America's Dumbest Criminals (14 page)
“Suspect just took out part of a fence at Garden and Greenlawn and is now going the wrong way on Lincoln Avenue.”
This was one car thief who was determined not to be caught. For a good twenty minutes he sped through stop signs and red lights, down side streets and back alleys. Finally, surrounded by police units, he abandoned the car and attempted to flee on foot. The officers caught him before he had run twenty yards.
The next day, the new adult was taken to Haney's office for questioning.
“You've got the wrong man,” the kid stated boldly. Apparently, he had spent the long night in jail strategizing about how he was going to get out of this one.
“Really?” the sergeant responded. He glanced down at the arrest record. “They identified you in a car that didn't belong to you, chased you for seven miles, then arrested you right after you exited the vehicle. Of course it was you.”
The thief shook his head back and forth. “There's no way they could have identified me,” he said cockily.
“And why is that?” Haney asked.
“I was wearing a baseball cap,” he sneered. “And the windows of the car were tinted.”
O
fficer Dan Leger, a southern undercover narcotics officer, was always quick with an ad lib. One story Leger told us really showed the importance of the quick comeback in police work. A creative impromptu answer can be an officer's best tool for handling the situation by controlling the conversation.
“I was working undercover, and I was making a buy. You've got to record everything you can for evidence when the buy goes down, and this means you almost always have to be wearing some sort of âwire' for recording your conversations. Unfortunately, every dealer knows that, too. Hollywood has always shown the undercover cop putting a wire right on the chest area, so for starters you want to be creative in where you put the wire. But you've also got to be prepared to talk your way out if the bad guys happen to find it. You'd be surprised at what they'll believe.”
One criminal, for instance, went straight to Leger's wire and confronted him, blowing the officer's cover sky high. In less than a minute, however, Leger had managed to convince the criminal not only that he wasn't a cop, but also that he was one of the baddest and smartest criminals that particular dumb criminal had ever run into.
When the criminal shouted, “This is a wire! You're a cop!” Leger looked at him like he didn't have a lick of sense and then explained the facts of life.
“Of course it's a wire,” he said patiently. “My lawyer told me to wear this so I'd have evidence to prove entrapment if I ever made a buy from an undercover officer. You ought to be wearing one, man. If a cop busts us and we go to court, it's our word against the cop's . . . and who do you think a judge is going to believe? But if you've got them on tape you can blow their case right out of the water.”
The dumb criminal was stunned by the logic.
“Wow, that's really true, man. Great idea! Where did you get yours?''
“I told him where he could get a wire, and I also gave him some tips on how to wear it. He thanked me warmly for the information, then he went ahead and sold me the dope. I eventually proved my point in court.”
The judge and jury did take Leger's word over the dumb criminal's because Leger had the recording from his wire and that was the evidence that convicted him.
A
burglar alarm went off at the station, and Lieutenant Dewey Betts of the Memphis Police Department quickly rolled out. The alarm was from a drug rehabilitation center Dewey was familiar with. When he arrived on the scene, it was obvious that the burglar had broken in through a second-floor window. What was not obvious was why the burglar chose the center. It's not exactly the logical place for a dumb criminal to look for drugs or money.
Betts called for backup and waited for the arrival of the second unit. Meanwhile, he stood with his back against the wall, hidden, in case the crook looked out and saw him standing there.
There was a creaking noise and the lieutenant looked to the side. The crook was trying to make his escape headfirst through the first-floor window. Not wanting the suspect to get away, the officer grabbed the crook by the collar and started to pull him through the window to the ground where he could cuff him. But when Betts pulled, the burglar screamed uncontrollably.
Betts was stunned at the man's reaction. He thought then that he might have an out-of-control drug addict on his hands. He couldn't let the man go because the suspect was in the kitchen and there were too many possible weapons lying around. So he kept pulling. Every time Betts pulled, the burglar screamed louder and louder.
When Betts's backup arrived, they tried to pull the man through the window . . . with the same results. With every tug, the man screamed at the top of his lungs.
Finally, two of the officers went inside the center, got behind the man, and pushed him out of the window into Betts's arms. That's when the lieutenant noticed a shiny object tucked into the burglar's pants. It turned out to be a chrome-plated crowbar that the crook had used to break into the center.
Now everything became perfectly clear. When the crook was leaning out the window with the crowbar wedged down the front of his pants, he had created a painful leverage on his privates. Every time someone pulled on him, the crowbar would act like a small, effective lever and apply enormous pressure on the suspect's groin area. Since the source of his agony was also important evidence in his crime, he didn't really want to tell the officers, “Guys, there's a crowbar in my pants. Could you stop pulling on me, please?”
Needless to say, the lieutenant didn't need to pry a confession out of this particular dumb criminal.
