Barracuda Queens true story: The real Swedish burglars
Barracuda Queens spoilers follow.
While most of us are familiar with the grim process of waking up with a dry mouth, ringing head and the hangover to end all hangovers, discovering that you spent thousands while partying away the night before is less common, thankfully.
But that's just what the four troublemakers of Netflix's Barracuda Queens learn after a wild night out in Sweden's answer to Saint-Tropez. Once the hangover has started to wear off – or they've knocked back enough booze to take the edge off it – Lollo, Klara, Frida, and Mia begin to realise the depth of the money pit they've landed in.
The rebellious girlbosses with decidedly upper-class backgrounds hatch a hare-brained scheme to break into the homes of their own wealthy neighbours, steal jewels, art and pricey bottles of wine – and leave empty flutes of "super expensive" bubbly they drink to celebrate a job well done.
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From their first attempt at a heist, things do not go to plan in the six-part miniseries, and soon the police come knocking. However, Lollo, Klara, Frida, and Mia – with the addition of their new friend Amina, who goes from attempted burglary victim to co-conspirator – manage to dodge the consequences of their string of crimes.
As Barracuda Queens says at the start of the series, the Swedish drama is based on a true story, so what really happened?
The Barracuda Queens true story
The Barracuda Queens girl gang and the heists they carry out are very loosely based on the Lidingöigan – or Lidingö League – named after the wealthy Stockholm suburb a number of the thieves were from.
The Lidingöligan were certainly quite different from the women of Barracuda Queens – for one thing, they were all men. In the 1990s, the group targeted the lavish homes of Sweden's wealthier neighbourhoods, including their own home turf of Lidingö, as well as Djursholm – where Barracuda Queens is set – and Danderyd.
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They pilfered everything from antiques and famous artwork to jewels and vintage wines – including lithographs signed by Chagall and Picasso. They quickly singled themselves out for having impeccably good taste, targeting prominent public figures, including the former Scandinavian Airlines chief Jan Carlzon and the writer Jan Guillou.
After they had packed the stolen goods into their family cars, which moonlighted as getaway vehicles, the Lidingöigan would often share a champagne toast and leave behind the empty flutes as their calling card – a bit classier than Home Alone's Wet Bandit thieves leaving the taps running, but essentially as dumb and insulting.
There were around 50 burglaries and 20 car thefts that the Swedish police believed to be connected to this one group, but they went years without the evidence to catch them, as the Lidingöigan racked up goods with an estimated total value north of £20million.
However, after their crime spree had reached the end of the '90s, the members of the Lidingöigan finally tripped up and the police were onto them, Sveriges Radio reported. A number of suspects were arrested and, in 2000, certain members of the league were sentenced for their crimes.
But the police struggled to find a concrete link between the suspects and the burglaries, so it is still unclear whether all those involved were ever brought to justice.
The real-life story certainly diverged from that depicted in Barracuda Queens, which sees Lollo's mother secretly smuggle their stolen goods to a safe place, to protect the girls from a lengthy prison sentence.
Tea Stjärne, who plays Mia in Barracuda Queens, the one girl in the group who doesn't come from an upper-class background, told Swedish outlet Aftonbladet that she enjoyed seeing the Netflix show's creators decision to gender-swap the characters from the original true story.
She said: "It's fun to see girls in this soapy crime genre. It's not that common for girls to have these roles, that they cut alarms and break windows.
"They are very bored. This upper class life isn't much fun and so they get a kick out of every burglary they do. They just want more and more and want to experience this fun again."
Barracuda Queens is available to stream on Netflix.
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