Speed reading a massive criminal investigation

How to make sense of 4,713 pages in 20 minutes without feeling a fraud

The file is about cocaine smuggling and has 4,713 pages. Five days for an experienced researcher to build a timeline weren’t enough. I managed it in 20 minutes, during a coffee break.

The AI did the heavy lifting. This article will show you how. Court orders, wiretap transcripts, cell tower data, arrest warrants, bank statements, interrogation protocols, all mashed into one 170-megabyte PDF were magically exported to a timeline and an Excel-sheet.

I was teaching a course in Antwerp this week—"Researching with AI," one of forty bootcamps I'm running this year. Organizations are welcome to bring their own material—the cases they're stuck on, the documents they can't crack. The first hour is always about getting rid of ChatGPT. I call it the McDonald's of AI: fine when you want something warm and fast. But when you're doing precision work, you don't want a warm feeling. You want cold facts. Exit ChatGPT.

A criminal court expert walked up to me. He had that look. “I’ve got this case file,” he said. “I don’t have a timeline of events yet, even after five days of hard work. Can AI help?”

He opened his laptop. The PDF was called something like “CaseFile_Snowfall_Complete.pdf”—I’m changing details for obvious reasons.

“I need a timeline of every significant event,” he said. “Who did what, when. But every time I search for a date, I get hundreds of hits. Phone numbers. Reference codes. Bank transactions. I can’t separate the real dates from the garbage.”

He’d already tried. Free online tools to split the PDF. Converters to turn it into text. But the converters couldn’t read every page—some were scanned, some were photos.

My next session started in 30 minutes. “Let’s try something”, I said.

The document contained 1,053,356 words. I didn’t bother uploading it to the usual AI chatbots—security reasons alone ruled that out. But in case you’re tempted, say if the documents are public, let me save you twenty minutes of frustration.

ChatGPT times out with “Failed upload.” Gemini refuses: “File larger than 100 MB.” Claude.ai: “You may not upload files larger than 31 MB.” Thirty-one—a number so arbitrary it sounds like it was decided by a committee that gave up halfway through.

SuperGrok just says “File is too large.” Google NotebookLM accepts up to 200 MB, which made my 170 MB file seem safe—until the hidden 500,000-word limit kicked in. It doesn’t tell you that. It just says “Error, try again.”

Five tools. Five excuses. What now? Use a different tool.

Adobe Acrobat can compress a 170 MB PDF down to maybe 80 MB. Problem solved? Shrinking a PDF makes the file smaller. Not the text.

Your 170MB → 80MB compressed file still contains 1,053,356 words. The AI still has to read all of them.

Think of it this way: Vacuum-packing a suitcase doesn’t reduce the number of shirts.

Step 0: security

Active criminal investigation on free AI tools without permission? Don’t. But you do can do AI stuff just on your own computer. See end of article.

Step 1: use a chainsaw

What you needed is a chainsaw.

Here’s the thing about chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini, all of them. They live in your browser. They can only help you with whatever you can carry to their house. Bring a 170-megabyte file? Sorry, too heavy. Come back with something lighter.

That’s like a scalpel. Useless against a tree trunk.

The chainsaw approach is different. The chainsaw is your own computer, running code locally. No uploads. No file limits. No arbitrary rules invented by people who’ve never had to process 4,713 pages during a coffee break.

“But I can’t code,” you say.

And that’s fine, because we’re not coding. We’re vibecoding.

It works like this: you describe what you want in plain language, and an AI writes the code for you and executes the task. You don’t need to understand what a “function” is. You don’t need to know what “Python” means. You just need to know what you want.

I wanted to split this massive file into smaller pieces so AI gets it.

Thats what I typed in.

The tool that makes it possible for me during my break is called Claude Code, a so called cold model. Don’t confuse it with the Claude chatbot at claude.ai—that’s the scalpel. Only Claude Code can be the chainsaw.

Now, there are two ways to use this. Both require a Claude Max subscription—$200 per month. That’s not a typo. Two hundred dollars. Every month.

Is it worth it? For me, yes. One investigation like this used to take days. Now it takes minutes. But you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Once you have Max, you get two options:

OPTION 1: CLAUDE CODE COWORKER (The Easy Way)

Claude just launched today Claude Code Coworker to help you code. It is user friendly. If you want the easiest possible experience and don’t need maximum power, Coworker is great.

The catch? It’s less powerful than option 2. It only runs on Mac via Claude Desktop.

OPTION 2: CLAUDE CODE (The Full Chainsaw)

For the project, I used the Claude Code that runs directly on your computer. It starts with $20 per month, but you don’t get Claude Coworker without a $200 Max subscription.

The trade-off? You need to install it. That means opening Terminal.

Terminal is a window with a blinking cursor that scares most people. Here’s a secret: it’s just a place where you type commands instead of clicking buttons. That’s all.

Open Terminal and type this one line:

npm install -g @anthropic/claude-code

Press Enter. Wait a minute. Done.

You now own the full chainsaw.

You don’t need to pretend you know what you’re doing. The AI handles the technical parts. You just need to know what you want—and be honest about what you’re afraid of. So how does it work?