Criminal - The Chase

Episode Date: July 6, 2018

Mark Roberts has attended almost every major sporting event in the world. And he's been escorted off the field almost every time. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You know, I've just, I've found a way to challenge law, if you like. This is Mark Roberts. You may never have heard of him, but his name and his face are well known to law enforcement all over England. Before every major event, they have a big speech about what to look out for, and I come up every single time. A big picture of me on screen. Everyone's given a picture of me to look out for me. You know, I'm looking at your Wikipedia page right now.

I don't know who wrote that. It certainly wasn't me, and a lot of it's not true. But there is this naked picture of you. Yeah. Oh, that's definitely me then. Mark Roberts lives in Liverpool. He's a 54-year-old house painter, a self-described sports fanatic, who likes a beer and who's travelled all over the world. Can you list some of the sporting events you've done? How long have we got?

Well, I've done the Rugby 7th in Hong Kong three times. The Chinese FA Cup final. Did the London Marathon. I came second in the London Marathon, actually. But I only did the last 200 metres behind the winner. The Champions League football final, which is the one next to the World Cup, I scored a goal in there. He's done Wimbledon twice, the running of the bulls in Pamplona, golf, horse racing, swimming, weather reports, a Mr. Universe contest, dog shows. He's done the Olympics, summer and winter. He was just in South Korea.

Back in 2006, Mark went to the Winter Olympics in Italy, to the curling competition. Curling is that sport where athletes slide stones across the ice and use brooms to control their speed. So I looked at the whole thing. I thought, well, they're cleaning the ice. So I'll go on with a mop. And I had a knotted handkerchief on my head, clothes're cleaning the ice. So I'll go on with a mop. And I had a knotted handkerchief on my head. Clothes pegs in my ear. So I'm going on as a cleaner.

Marigold gloves on my hands. And a big rubber chicken stuck to little Fred downstairs. How many times have you done this? How many times have you streaked? Well, up to today, it's 565 streaks in 23 countries. You know, if you've got a good act, you take it on tour, don't you?

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. His first streak was in Hong Kong in 1993. He was in a bar with friends and saw a news story about a woman who had streaked. Mark wasn't impressed. He said, I could do that. I just said, oh, anyone can streak. So the owner of the bar was next to me. He said, OK, big mouth. You streak tomorrow in the final? I said, yes, because I was rotten drunk.

Mark went home and passed out. And before he knew it, his friends were banging on his door, ready to take him to the rugby match. He had no memory of what he'd promised to do, but he did have a horrible hangover. I said, just give me a beer. So I had two, two, three beers. I went, right give me a beer. So I had two, three beers. I went, right, let's get this over and done with. So I've walked right down the main stand, took my clothes off,

and the All Blacks, the best team in the world at the time, were playing South Africa. So I've ran on, totally naked, ran backwards, waved to the stands as if to say, OK, I've done it. But as I turned around, I saw the ball, and something in my head just said, grab that. So I ran over, picked the ball up around the whole length of the field

and scored a try, a touchdown. In that exact moment, in Hong Kong, Mark had a breakthrough. He knew exactly what he had to do with the rest of his life. As I turned around, the whole stadium, 65,000 people, all rose to their feet, started screaming and cheering. I literally felt the energy from everybody all at once. It was like opening the door of a sauna and the heat hits you. It literally felt like that.

And I've got a lovely body, you know, I'm not well built downstairs or anything. I'm just a normal guy. But everyone loved it. It went over so well that he couldn't wait to do it again. Two days later, at a different stadium, a soccer game between Hong Kong and South China. That first time, he was too hung over to be nervous. But the second time, he was so excited, he could barely stay in his seat. I've got to look normal, because I can't look out of

place. I just join in with all the rest of the supporters and the crowd. But inside, I am all over the place. My heart's going crazy, my stomach's churning, my mind's checking out every single possibility. And all the time I'm looking at the police and security, waiting to get a little point where I can go on. And virtually every single time I've done it has worked absolutely perfect. It's worked perfectly, except for all the times he's been arrested. And he's been arrested a lot for outraging public decency, criminal trespass, public nuisance, breach of the peace, and causing, quote, alarm and distress to the public.

Are you naked during the arrest process, mostly? Well, usually, yeah. What does it feel like right before you're about to take your clothes off? I mean, do you do it quickly? Do you, like, rip the clothes off? Yeah, I've got Velcro clothes, specially made. Oh, you do? So they can come off in a second. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm a professional. Mark has these special outfits made for him by a seamstress in Liverpool.

He says she knows what they're for and that she's, quote, cool about it. His usual process is to get down on the field with his outfit on and then rip it off and take off running. So the police go over and pick up your clothes off the field and kind of jog them over to you? Yeah, yeah. Do you ever think it's kind of mean to make a police officer chase down your pants and deliver them back to you? No, not really. As long as he's laughing when he hands them back to me, you know. And that's what I've had with the police all the time. He did tell us about one time in Madrid when the police weren't laughing. They picked up his clothes and refused to give them back.

