Arrest-Proof Yourself (19 page)

SOLUTION:
Get an attorney. More precisely, get the name and business card of a criminal defense attorney who could represent you if you’re arrested. How to do this without spending money is covered in a later chapter. The trick is to let cops know you have an attorney, so they think twice before busting you. This has to be low key to be successful. What you want to avoid is yelling “Call my attorney!” which annoys cops and makes them want to bust you so you can spend lots of money on your attorney. This delicate maneuver is covered in detail in a later chapter.

Having an attorney is crucial. I’ll give you a personal example. One of my former wives is Hispanic and a self-made millionaire. Despite her professional success, she has a chip on her shoulder about being a minority and takes care of this situation in an unusual way—she drives like a maniac. Naturally this attracts the police. When cops stop her, however, they notice at once that she’s driving a Porsche that costs more than they make in a year. She always lets them know that her personal attorney is the meanest junkyard dog in the city. Cops realize immediately that giving her a ticket means multiple court appearances, expert witness challenges, appeals, and subpoenas for every piece of paper they’ve ever possessed on the subject of traffic stops. The woman is prepared, nay, eager, to do whatever it takes to get out of a hundred-dollar ticket. Generally the ticket turns into a warning—no surprise.

PROBLEM 8: THE URBAN OUTDOOR LIFESTYLE.
Whether from lack of automobiles and air conditioners or social and cultural factors, clueless people hang out on the streets. There they are visible to, and arrestable by, police riding around in cars.

SOLUTION:
Stay out of sight. Remember, if cops don’t see you, they can’t arrest you. If you must be a thug, at least smoke dope and do stupid stuff
indoors
where police can’t arrest you and seize evidence without a search warrant. This buys you time to stay free, grow up, and wise up. Warrants are almost impossible to obtain for petty crimes.

PROBLEM 9: INTOXICANT OF CHOICE.
Clueless people prefer marijuana to alcohol as an intoxicant. There are obvious reasons. Dope is tax-free, cheaper than alcohol, and gives a longer-lasting high with no hangover. Unlike beer, it doesn’t make you pee every five minutes.

Dope has two problems. First of all, it’s illegal, and second, it dulls emotions and causes you to not care about anything
even when you’re straight
. Therefore, you don’t care if you miss your court hearing, don’t go to drug rehab, and don’t call your probation officer. Of course there is another tiny little prob. You have to buy dope from crooks. They often cheat you and steal from you. If you annoy them or fail to pay for dope, they might even kill you. Bang! You’re dead.

SOLUTION:
Get a legal buzz. Use alcohol in moderation. Do not ever have an open container in a vehicle or in your hand on the street. Don’t drive drunk. Alcohol costs more, but didn’t I just mention that freedom isn’t free?

PROBLEM 10: BIZARRE APPEARANCE.
One thing you notice at the jail is that most prisoners look like crooks. They’ve got weird hair and wild clothes. The black guys have dreadlocks down to their knees, greasy corn rows, and strange topknots. The Hispanics and white trash have scruffy beards and hair down to their shoulders or shaved skinheads tattooed fore and aft. The bikers? Let’s not even go there. Those leathers that have been soaked in beer, vomit, barbecue, and blood for years without being washed are beyond nasty. As for that fetor wafting its way from the holding cell to your protesting olfactory nerves, it’s not just stinky, it’s
stanky
. Naturally this all ends when the jailhouse barber buzzes all that scruffy stuff off and the clerk kits them out with jumpsuits and flip-flops.

Petty offenders often get arrested simply because they stand out like neon lights and are easy to spot by cops driving around in cars. If you can’t understand that looking like a hoodlum is likely to get you arrested, you’re clueless and in need of professional help from attorneys like me, since you’re probably already in jail.

Savvy career criminals are aware of this and make an effort to blend in with mainstream America. Mass murderer Wayne Williams wore short, neatly trimmed hair and nondescript clothes, and looked like an accountant. Coed killer Ted Bundy had a movie star smile and wore suits and ties. When not killing young women, he looked like the Republican Party activist that, in fact, he was. As for the big-time white-collar guys, they prefer suits and are always distressed at what handcuffs do to well-starched shirtsleeves.

SOLUTION:
Tone it down. Yes, I know your friends and all those music and sports stars are pressuring you to adopt hoodlum chic. But think about this. Your thug friends are on the way to jail. As for those music stars and sports legends, they’re millionaires. One of the ways the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is for the rich to sell overpriced, flashy hoodlum clothes to the poor. Forget the superstars. They don’t need your money. Consider Wal-Mart and Kmart your clothing friends. Besides, if you don’t wear NBA footwear, you’re less likely to get beat up by people who want to steal your sneakers.

PROBLEM 11: BEING JUST PLAIN DUMB.
Never discount human foolishness, often a factor in who goes to jail and who goes free. Just the other day I was interviewing an upset bank robber. “How did they identify me?” he wailed. “How did they know it was me?” Well, our robber forgot the first lesson in Heists 101: whenever you rob a place with security cameras mounted every four feet on the wall—
don’t forget to wear a hat!

