Do criminals really run police/FBI/CIA people from one location to another?

Factual Questions
1

You’ve seen it in movies. The bad guy says on the phone to whomever:

“Go to the phone at 12th and Flarm. You have 8 minutes.”
Guy gets there and answers phone.
“Now drop this phone and take the subway to the butcher at 197th and Moose Avenue. You have 18 minutes and 12 seconds.”

Does this ever happen? Has it ever happened?

2

I’m pretty sure it has happened before, but I would have to google to find when and where. It makes sense. The perp wants to keep one step ahead of the police in case they are tracing the phone call.

3

I don’t think it’s to avoid tracing the call. That wouldn’t explain the demands to attend multiple physical locations. To avoid tracing the call the bad guys could just make one quick call giving the ultimate location.

My understanding is that this trope is when the bad guys are trying to arrange a meet (usually for handover of a ransom). The bad guys are trying to avoid being captured at the meet. They want to make it hard for the cops to follow the good guy to the meet without it being obvious. So they give a string of locations with little time between, so they can (from the sidelines) watch to see if the good guy is being followed or accompanied by cops, and give the good guy no time to let the cops get organised.

It’s an old trope and I can’t see how it would work now in the days of cellphones being ubiquitous (even assuming it ever would have worked).

I have no idea about whether the trope has any reality behind it, but I think that’s the idea behind it.

4

This actually happened in the Leopold and Loeb case. Although two points:

  1. it wasn’t even a real ransom demand. They killed for the thrill of it, they didn’t really attempt to get money, it was a deliberately false trail.
  2. The father was unable to follow the confusing instructions given.

See Leopold’s statement . starting page 3 paragraph 2.

5

Similarly in the Pizza Bomber case, the intention was the victim (who had a bomb strapped to his neck) would have to follow a series of instructions taking him from place-to-place which he could never have completed before the bomb exploded, in practice he was caught by police very early on who just made him sit down until it exploded (personally I think a lot of the attempts by police to imply the victim was in on the plot were attempts to deflect blame for this).