The glamor of Pirot

With apologies to The Glory of Carniola for the near-identity theft in the title, I offer you, courtesy of my Ohioan friend, a story of near-identity theft. It goes like this: a confidence artist by the name of Goran Marković looks, I guess, a lot like the actor Bruce Willis. He was able for a time to take advantage of the resemblance to get a lot of unpaid privileges for himself, deflect the attention of authorities, you name it. He even got himself a set of forged documents in the name of Bruce Willis, but there he made a crucial mistake: according to news.com.au, he "he linked the name Bruce with Australia's invasion of Hollywood," and got himself a fake Australian passport in the actor's name instead of a fake American one. So when the police in Pirot pulled him over and he gave them the Hollywood treatment, they:

"...immediately arrested him when they saw the passport was Australian. A further check revealed the car he was driving was stolen and an ensuing investigation linked him to other car thefts. 'When we pointed out the mistake he had to admit he wasn't the real thing,' a police spokesman said. 'He said he thought that Willis, like Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson and Nicole Kidman, was Australian. He did look like him, but it was the Australian accent that gave it away'."

It seems that there is a message for crooks here, that they need to keep up to date on their show business trivia.

Balkania