Expropriation – Dark Nights

Greece: Nikos Palaiokostas, the Ghost, the Greek Robin Hood & brother of Vassilis Palaiokostas has passed away

Posted on 2025/04/26 - 2025/04/26 by darknights

This morning Nikos Palaiokostas passed away at Trikala hospital. Since 2021 Nikos had been released due to health grounds and was able to serve the remainder of his sentence under house arrest in his family home in Trikala, from where he was able to leave twice a week, for dialysis treatment at the hopsital’s Kidney Unit.

Nikos Palaiokostas born in Moschofyto, in the mountains above Trikala, to a large family with a background as shepherds. He was a bank robber, beloved of the anarchist/revolutionary movement, hero of the poor in Greece and the older brother of the still wanted Vassilis Palaiokostas . He operated for several years either with his brother or alone, mainly committing bank robberies and one kidnapping.

After a brief job as a sailor, he quickly began to engage in ‘petty theft’ and ‘burglary’ together with his younger brother, Vassilis Palaiokostas, who in the meantime had begun earlier. In 1988, Nikos Palaiokostas was imprisoned in the prison of Trikala but with the help of his brother Vassilis, he escaped on 18th December of that year. However, on 3rd February, 1990, Nikos was arrested again for theft, while in April of the same year, Vassilis was also arrested for car theft while preparing a plan to help his brother escape again.

Palaiokostas’ acquaintance with Kostas Samaras (known by the nicknames Artist or Butterfly ) in the 1980s was crucial as the three of them began committing bank robberies in various areas throughout Greece. The most famous robbery of these took place in June 1992, when they robbed the National Bank branch in Kalambaka, Trikala, liberating 125,000,000 drachmas, which remains to this day the largest bank robbery in Greece.On 15th December 1995, the Palaiokostas gang carried out the first kidnapping in Greece, kidnapping industrialist Alexandros Chaitoglou from his home in Thessaloniki. The Palaiokostas gang then demanded a ransom of 260,000,000 drachmas for the industrialist’s release. The Chaitoglou family paid the ransom to the kidnappers, with the authorities launching a major manhunt at the time in their attempt to locate and arrest the gang. Only after 3 years of investigations and pursuits, in 1999, did they manage to achieve some results, as after a car accident at the Lamia – Livadia national road, the authorities arrested Vassilis, who was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison for the kidnapping of Chaitoglou.

Nikos Palaiokostas is ‘alleged’, according to the authorities, to be the organizer of the first helicopter escape from Korydallos prison of his brother, which took place in June 2006. The story goes, that two people hired a trip on a sight-seeing helicopter from Agios Kosmas, a coastal suburb of Athens. They hijacked the helicopter using a pistol and hand grenade, and forced the pilot to fly to the prison. When the helicopter arrived, guards believed the helicopter was a visit from prison inspectors. The helicopter flew the prisoners to a cemetery nearby, where they transferred to motorcycles and fled from there. Unfortunatly Vassilis was re-captured two years later on 2nd August 2008 in Thessaloniki.

Nikos is again ‘accused’ of the same action in 2009 this time liberating both Vassilis and his cellmate Alket Rizai. They climbed a rope ladder thrown to them by a female passenger in the helicopter as it flew over the prison courtyard. Guards on the ground opened fire and the woman fired back with an automatic rifle. One prison guard injured himself while trying to pull out his gun. Vassilis is still at large with a one-million euro bounty placed on him. His cellmate Alket Rizai was re-arrested in November 2009

Wanted for 16 years, Nikos was finally arrested in 2006, outside the village of Livadi on Mount Parnassos, after falling into a roadblock set up by the Livadia cops. He tried to avoid the roadblock by driving at high speed, but the car he was driving veered off course and went off the road. In recent years, Palaiokostas has been held in the Agios Stefanos prison in Patras. The state took its revenge by sentencing Nikos to 197 years and 376 months.

Nikos showed that we are not pawns of the capitalist system, that all laws of the state are to be broken, that there is no legal or illegal. The rich are only rich because they are left to be, Nikos and Vassilis understood that all that was needed was a trusted few to take it.

