Big Mäck: Gangsters and Gold (Big Mäck: Gangster und Gold)

- Hello. - Yeah?

Big Mäck?

Yes, I don't believe it!

Hey, Falko!

Hey, Big Mäck.

Ah, I'm so happy.

Oh man, you won't believe how happy I am.

Why did they tell me that you had died?

No. Who told you that?

The slammer.

What?

Do you know how many letters I sent? Telegrams and everything.

I didn't get anything.

First thing I did was look on Facebook.

I looked everywhere for you.

Nothing. I found nothing.

I would never have given up on you.

They're now making that movie. A documentary on Netflix.

That's great.

I've always been a fighter. Always.

How are you, really?

This is a hypothetical story.

Hypothetical. Nothing to do with me.

Sometimes life is crazier than a film.

I was on a stellar rise to the top in my career.

What's fascinating about Donald is he can capture people.

Fully legal.

Two robberies, almost 20 years apart,

and supposedly Donald Stellwag played a role in both.

He was always a bit of a rascal.

If something like that happens once, it's weird.

All a lie.

Twice, that's just really strange.

All hypothetical.

BIG MÄCK GANGSTERS AND GOLD

Don't you find it unusual that two big events happened in your life?

Not at all.

No.

SPARKASSE FINANCIAL GROUP

ROBBERY 1

NUREMBERG 19 DECEMBER 1991

It was in the afternoon, before half past 3:00.

AUDIO BASED ON COURT DOCUMENTS

He came in. He was tall and fat.

He was wearing a hat, coat, scarf and glasses.

And he pulled the weapon and said, "Give me the money, quickly."

He threatened customers and my coworkers.

So I opened the cash register.

Swiss Francs, Italian currency. I gave him everything.

Fifty-four-thousand deutsch mark.

I was waiting for him there.

He said he would be right back.

I had no idea what happened in the bank.

He got in and told me to drive,

so I did.

Go, drive!

I wanted to turn right at the end of the street.

- You were only allowed to go right. - I said left!

But then he had a gun in his hand,

20 centimeters from my head,

and then he said...

Go left, or I'll shoot you.

So I drove down the one-way street, the wrong way.

I kept going, running a red light.

Just drive! Damn it.

Then he got out and was gone.

Of course I remember what he looked like. Very tall.

At least 1.9 meters, about 35 years old, and very corpulent.

I met Mr. Stellwag almost 30 years ago.

He came to the law office where I worked at the time.

I remember it clearly.

He came in with 500 deutsch mark, put them in my hand and said...

MANFRED NEDER CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYER

...the police were looking for him and he had to sort something out.

CASE NUMBER XY UNSOLVED

At the end of today's program, we'd once again like to show you photos

which were taken by automatic cameras during bank robberies.

In December 1991,

this man robbed a Sparkasse branch in Nuremberg city center.

CRIMINAL POLICE NUREMBERG 21 11

That was the beginning of this story.

Description, 35 to 40 years old,

very tall, at least 1.95 meters, and strikingly obese.

The man robbed a bank...

A police officer recognized him from a TV show and said,

"That's Stellwag, I know him."

They were looking for me for a bank robbery? It wasn't me at all.

It didn't matter if it was a bank robbery or something else.

I wasn't afraid.

I knew I hadn't done anything.

"It didn't look like a big deal."

"Pay a short visit to the police and clarify this."

"I'm not aware of anything wrong."

A lot of clients say things like that when you go with them to the police.

That's impossible, I'm innocent.

He seemed totally calm.

You have to find out what kind of person you're dealing with.

So you talk, and in that context, he told me he had nothing to do with it

and that he was sick.

We then went into a room.

You were presented with things, and among them, this photograph.

I knew him, so I didn't have to look over.

I just thought, "This doesn't look good."

It's a poor quality photo, but it looks like him.

The size of the body.

Then comes the charge.

I still remember when the inspector said

it was about a bank robbery with the taking of a hostage in Nuremberg.

I said, "I don't even know what you want from me."

At that time I was not even in Nuremberg.

A bank robbery is severe criminal extortion

with a minimum sentence of five years.

You can't just go home, no matter how good your social prognosis.

You will stay there to clear up whether it was you or not.

No matter what you say.

He insisted it wasn't him and that he had an alibi.

Of course, he had to think hard to remember where he'd been.

The policeman, the criminal investigator at the time, believed him.

That was my impression.

So he said, "Let's do a lineup. Would you agree to that?"

I said, "Yes. Of course."

You have to picture the following.

I come into an empty room,

with a huge pane of glass,

and stand there.

But since there were no other big fat guys like me,

I was the only one standing there, all by myself.

Six or seven people came in who'd been customers in the bank.

And what did they say?

"He's tall, he's fat, it's him."

More than 16 people said I was the perpetrator.

It floored me.

I thought, "This is a really bad horror film."

The criminal investigator came up with the idea

of commissioning an expert assessment,

also known as an anthropological report.

It's intended to determine

if the person in the photo is identical to the alleged perpetrator.

These are assessments that are done

when there are traffic violations or when people are caught by speed cameras

and say it wasn't them.

So he had his picture taken.

Then the expert compares these photos with the image.

Right, I'll look and see what we can make out.

DR. CORNELIUS S. EXPERT WITNESS IN THE DONALD STELLWAG CASE

The expert is controversial in many places.

Many people think less of him.

The expert is being evasive today.

The expert did not want to comment. But his colleague was willing to speak.

If you look at the anthropological literature,

there are around 250, 280 characteristics

that can be defined on the head alone.

PROF. FRIEDRICH RÖSING FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGIST

So wherever there's something to be stated

about human beings in the legal sense,

we come into play.

The court expert must present the findings

in the simplest and clearest language possible,

and then in the end give a probability of how certain their conclusions are.

And the expert did a good job in creating parallel images.

There was a series of extremely good pictures of the bank robber,

so that we always had pictures next to each other

that were easy to compare.

We were anxiously waiting,

because the expert was our door to freedom.

But he said

he couldn't be ruled out as the perpetrator.

I call it the "ear report."

It was probably the deciding factor,

because you could see it so clearly in the photo.

He would not be released any time soon.

Every week, every day was hell.

I was at the mercy of the judiciary.

Dealing with this mentally is perverse.

I spent almost two years in detention awaiting trial.

That was a terrible time for me.

That's a long time. That would be absurd today.

it just wouldn't be possible.

Nothing happened during that time, because nothing new came up.

Then there was the trial.

COURT HOUSE

25 JANUARY 1994 START OF TRIAL

Five judges sat there.

Three full-time professionals, two on jury duty.

I think I found out two weeks before that this trial was about to start.

And the "ear report" was obviously the perfect gimmick to use

as a hook for the reporting.

Even experienced colleagues had never heard of anything like it...

HARALD BAUMER CRIME REPORTER

...and they wanted to know if it would even be possible

to convict a perpetrator with this kind of report.

There was nothing about this

pointing to Donald in the vicinity of the bank.

Nothing.

No evidence or clues.

Instead, there was evidence pointing to his innocence.

In the photo, the perpetrator wasn't wearing gloves.