Ripped all my clothes off on the pitch, got chased by seven policemen, taken, taken away, put on a police station till 1.30 in the morning. I'm stark naked. And the police said, OK, you go. I said, my clothes? No clothes, no clothes. You go. I thought, this is a wind-up. So I said, OK. I've walked out the police station stark naked, and I've started walking up the road, waiting for the police to call me back. But they didn't. Mark went back into the police station and said, OK, very funny.

Now give me my clothes. And they eventually told him that they didn't even have them. They'd thrown them into the crowd, along with his passport, his phone, his ATM card, everything. He was stuck in the middle of Madrid, naked. Often law enforcement themselves are confused about what the law is, and a good example of that is a guy named John Brennan, who, like many of us, was frustrated going through airport security and being probed and examined by TSA. This is Joanna Grossman, a professor at SMU Law School

who's written about nudity in the law. And they were getting more and more invasive, and he, in protest, just stripped naked and stood there in the Portland airport, completely unclothed, saying basically, OK, now you can see everything. I have nothing to hide. And he was arrested and turned out that, in fact, he hadn't done anything wrong. In addition to having a very sympathetic story, because we could sort of all imagine getting mad enough that maybe we would do that in that moment in time. But being simply nude was not actually a violation of the relevant law.

And even if it had been, the court looked at it and said, look, he's protesting that you can use nudity just like you can use speech or protest in other forms to protest the government. And that what he was really doing was protesting government surveillance and the increasing invasion of privacy. So let's say that you are in a jurisdiction where nudity is illegal. Why is it illegal? Nudity is illegal because of concerns about public sensibilities, affront, provocation. It's not about simply the shame of the human body, although that, of course, pervades our culture in lots of different ways. If you look at the structure of nudity law, particularly what is and isn't illegal, you get a different sense,

first of all, depending on gender. So when you look at laws that affect nudity by women, what you really see is a concern about enticement, right? We worry about women being naked or being topless because we worry that people will be driven to distraction or worse. When you think about men and the naked male body and you look at our culture and legal history, when we're worried about men, we're not worried about people being too distracted or too enticed by the sight of the male body. What we're worried about is that it's threatening. Now, that might end up in a law that looks very similar, right?

That might say nobody can show their genitals, for example. But we really have very different concerns for men versus women. So if you were to do a 50-state survey and say, you know, what is the law of public nudity in the United States, you would find a range of approaches. But as a general matter, it's indecent exposure laws are the type of law that will come into play. If you took another step down the spectrum, the more common law you would find would be an indecent exposure law that prohibits nudity only if there's something lewd about it. And if you're in a jurisdiction in which simple nudity is a kind of indecent exposure, right, one of those stricter states, then the question is who the prosecutor is or who the police are, because they're the ones that are making determinations

and exercising discretion to say, I am going to try to bring the law to bear on this situation, or I'm not. So I think there's a lot of points of discretion, and then maybe you even get to a jury, and the jury gets to say, you know, oh, come on. It's streaking. It's nothing. You know, we did Mark's story in front of a live audience all across the country. And as part of the shtick at the end, we had someone streak across the stage. And it's always amazing to me that for some reason, a streaker seems to turn everyone into a nine-year-old boy. Like everyone in the audience, no one is acting like an adult when they see a streaker. You are acting just like a child. Something happens to us when we see a

streaker. Most of the time, yes. I think for most people who see it, it's sort of interesting, mostly because you see a person in a place they're not supposed to be, right, acting in a way that they're not supposed to act in that context, right? Not because it's so shocking to ever see a naked body, right? You might expect to see that in a gym locker room. But to have somebody streaking across a sporting event or, you know, something like the Oscars, it's, you know, jarring. And I think that's what the streakers, if you look at sort of the history of streakers, what they get out of it, right? It's like jumping off, you know, jumping out of an airplane.

It's fun and exciting and it's an adrenaline rush because you surprise people and, you know, catch them off guard. In the beginning, when charges were brought against Mark, he would plead guilty. No point denying something 60,000 people and a lot of television cameras saw. But at a certain point, he realized that he wasn't going to plead guilty anymore. Not because he didn't break the law,

but because he thinks the law is wrong. I know the law better than my lawyer nowadays. I said, no, this is wrong. Everybody is laughing and joking and cheering. No one's harassed or alarmed or distressed. So I've had eight trials, and I've won six. Still, he's banned from most sporting events in the UK. Wimbledon's lawyers write him letters begging him to please just stay home.

When British teams play abroad, Mark says he has to surrender his passport at the police station. When the game is over, he can go pick it up and go back to normal life. What's the biggest sporting event you ever pulled off?

It's got to be the Super Bowl. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you?

And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. In 2004, Mark streaked Super Bowl 38 in Houston. He knew this would be the hardest event yet. The security is very tight, and Mark didn't know how he was going to get from his seat onto the field without being stopped.

So I thought, I'll go on as a referee. He got his seamstress to make him a Velcro referee's uniform and put his real clothes on over that. But he wasn't expecting a head-to-toe pat-down by security. When he saw security frisking people, he thought, oh no, this'll never work. So I've walked up, put my arms out, the guy's felt along my arms, down my back and the inside of my legs. He said, what's this, man? And the first thing I could think of was, I've got a skin disorder, I need to be able to get to my legs, put the cream on quickly.