Nothing has changed since the Palaiokostas brothers humiliated the state & the rich of Greece. The rich are still rich and getting richer. There is need again and always of another cycle of expropriation, whether it is to fund revolution or to merely live against this existing rotting system of tyranny and inequality.

We will never forget or forgive, Nikos and Vassilis we are with you till the end.

“If you steal something small you are a petty thief, but if you steal millions you are a gentleman of society.”

Read the book ‘A Normal Life‘ for more on Vassilis and his brother Nikos.

Berlin, Germany: Freedom & Happiness – Call for a demonstration in solidarity with Daniela Klette on 22.02.25 – 18:30 – Oranienplatz

Posted on 2025/02/02 - 2025/02/02 by darknights

Stop state terrorism

Solidarity with those in hiding and prisoners

Almost a year ago, on February 26, 2024, Daniela Klette was arrested in her Kreuzberg apartment and has been in custody in Vechta Prison ever since.

She is accused of various expropriation actions, as well as the successful demolition of the prison in Weiterstadt in 1993, which was carried out by the Red Army Faction (RAF).

The first trial is about to begin in March of this year at the Verden District Court.

After Daniela’s arrest, Berlin became a scene of heavily armed uniformed men in military style trying to outdo each other in the level of escalation. Disputes over jurisdiction within the various repressive authorities at federal and state level at least provided some amusement in a week that was otherwise overshadowed by the cops’ show of force and lurid articles in the media. Houses were evacuated, various properties were searched, tanks drove through the streets and the German state showed that it does not forget.

This escalation by the repressive authorities was followed by further measures that illustrate their determination to persecute. For example, an extensive public search was carried out for the other two accused – Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub. The treacherous face of parts of German society has been shown above all in the fact that time and again, most recently at the counter-protests against a Nazi march in Berlin Friedrichshain, cops arrest people who are named by denunciators who see the manhunt as an event, incited by the smear campaigns of Springer and Co.

Calls for denunciation and manhunts as happenings do not appear to be a remnant of the RAF era, nor is it just a matter of “settling old scores”. Since the G20 summit in Hamburg, public calls for manhunts have once again become a widespread method used by the cops in cooperation with the relevant media and, in addition to the persecution of our companions in various investigations throughout Germany, we have to observe how even banal offenses lead to pictures of the suspects in the press and on billboards. Continue reading “Berlin, Germany: Freedom & Happiness – Call for a demonstration in solidarity with Daniela Klette on 22.02.25 – 18:30 – Oranienplatz” →

“We refuse consensus, their dilemmas, social peace.”

Posted on 2024/07/12 - 2024/07/12 by darknights

Responsibility claim for the burnt ballot box in Exarcheia

June 18, 2012

Responsibility claim for the burnt ballot box in Exarcheia, Athens on the night of the election of June 17th, 2012.

Everything around us seems to unwind in coercive binaries: memorandum/anti-memorandum, drachma/euro, fascism/anti-fascism. Perhaps even among our ranks it is necessary to take a position, to take a stance in this liminal conjuncture. Yet we don’t for a moment forget the only real binary: Revolution or consistency with the existent.

We refuse consensus, their dilemmas, social peace. Security concerns the profits of local and international capital; freedom concerns everyone else. The state and capital, the fascist and the banks are no invisible forces. They have names and addresses. They’d better begin to count down their days of plenty.

We look behind, in the past few years, at tough struggles. How can the barricades and the fires of February 12th fit in ballot boxes? How can the voices shouting “Enough!” fit in these boxes, voices raised by the few, the dignified proletarians at the times of wage fear and subordination? How can the struggles fit in those boxes, the struggles fought city after city, neighbourhood after neighbourhood, with the scum of GD? How can our brothers and sisters fit, those who are missing from our side, yet they are always next to us, even when in the cells of the regime?

At these liminal times, which have no space for reservations we attempt the unthinkable and we make the above ‘fit’. The 1000ml of petrol that we placed in the ballot box of the 18th polling station in Exarcheia at the June 17th elections are our 1000 votes, they are our 1000 challenges in an unpacifiable war.