I
t was the early 1990s and baseball would never again be played in the old Comiskey Park in Chicago. Cheering crowds believed they had seen the last play at the historic stadium. Not long afterward, however, two dumb but nostalgic baseball fans decided to try one last half-inning on their own.
The two men climbed onto the field at night with the intention of stealing the old home plate for a souvenir. Silently, they crept over the field with their shovels, peering nervously over their shoulders, jumping at the slightest sound, but determined to obtain their prize. What a collectible!
But surely they paused for just a moment to contemplate, to look up at the silent, shadowy stands and hear the cheers once more. They must have gazed down at that old plate, envisioning all the runs that had been scored from that spot, all the great batters who had stood there, all the great pitchers who had hurled the ball toward home.
They paused for just a moment to wonder how they were going to get away with their crime now that two security guards were running toward them on the field.
There was a frantic rundown play between third and home before the two thieves were captured for the unofficial final out at the old Comiskey Park.
W
e've all heard of people who have been in accidents that could have or should have killed them but were so drunk they weren't even injured. Detective Adam Watson of Brunswick, Georgia, tells about one of those people whose amazing good luck managed to outstrip his sheer dumbness.
Watson was dispatched to an exclusive resort estate late one Saturday night to check on what was supposed to be a break-in with the suspect still on the premises. The terrified occupants of the house, an older couple by the name of Thompson, had whispered the story over the phone when they called police.
Around midnight, the Thompsons said, a man had appeared at the front door of their residence and begun pounding crazily, determined to gain entrance. Not surprisingly, they had refused to let him in. After several unsuccessful minutes the man had moved to the back door and continued his pounding. Then, as the Thompsons were phoning the police, they heard the sound of shattering glass and a loud thud that told them their intruder had somehow gained admittance. They didn't try to find out how. They just locked themselves in their bedroom and waited for the police.
“When we arrived,” Watson says, “we began an immediate search of the home with weapons drawn. We came around the corner and entered a hallway on the first floor. And there in a crumpled heap lay the intruderâ out cold. But it wasn't until much later, when we got him to the hospital and he woke up, that we were able to piece together what really happened.”
The burglar, it turned out, wasn't really a burglar. He was a high-powered executive who had been visiting friends at the resort. That night, he had gotten totally wasted in a local bar and then gotten lost. Drunk and unfamiliar with the area, he arrived at the Thompsons' and assumed their home was the condo where his friends were staying. He had beaten frantically on all the doors, seeking admission.
Getting nowhere, he had next decided to scale the side of the house and climb in through a second-story window. First he tried to open it, then finally he smashed it and fell through.
Unfortunately for him, the window he chose was in a room with a cathedral ceiling. There was no second floor to land on. He fell twenty feet and landed in the first-floor hallway.
When the intruder was finally able to talk to police the next day, he told them that all he remembered was knocking on the door. He had no recollection of climbing up the house or falling twenty feet or being arrestedâhe was just too drunk to remember anything at all.
“We ended up charging the guy with criminal trespassing,” the officer states. “There was nothing else we could charge him with. He really wasn't breaking in, and there was no criminal intent.”
And amazingly, the only ill effects he seemed to suffer from his twenty-foot fall were a few bruises.
DUMB CRIMINAL QUIZ NO. 457.2
How well do you know the dumb criminal mind?
A dumb crook tried to rob a gas station, but the attendants didn't cooperate. When neither attendant would hand over the money, did the criminal . . .
(a) start crying and run away?
(b) challenge the attendants to an arm-wrestling contest for the money?
(c) threaten to call the police?
(d) hold his breath until he passed out?
If your answer was (c), then you're getting the idea. A would-be bandit in Oklahoma grew so upset that the gas station attendants refused to give him the money that he threatened to call the police. When the attendants still refused, the man made good on his threat. Needless to say, he was half-gassed himself at the time.
N
o officer likes to get a call involving a train accident. They are usually the bloodiest and most disgusting scenes imaginable.
One evening Marshal Larry Hawkins of Little Rock got a call that a pedestrian had been hit by a train. Expecting the worst, Hawkins reported to the scene. He arrived to find a crowd of spectators craning their necks to get a better look. The marshal elbowed his way through the crowd and saw the victimâstanding up talking to someone and brushing off the dirt on his pants.
Here's the story Hawkins unraveled: The man and his wife were at Johnson's Tavern, which is right next to the railroad tracks. They both got drunk, and then they got into an argument. He said to her, “The hell with you, I'm walking home.” The railroad track went right past his house, so he decided he was going to walk the tracks home.
Meanwhile, a southbound train was on its way. And somewhere between the tavern and home, the train and the drunk man managed to meet.
But the important thing is that he was lying between the two rails when the train went over him.
