America's Dumbest Criminals (6 page)
The officers figured they must have a burglary in progress and called for backup. Three of the men were quickly apprehended in the neighborhood, but they turned out to be the rightful occupants of the warehouse.
So why had they fled?
Well, they weren't burglars, but they were guilty of a bit more than disturbing the peace. The police searched the warehouse and ended up seizing twenty-two tons of cocaine, with a street value of more than six billion dollars.
It was the biggest drug raid in U.S. history, and it carries a lesson for all would-be dumb criminals: If you're going to mess with Uncle Sam, make sure you don't wake up the neighbors!
DUMB CRIMINAL QUIZ NO. 007
How well do you know the dumb criminal mind?
An officer fired at a bearded burglary suspect. The fleeing felon was unhurt, but the bullet tore a hole in the man's shirt as it flapped in the breeze. The criminal escaped. Immediately afterward, did he . . .
(a) sew his shirt while he watched television?
(b) shave his beard and go right down to the police station?
(c) use his shirt as a hand puppet to entertain children?
(d) try and take his shirt back for a refund?
If your answer was (b), you are correct. In Atlanta, a burglar was fired at by officers, escaped unhurt, and returned to his own home. When he got home, he quickly shaved his beard to fool the police and then went right to the police station to report that his car had been stolen. He was arrested on the spot.
Why? First, in his haste, he had cut himself shaving, so his face was a bloody mess. Oh, and he also forgot to change the shirt that had the bullet hole in it.
Five Will Get You Ten or Twenty-Five
W
ith a long sigh, Janice Patterson finished writing her check on her account and received the five-dollar bill from the bank teller. She actually needed more, but her balance was far too low at the moment. She wouldn't get her next paycheck for two more days. Until then, she would just have to get by on those five dollars.
Janice got into her car, swung the door shut, and put the key in the ignition. Just as she was starting the engine, a man jumped in the front seat beside her and pointed a gun right at her face. “Give me all your moneyâright now!” he demanded in a harsh voice.
Reluctantly, but obediently, Janice turned over her five-dollar bill.
“It's all I have,” she explained.
“You're kidding!” The bad guy put the gun down. Incredulous, he searched her purse and the glove compartment before he finally realized she was telling the truth.
“Damnâwouldn't you know it! All those people comin' out of the bank, and I have to pick the one that don't got no money!”
All Janice could do was shrug. But now her would-be robber decided to take a different approach. “Write me a check!” he ordered.
But Janice had to shrug again. She had just written the last of the checks in her checkbook.
Obviously, this was not going well at all for our criminal.
“I gotta think!” he mused, then ordered her to drive around the block. Janice obeyed.
They had just turned the corner when another problem apparently occurred to the worried criminal. His victim had seen what he looked like and presumably could relay his description to the police.
“Don't look at me,” he warned. “You keep looking at the floor, hear me?”
“That would be difficult,” she told the crook. “I'm driving, remember?”
“Well, you just look straight ahead. Don't look at me.”
She didn't.
Momentarily frustrated, the bandit then remembered that banks keep counter checks available for customer use. He directed his victim to drive back to the bank.
They went inside to one of the desks, where he directed her to write a check for eighty-five dollars. She didn't bother to tell him she didn't have that much in the account. But she did try to communicate with the teller. As the bandit fidgeted and glanced around, Janice gestured, mimed, made faces, and even pointed at the man, but her dramatics had no effect on the teller.
Resigning herself to the victim's role, the woman handed the check to the bandit, but in her nervousness she neglected to sign it.
The teller, finally tipped of by the omission of the signature, slipped back to the manager's office, where a call was made to police. The robber was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in jail.
Janice Patterson barely escaped punishment herself.
“It's a good thing you didn't sign it,” the teller pointed out to her. “The check would have bounced, and we would have had to charge you a twenty-five-dollar processing fee.”
R
etired Officer David Hunter of the Knox County (Tennessee) Sheriff's Department tells this story of two very hungry holdup men:
After an evening of partying and smoking dope, the two very high potheads decided they would kill two birds with one stone. They were broke, and they had the “munchies,” so they agreed that the best thing to do would be to rob a hamburger joint. Armed with loaded shotguns, they burst through the door of the first place they came upon.
“Give us all the money,” the dim-bulb duo demanded, “and a dozen hamburgers with everythingâto go!”
“I'll get you the money, man,” one frightened employee replied, “but the grill's already been shut down. It'll take about ten minutes to reheat.”
“Do it,” came the gunman's reply. “We'll wait!”