The revolution first and always

P.S. A raised fist for the comrade Olga Oikonomidou*

Claim for expropriation and arson of polling boxes

07/07/2019

Our ears are ringing with the desperate calls from parties and other political actors to participate in the democratic electoral process. A small group of comrades were moved by the pathetic vote beggars and armed with determination, the will for direct action and our sledgehammers we participated in the democratic fiasco. We broke with the above the delegation regime that prevails as normality and formed our own terms of attack and sabotage in their celebration .

We therefore take responsibility for the invasion of the 33rd Athens polling station a few minutes before the end of the process, where we expropriated a ballot box. On our entry we frantically searched the police guarding the polling station, but as we found out while they were there they chose to play hide and seek (successfully, it is true). At the moment of our departure we left a gift of a (stolen by cops) tear gas canister to the deadbeat party clerks and the willing democratic garbage of the election committees. A few seconds later we consigned the inside of the ballot box to the only fate it deserves: fire.

This action is a warm welcome from our side to Kyriakos Mitsotakis and New Democracy, who have promised to finish us off. We are waiting for you…

SABOTAGE OF THE ELECTORAL PROCESS

FIRE IN THE BALLOTS

Ballot arsonists

DN Note

*Olga Economidou was arrested on 14/03/2011, in Volos, along with another 4 CCF’s members, after a night raid by police’s special forces and Anti-terrorist squads at the house they where living. In December of 2014, she was sentened to 25 years in prison in the Fire Conspiracy Cells case.

She was previously tried for participating in street fights during the Polytehnio memorial demonstration, on 17/11/1998. She was prosecuted for “Volos case” (alleged bank robbery, while being dressed up like cops), for her involvement with explosives and guns, which were found on other people prosecuted for the same case (arrests in Pireus and Kallithea), for the 14 parcel bombs case, for the case concerning 250 attacks by CCF between 2008 and 2011, for the text in solidarity with Anarchist Squat Nadir (second eviction in October 2011) and for instigation concerning “Phoenix” project. She was also under investigation concerning “Ardire” case, which was launched on June 2012 by the Italian prosecuting authorities, which claim to have found and confiscated letters from her, in the houses of Italian comrades prosecuted for the case.

In 2016 she was sentenced to 115 years of prison together with 10 other members of CCF in the trial connected with the escape plan. Now released.

Santiago, Chile: Sabotage to padlocks and locks of commercial centers with the exploitation and death of animals and churches.

Posted on 2024/01/10 - 2024/01/10 by darknights

The last days of December in the midst of the consumerist frenzy for the end of the year celebrations, we, some anarchic individualities, decided to act in memory of our comrade Sebastian Oversluij, 10 years after his death, who was killed by the guard of a bank branch in Pudahuel, when he tried to expropriate it on December 11, 2013.

We grieve for your death Angry… we grieve for your last moments… but we are proud of the life you chose to live. We embrace your anarchic conviction, we embrace your kaos.

In your memory we seal padlocks of a center of profit and animal exploitation, as well as three butcher shops and two places of religious and authoritarian indoctrination, all this in Santiago, Chile.

Sebastián Oversluij presente!
Solidarity with the anti-speciesist and anarkist prisoners.
Nothing is settled.

Source: Contra Info

Santiago, Chile: Incendiary attack in Liceo Manuel Barros Borgoño 10 years after Sebastián Oversluij’s death

Posted on 2024/01/06 by darknights

During these days, hooded students set up barricades and confrontations against the presence of Carabineros (COP), injuring one in the back with minor burns. In memory of pelao Angry, who on December 11, 2013 was killed during a bank expropriation in Pudahuel.

Below are some records:

Source: Informativo Anarquista

Greece: For Comrade Alfredo Bonanno from Nikos Maziotis, Member of Revolutionary Struggle

Posted on 2023/12/17 - 2023/12/17 by darknights

Comrade Alfredo M. Bonanno has passed away at the age of 86. He lived a whole life in the world of struggle and anarchy. He was one of the main representatives of the insurrectionary tendency of the Italian anarchist movement with a great theoretical contribution and editorial work. He was editor of the magazine Anarchismo and other anarchist publications. For his activities he was repeatedly persecuted and imprisoned by the Italian state together with other comrades in the 1990s, e.g. for the O.R.A.I. case (in 1996), the armed expropriation of the Serravalle Rural Savings Bank in the Trento area in 1994 and other attacks.

