DECEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 117
The case might have ended there, an
obscure series of crimes in a cold and remote
country. But Stefansson’s next step made
headlines worldwide: He used a loophole in
the law to escape from prison.
In Iceland, it is not a crime to stage a pris-
on break: The law recognizes that inmates,
like all human beings, are naturally entitled
to freedom, and thus cannot be punished for
seeking it. After his arrest, Stefansson was
held for three months as a “resident” in an
“open” prison in Sogn, where inmates are
housed in private rooms with flat-screen TVs
and cell phone privileges. On April 16, 2018,
a hearing was held to consider a request by
prosecutors to extend Stefansson’s detention
for another 10 days prior to trial. “The judge
made the decision to think the matter over”
until the following morning, Stefansson later
observed. But “the judge did not extend the
custody temporarily.”
The prison staff advised Stefansson that,
technically, he was a free man: The order had
expired at 4 p.m. and would not be extend-
ed until the next day. He signed a declara-
tion saying he “would spend the night in a
prison cell while I waited for the judge to
rule on the extension of my custody.” Then
he climbed out of the window in his room,
hitchhiked 65 miles to the airport, and took
a flight to Stockholm in the name of “an old
friend.” Since Sweden does not require Ice-
landic travelers to have passports, Stefans-
son says he “didn’t have to show any IDs,
talk to any staff, nothing.”
By chance, Stefansson was on the same
flight as Katrin Jakobsdottir, the prime min-
ister of Iceland, who was sitting a few rows
in front of him. (“We did not chat,” Ste-
fansson later said. “I kept my head down
as much as I could.”) By the time the alarm
was sounded back at the prison, Stefansson
was approaching Sweden.
The police, assisted by Interpol, mobi-
lized in an international manhunt. But Ste-
fansson managed to stay one step ahead.
From Sweden, he traveled to Denmark,
then to Germany by train, and finally to
Amsterdam by car. While on the lam he
wrote a letter that was published in Fre t-
tabladid, detailing what he claimed were
human rights violations by the police. (His
attorney refers to his interrogation as “tor-
ture.”) Residents of Iceland began cheer-
ing the Bitcoin bandits, who were well on
their way to becoming folk heroes. “I am
proud of him for standing up for his rights
and protesting that he was illegally held in
jail,” says Stefansson’s accomplice, Viktor
“the Cutie” Jonasson.
Then, once again, Stefansson screwed
up. In Amsterdam, he met up with Vik-
tor the Cutie and Haffi the Pink. The trio
brazenly posed for a picture in front of the
De Bijenkorf department store wearing
triumphant smiles and sunglasses. Haffi
posted the image on Instagram and tagged
it #teamsindri.
Two hours later, Stefansson was arrested
by the Amsterdam police. He spent the next
19 days in a Dutch prison before being extra-
dited to Iceland to stand trial.
On December 5, 2018, to protect their
privacy, the suspects entered the courtroom
the same way they had entered the Bitcoin
mines, their faces covered—in Haffi’s case,by a Louis Vuitton scarf. Only Stefans-
son chose to show his face to the cameras.
After confessing to two of the burglaries, he
received the stiffest sentence: four and a half
years in prison. Matthias Karlsson confessed
to the Advania heist and was sentenced to
two and a half years; his brother, Petur the
Polish, received 18 months. Haffi the Pink,
Viktor the Cutie, and the security guard, Ivar
Gylfason, got sentences ranging from 15 to
20 months. The burglars also had to repay
the police $116,332 for the legal costs of the
investigation. Everyone except Gylfason is
appealing their convictions, and all remain
free until their appeals are resolved.
And the mysterious Mr. X that Stefansson
continues to blame for the crimes? “Many
Icelanders believe in elves and trolls,” says
Kjartansson, the police chief. “I am not
one of them.”
If Mr. X does exist, he remains at large,
as do the 550 stolen Bitcoin computers. It’s
possible that the machines are blinking
away in a warehouse somewhere at this
very moment, mining Bitcoin for the young
men who stole them. According to prosecu-
tors, Stefansson had leased a former fish-
processing factory in northern Iceland. Was
it to house the stolen computers and launch
his Bitcoin mine?
“Maybe the computers have been run-
ning the whole time,” Stefansson tells me.
“Maybe I know where they are. Maybe I do,
and maybe I don’t.”
“If you were Mr. X,” I ask him, “how
would you grade the Big Bitcoin Heist?”
“A masterpiece,” he says. Then he catches
himself. “I just wish I had done it.”the least of it.”
(Epstein, the financier, was later convicted
of sex crimes. When he hanged himself in a
federal prison this past August while awaiting
new sex-trafficking charges, it was William
Barr, overseer of the federal prison system,
who immediately called for an investiga-
tion. Barr recently claimed he hadn’t made
the Dalton-Epstein connection until he read
about it in the press.)
Donald Barr, it turned out, was no Mr.
Chips. He was a remote presence, according
to alumni. Early on, his time was taken up
recruiting boys for the upper school. “I was
considering going off to boarding school,”
recalled Steven Slon, Jonathan Slon’s broth-
er, now the editorial director of the Saturday
Evening Post. “I went up to visit Andover.
Meanwhile, my parents went to meet with
Donald Barr. He said, ‘Don’t send Steve
there. There are a lot of homosexuals who
prey on boys there.’ My parents laughed it
off.” Nonetheless, Slon stayed at Dalton,
and during his freshman year Barr called an
assembly to decry an episode in which two
boys had been found having sex. “I remem-
ber how outraged he was and said to all of
us, ‘This disgusting horrible thing has hap-
pened. Unnatural acts were performed.’ ”
When college admissions time rolled
around, however, Barr was an ardent defend-
er of his students, frequently traveling to
campuses to meet admissions counselors
on behalf of Dalton’s top prospects. Part
of the draw of Dalton was the implicit
promise that the school’s most accom-
plished graduates would likely move onto an Ivy League education. “Donald Barr
was self-conscious about class differenc-
es,” Semel contended. “He often talked
about ‘the Columbia mafia’—the world he
had come out of—and the rich Upper East
Side families. There was a battle going on
between the old-money German Jewish
values of Dalton and the new money that
had come in.”
The clash of cultures was inevitable. A
libertarian turned conservative Republi-
can, Barr wore an American flag pin on his
lapel and cared deeply about credentials.
In his writings and conversations, he could
sound ponderous. He would cite the First
Vatican Council, parse the subtleties of
dialectical materialism, or quote the Vic-
torian novelist and critic G.K. Chesterton
on the relevance of understanding history.
And he never made a secret of his passion
for rigid adherence to rules—to the notion
that good discipline instilled moral back-
bone in individuals and society at large.
In Barr’s 1971 book Who Pushed Humpty
Dumpty?, he noted:William Barr
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