From Belgrade 2.0 blog:
Belgrade Phantom (Serbian: Beogradski Fantom) is a nickname of the guy who night after night repeatedly managed to run away in a white Porsche from the cops who were driving their Zastava’s in the late seventies. His real name was Vlada Vasiljevic, a small time crook apparently very good in stealing cars and with particular obsession with fancy and expensive sport cars such as Porsche. These stunts made him famous in at that time communisticaly boring Belgrade and the people would gather every night around Slavija square waiting for him to do his show and to escape Narodna Milicija one more time. Here’s a short documentary film about the event by Jovan B. Todorovic, who is also preparing a movie about this event.
See the full post for speculation on what the car was, who it was stolen from and who the phantom was.
This story reminded me of the Claude Lelouch’s famous classic “C’√©tait un rendez-vous“. Jerry Kindall explains:
On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.
No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.
Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago. [Source]
You can see it on YouTube, or below:
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