SOLUTION:
If you’re born dumb, there ain’t one. Of course, if you’re that way, you aren’t reading this book, so what do I care? The important thing is not to demote yourself from clueless person (curable) to moron (incurable) by doing booze and drugs. Those things shave mucho points from your IQ (intelligence quotient), often permanently.

THE CLUELESSNESS QUOTIENT CHART

To make it easier to figure out how likely you are to get arrested, I’ve devised the Cluelessness Quotient chart. This chart rates what I call your Clue-Q. Your IQ measures your ability to perform logical analysis, math, and verbal tests. The Clue-Q shows how savvier people are less likely to get arrested and clueless people are more likely to get arrested.

What the Cluelessness Quotient chart makes clear is this:
attitudes, values, and behaviors, not ethnicity and skin color, make people more or less arrestable
. This is one of the most important concepts in this book. For race and ethnic entrepreneurs quivering with rage, hold your horses (and lawsuits), and make a visit to your local lockup on a Friday night. Then tell me this chart is nonsense.

CHANGING CLUELESS BEHAVIORS

First, some truth. Changing behaviors takes a long time. What you’re looking at is the short form. Reading is easy; changing is hard. You can, however, start now. Change takes place a bit at a time. Stay motivated by thinking of freedom, of
not
being cop fodder.

You can judge your cluelessness quotient (Clue-Q) from this chart. The higher your cluelessness quotient, the more likely you are to be arrested.

SCENARIO #3

CLUELESS AMERICANUS: A PORTRAIT

This is a portrait of one of my legal clients. I’ll call him Fred (not his real name). Fred is a young guy. He’s handsome and charming in a way that women find endearing. Some of the ladies find him a bit more than endearing, so Fred has several children by various women whom he never seems to get around to marrying. Fred drives a milk truck and lives in a small apartment.

One day one of the women with whom Fred has children became annoyed at what she considered his less than abundant child support, his casual parenting style, his slob appearance, and his easy-go-lucky demeanor. Things got loud, and Fred gave the woman a good whack, which is against the law. When the police arrived, they frisked old Fred and discovered, not entirely to their surprise, that he had some weed in his pocket. So Fred got taken downtown and booked for domestic battery and possession of marijuana.

The judge cut Fred some slack. He gave him a suspended sentence with probation and required that he attend anger-management classes. One day Fred failed to telephone his probation officer as required. He thus violated his probation, and in due course police hauled him back to jail.

THE MORALS OF THIS STORY

1. Fred is not the most upstanding citizen. It’s safe to say he won’t be elected president of the Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce anytime soon, but he’s not a career criminal. His crime is that he’s clueless about the system.

2. Fred cannot manage time. Working, eating, riding the bus, giving the ladies some love, and watching TV are about all he can do. It’s no surprise he missed a call to his probation officer—all day and half the night he’s driving the milk truck or riding the bus to his court-ordered anger-management classes! He can’t afford a telephone, and in his neighborhood, pay phones often don’t work because they’ve been whacked with large hammers by guys who hurt people and steal things for a living.

3. Hitting a woman was his first mistake. Not disappearing when the police were on the way, and not getting rid of illegal substances on his person, were his next two mistakes.

4. Fred can’t use watches, clocks, and calendars to show up on time at official proceedings. He can barely read and so has no paperwork smarts. He cannot understand the blizzard of notices, court orders, and probation forms he gets. This means he’s forever getting into
more
trouble with the system, which defines nonattendance at official proceedings and failure to complete official paperwork as crimes. He doesn’t even know that he’s been consigned to the electronic plantation, and that jobs better than driving the milk truck may never be his.

5. He has low social backup in the form of family and friends who could help him through his continual legal emergencies.

6. Massive amounts of taxpayer money are being expended to process Fred through courts, jail, and probation, but none of this will teach him what he really needs to know. He doesn’t belong in jail but in a life-lessons course that would start with how to read watches and clocks. Such a course would advance to the technique for rolling latex sheaths onto the organ of generation and why this is a good idea. It wouldn’t hurt to teach Fred that when arguments with women escalate, the correct response is to
run
out the nearest door or
leap
out the nearest window.
⁵

6

THOSE FREAKING JITS WILL GIVE YOU FITS

T
his chapter is about the
extreme
form of cluelessness. If you have any of the behaviors described below, you have an emergency. You’ve got to take immediate action to get less clueless. This chapter illustrates where the extreme clueless life leads—to endless uproars, arrests, incarcerations, and criminal justice processing. Please note that though extremely clueless people are not career criminals, they spend as much or more time in the system as real bad guys. Social scientists call such people “extremely lacking in socialization.” Ghetto inhabitants call them jits.
⁶
This punchy term refers to young men who grow up without family and friends and who are so unpredictable they’re scary. Jits are continually recycled through the criminal justice sausage grinder for the following reasons.