He had come to Greece several times. The first time I met him was in January 1993 when he visited me in the military hospital 424 in Thessaloniki after 50 days of a hunger strike I had carried out. I had just been released from being a prisoner in the Thessaloniki military prison for refusing to serve my military service. In 1999 he had also come to Greece and had testified as a political witness for the defence in my trial for the bombing of the Ministry of Development in December 1997 as an act of solidarity with the then dynamic struggle of the villagers of the Strymonikos Gulf villages in North Greece – Halkidiki (Olympiada, Varvara, Stavros, Asprovalta) against the installation of the Canadian multinational gold company TVX GOLD, which has been succeeded today by Hellas Gold, a subsidiary of Eldorado Gold. It was a historic political trial in the then annals of the Greek anarchist movement where for the first time in Greece after the fall of the junta there was a defence of armed-dynamic forms of action. In that trial, in addition to the Greek comrades/compañeros, in addition to Alfredo Bonanno, Costantino Cavalleri, a comrade of the insurrectionary tendency of the Italian anarchist movement, and the comrade Hellyette Bess, who was a member of the French guerrilla organization Action Directe and had been imprisoned for several years for her participation in the organization, had testified after an international call for solidarity. The 3 then imprisoned members of Action Directe, Jean-Marc Rouillan, Joëlle Aubron and Nathalie Ménigon, had also sent a written message of solidarity to the court.

The last time I saw Comrade Alfredo was in 2010-’11 in Korydallos prison when we were in custody for our participation in the Revolutionary Struggle. He was also in custody on the charge of expropriating a bank in Greece. With Comrade Alfredo, despite our different approaches to struggle and mode of action, we were connected by an invisible thread, as are so many other comrades around the world who dedicate their entire lives to the struggle to free humanity from the shackles of the state and capital.

THE COMRADE WILL LIVE ON IN MEMORY AND IN OUR STRUGGLES

Nikos Maziotis, convicted for the actions of Revolutionary Struggle.

source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1628067/

Via & translated for Abolition Media by Nae Midion

Santiago, Chile: RED bus incendiary attack 10 years after Sebastián Oversluij’s death

Posted on 2023/12/17 by darknights

On Monday, December 11, between 5 de Abril and Luis Infante Cerda, a RED bus was burned after a commemorative activity 10 years after the assassination of comrade Sebastian Oversluij, who in an attempt to expropriate a State Bank was killed by a guard with military training.

Source: Informativo Anarquista

Athens, Greece: If you were invisible, would you rob a supermarket? by ALIENATION_2.0

Posted on 2023/12/03 by darknights

Athens, If you were invisible, would you rob a supermarket? by ALIENATION_2.0

At noon on Saturday 4/11, an expropriation took place at s/m My Market on Agia Sophia Street, in one of the most central parts of the Vyrvna neighbourhood.

Supermarkets have always been one of the businesses that never miss an opportunity to turn every crisis into an opportunity to multiply their profits on our backs in a variety of ways. Either by draining their workforce with meager wages and flexible hours, or by imposing exorbitant mark-ups on all their products, with priority given to basic necessities further hampering our quality of life.

We live to work, we live to rent, our salaries end on the 1st week of the month and in this condition the state tries to convince us that the “household basket” and the crumbs it called market pass constitute social policy. In the same vein, the “social policy” of humiliating compensations and accommodation in camps and stadiums with which it tried to convince the affected residents of the Thessalian plain that their lives will be restored. In the same situation, the entrepreneurs of the supermarkets, as modern-day black marketeers even took advantage of the lack of drinking water in the wider area of flooded Thessaly city by selling bottled water even more expensively. While the populations affected saw mud and debris, bosses studied balance sheets, turnover and profit margins.

