsidies for its fictional transformation into some other butter-fat product. At the end of the tour they sold off the butter for what they had paid for it and pocketed between them ten million Deutschmarks in subsidies. Later operators in this field have not even troubled to buy the goods they manipulate in this way. Their transactions exist only o n paper. Value-added tax rebates of nonexistent but thoroughly-documented export transactions are currently in vogue. EEC regulations are constantly being changed, of course, to stop up the holes in them, but new holes continue to appear. Needless to say, even when such a criminal, or the corporate cover behind which he works, has supposedly been identified, there is no effective means of instituting a prosecution.’
    Well of course there isn’t. No criminal law has been broken, and nothing injurious to the public welfare has occurred; not, that is, unless you consider the spectacle of EEC bureaucrats going about with egg on their faces injurious to the public welfare. There are, in fact, large sections of the European public who find such sights highly beneficial, and worth every centime or pfennig of their cost.
    And not even Krom, by the way, had been altogether unaware of the inconvenient questions which his theories invited. He had dealt with them, cutely, by asking them before his audience could do so.
    ‘Why, I may be asked, should the word “Able” be used to categorize this well-adapted but minor sub-genus within the human race? Would not the term Successful Crook be at once more accurate and more suitable? My answer must be that it would not. The word “crook” is imprecise and the word “successful” would in this context be misleading, for it could be taken to mean “fortunate”.’ The Able Criminal is, no doubt, fortunate in that he is successful; but he is successful not through some happy series of accidents or because the police authority concerned with him is incompetent; he is successful always and only because he is able.
    ‘Why, then, is he a criminal at all? What, if he really exists, can possibly motivate him? The desire for wealth and the power that goes, or is said to go, with it? Hardly. Men capable of planning and executing the butter coup or having the fiscal wit to create illusory businesses which make real profits could surely become multi-millionaires quite - I was about to say “legitimately” - perhaps I should say instead “legally”‘. As legally, anyway, as unit trust managers or currency speculators are said to conduct their respective operations.
    ‘But our Mr X is not attracted by the blessings of legitimacy and legality, only by the extent to which the appearances of them may be put to use. He is a white-collar criminal in the sense that he is an educated one, yes; but his crimes are the products not of breaches of trust - the hand in the till, the falsified accounts - but of breaches of faith. And the faith he breaches is that of faith in established patterns of order. He is, in short, an anarchist.
    ‘What kind of anarchist? Well, of one thing we can be certain. He will not be stupid. He will not have taken to his heart the works of the ineffable Marcuse, nor troubled himself with the ravings of those hapless social philosophers, those paladins of the lollipop set, Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. He will believe neither in the Spectacular Society nor in Situationist Intervention. He will not be a carrier of bombs in plastic shopping-bags. But his tactical thinking will have much in common with that of some of the better disciplined urban guerrilla groups - those who work by confounding bureaucratic controls and exploiting the resultant confusion for profit. Whether that