That's why you're wearing the Velcro. Yeah, that's why I'm wearing the Velcro, you know. And he went, OK, man, lifted me top up. I saw the referee's uniform. He said, what's that, man? I said, that's my lucky uniform. I wear it to every game. He said, OK, fair enough.

In you go. The New England Patriots were playing the Carolina Panthers. Mark waited until the second half, and then he took off his first layer of clothes. Now my referee have dropped down the wall through all the people around the field. Excuse me, man. Excuse me, man. People opened up, and I've got right to the center of the field just before the guys kicking the ball for the third quarter kickoff. Whoa! And the guy took a face and went, what's up, ref, man? I just went, nothing. I just went, rip me clothes off and started river dancing. This wasn't broadcast in the United States.

CBS turned their cameras away. But here's the audio from a Danish TV crew. Super Bowl 38. Oh, and then there's a striker. There's a striker in the middle of the field. That's fantastic All the crowd got onto it straight away But all the players are going

What's the referee doing man? Do you think the referee is having a breakdown? What's the referee doing man? So I'm dancing around in circles around the ball And look at all the police Total confusion And I'm dancing around Looking at all the police

Total confusion I was on there for nearly a minute Phoebe doing all these silly dances and to be honest I'm glad they came after me because I was running out of moves when they first eventually come after me here's the chase so I'm going and the noise level in the crowd was unbelievable when I first went on. And when the chase started, they went absolutely crazy. I'm going, wow! For a Super Bowl. I don't think it's American TV, we're making pictures of it.

And now the jacket goes in. And he's tackled by the player, you can't see it, but the player from Penfield is running over and tackling him. So the security people are coming, but... As I'm running, I don't want to get there are players from Pelfast who run over and tackle him. So the security people can come with him. As I'm running, I don't want to get caught, it's obvious. But one of the linebackers came running in from the side and flattened me.

And I've got about 20 cops on top of me. I've got my face pushed in the grass as I'm getting handcuffed. And all I could think of, I did it. I just did the Super Bowl, man. He was arrested and charged with criminal trespass. When the jury went to deliberate, Mark asked someone in the courtroom how they thought it went, and they said, if no one looks at you when the jury comes back, then you know it's bad. The jurors came back in, and no one looked Mark in the eye. It was a guilty verdict, but in the end, his

sentence was only a $1,000 fine. I went, wow, man! So I couldn't stop thanking all the jurors and the judge, me mum, Simon Cowell, anybody we could think of we're getting thanked that day. He could cover that $1,000 fine, no problem. Companies pay millions of dollars to get coveted commercial spots in the Super Bowl, and one company paid Mark to write their name on his body. They paid for his tickets, and in the end, his legal fees. You may not remember Mark from this game,

but you probably do remember something else. This was the same Super Bowl where, for not even a second, the world saw part of Janet Jackson's chest. Janet Jackson was apparently so offensive that more than 500,000 people filed complaints with the FCC. The FCC chairman called it a crass and deplorable stunt. He said, our nation's children, parents, and citizens deserve better. Networks immediately took the video down. But a programmer at PayPal is determined to find that video online, and he couldn't. So he and his friends built a new site so that people could easily upload and share videos. He called it YouTube.

It's true that when you watch videos of Mark, everyone does seem to be laughing and smiling. One time, the king of Spain stood up in his box and cheered and clapped for Mark. He says people like it because he sticks to a rigid code. Don't interrupt a game because you can change the outcome. Be prepared to spend a few hours, maybe even an evening in a police cell. Have a good lawyer handy. And don't eat spicy food the night before. I asked him why he does this.

He said that he likes to make people laugh, which I've always thought is kind of a cop-out answer. Everyone likes to make people laugh, but we don't all go around taking our clothes off. It's a most unbelievable, liberating thing you could do. I think everybody should try it at least once. I think I would rather die than be naked in a stadium full of 65,000 people. I think I would just have a heart attack. I wouldn't even get a chance to run because I'd just fall down dead. Well, if anybody had told me I'd have been streaking, you know, years ago, because I was 28 years old when I first did it, and I said, you're joking. There's not a chance in hell.

Since that first streak more than 25 years ago, Mark's broken fingers and toes. He's broken four of his ribs. His children have begged him to stop. I always said the day I get booed is the day I'll stop. And I don't think that's ever going to happen. So I've slowed down a hell of a lot. Who knows?

I might be the first pensioner to streak at the bingo or something. Do you have any upcoming summer plans that you'd like to tell anyone about? What are you trying to make me say, Phoebe? I think we'll be speaking again soon. Okay, oh boy, oh boy. Okay. Okay. Bye-bye.

Cheers. Take care. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Matilde Erfolino is our intern. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. We'll be right back. Breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Side effects may include allergic reactions, injection site pain, headache, eyebrow and eyelid drooping, and eyelid swelling.

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