EVERYTHING IS OURS BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS STOLEN

So we grabbed dozens of essentials from My Market (oil, cleaning products, toiletries) and left collectively without paying a cent. These products have already been given to people in Thessaly who really needed them, strengthening the hundreds of movements of solidarity that have been expressed throughout this time by the self-organized movement towards the affected. This small movement of expropriating and sharing what we need is inspired by the overall movement of counter-attack and recovery required to take back everything that we are deprived of daily and really need.

We don’t expect anything from anyone. We are collectively organizing against the continued devaluing of our lives. Fight for life and dignity.

We call for the proliferation of similar direct actions.

EXPLOIRATION_2.0

PS We decided to film our movement and share it to break the orchestrated silence of the media and to inspire similar initiatives…

Sequence_01.mp4

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Source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1627728/

Via & Translated by Act for freedom now!

Argentina: A wave of looting across the country

Posted on 2023/09/01 - 2023/09/01 by darknights

Plagued by inflation, Argentina is facing a wave of looting

In Argentina, a wave of looting of supermarkets and shops over the past four days has put the country on alert, reviving traumatic memories of the “Gran Crisis” of 2001 [See here the brochure Recueil de textes argentins (2001-2003), ed. Mutines Seditions, 2003], against the backdrop of presidential elections scheduled for October. Although the government denies any causal link, the wave comes at a time when the Argentine peso has just been devalued by around 20% in mid-August. Latin America’s third-largest economy is grappling with endemic inflation, which has been in double digits for over twelve years, and is now running at 115% year-on-year. JPMorgan even expects inflation to reach 190% by the end of the year. Inflation is so high that in May, the government launched a 2,000 peso banknote, the largest ever in circulation.

The looting, which has occurred in the southern Patagonian city of Bariloche, around the capital Buenos Aires and in the Mendoza wine-growing region, is the work of small groups who break into shops to steal food and other goods. Gangs of 20, 40 or more people descend on a supermarket or other business in “piranha attack” mode, or smaller groups, driven by last-minute appeals via social networks, sometimes force their way into closed stores. The assailants grab food, but also whatever they can find: alcohol, cigarettes, various and sundry objects, as evidenced by the full supermarket carts abandoned when the police arrived. Sometimes, as in Moreno on Tuesday, the store is set on fire.

In all, almost 200 people – many of them minors, sometimes aged 12 or 14 – have been arrested in four days, following looting or attempted looting, often halted by the police, in the provinces of Cordoba (central), Mendoza (west) and Neuquen (south), and more than a hundred since Monday in the “Conurbano”, the huge suburbs of Buenos Aires. On Wednesday August 23, the Buenos Aires government reported that in the capital, there had been more than 150 looting attempts at the same time, with 94 people arrested.

Today, August 24, the Argentine press announced that the national government has formalized the creation of unified commands to prevent looting. These Unified Commands of the Federal Police and Security Forces will be made up of the National Intelligence Directorate and the Secretariat of Security and Criminal Policy, the Argentine Federal Police, the National Gendarmerie, the Naval Prefecture and the Airport Security Police, as well as representatives of the police forces of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and the provinces.

Buenois Aires cops deployed to prevent supermarket lootingDitto Patagonia, August 23, 2023

[Quick summary of the Argentine & French-language press, August 24, 2023]

Source: Sans Noms

Volos, Greece: Responsibility claim for an attack on ATMs, cops and OPKE in memory of Vassilis Maggos

Posted on 2023/01/24 by darknights

“Cops, judges, politicians have no reason to sleep soundly.” G. Michaelides

In the early hours of Saturday morning, we headed to the Eurobank bank at the junction of El.Venizelos and Iasonos streets, where 2 ATM machines were broken and then an attack was carried out on a police car and a vehicle of the OPKE, who arrived at the scene, by throwing empty bottles and stones. The above actions were taken as an act of vigilante action. We have no illusions, nor do we expect any vindication from the judicial organs of the state apparatus in the upcoming trial of the cops-torturers of Vassilis Maggos. It is time for fear to change sides. With this act we call for a generalization of the confrontational actions of the anti-authoritarian space in memory of Vassilis. We carve our confrontational path alone against rulers and their cover-up.

Anarchists

Source: athens.indymedia