Meanwhile, a passing motorist noticed that the two men sitting in the burger shack were holding shotguns. Suspicious indeed. The motorist phoned police.
“Here's your food,” the shaking worker said.
The burger bandits grabbed the greasy sack and hit the door just as the sound of police sirens and squealing tires filled the night air. In their haste, they left the stolen money sitting on the table.
Panicked, the two robbers ran across a highway, slid down an embankment, and tried to hide under a bridge, which is where the K-9 unit found them. The hamburger heist was over.
“What really pisses me off,” one man said to the other as they were being led away in handcuffs, “is that those damn dogs ate all our burgers. I didn't even get one bite!”
The officer responded, “You ought to be glad those are the only buns the dog bit.”
T
rooper Robert Bell shared this story of true romance at a very tender age in the Southeast:
Bell was headed out to the interstate highway through a small town when he noticed a classic car whipping by at a high rate of speed. It was a '64 Buick in mint condition. Radar revealed the vehicle was traveling at fifty miles per hourâ
over
the speed limit.
When Bell closed in on the Buick, the speeder acted as if he might force a chase, but then he abruptly pulled over. Bell approached the idling Buick carefully. When he got to the window, he saw that the driver was an elderly man who appeared to be quite agitated.
“Sir,” the trooper said, “were you aware that you were doing eighty-five in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone?”
“Of course I know how fast I'm going,” the driver snapped. “It's an emergency!”
Concerned, the officer asked, “Is it a medical emergency, sir? I can get you to a hospital.”
The driver's face reddened. “No, I have to go now. It's an emergency!”
“What's the emergency, sir? Maybe I can help you.”
The old gentleman just looked angrier than ever. “I can't tell you. You'll laugh at me.”
Bell tried to reassure him. “I won't laugh at you, sir. But if you don't tell me what the emergency is, I'll have to write you a ticket.”
The senior speedster finally relented. “You promise not to laughâman to man?” He was very serious.
“No, sir,” Bell said. “I promise.”
“Well, son, I'm eighty-two years old, and I haven't had an erec-uh . . . well, I haven't been âin the mood for love' for more than two years now. Well, I have anâuh, I'm in the mood right now, and I'm on my way to my girlfriend's house!”
Bell was stunned, but only for a moment. “I had never heard that excuse for speeding before andâman to manâwell, I had to empathize just a little. So I gave him a police escort.”
C
ircus man P. T. Barnum is famous for saying that there's a sucker born every minute. Retired captain Don Parker of the Escambia County Sheriff's Department in Pensacola, Florida, reports an unusual incident that proves Mr. Barnum's point:
A resident of a quiet neighborhood was walking his dog in the woods one evening when the animal sniffed out a woman's purse. The man unzipped the purse to look for identification. Instead of a wallet, a comb, or a lipstick, he found several curious packages, about the size of small bricks, wrapped in plastic and sealed with duct tape. Suspicious, he called the cops.
A patrolling deputy soon arrived and took the purse and its contents back to the station. As suspected, the packages contained drugsâpure cocaine with an estimated street value of two hundred thousand dollars.
The narcotics division immediately set up surveillance at the site where the purse had been found, hoping that someone would try to retrieve the drugs. But there was no activity, even though the officers stayed until well after midnight. Finally, as they were about to give up, one of them had a brilliant idea.
“Give me a piece of paper,” he whispered to his partner. Then he wrote, “I found your purse and the contents. Call me. Large reward expected.” He listed one of the confidential phone numbers that bypassed the department's switchboard and rang directly in the narcotics office.
The narcotics officer quickly taped the note to a stick and placed it where the purse had been. Then he and his partner went home.
The narcotics officers' fellow workers were highly amused the next morning when they learned about the note. For the rest of the day, the two were teased unmercifully. But the jokes stopped abruptly when they got a call around three in the afternoon.
A female cop answered the phone and set the trap. She demanded ten thousand dollars in cash for the safe return of the purse and its contents. At first the person on the other end of the line balked, but she made it clear he would have to pay up if he wanted the dope back. Finally, he agreed.
The drop was set for a phone booth outside the local mall. Undercover deputies took up positions in the parking lot around the booth.
The male and female narcotics officers stood by the phone booth, the female cop holding the purse. Soon a car with three occupants pulled up.
One suspect got out of the car and handed the narcotics officers a shopping bag that was bulging with cash. The female undercover officer gave the suspect the purse, and the man turned to go back to his car. That's when the cops got the drop on the suspects.
When both cops drew their weapons, the suspect started to go for his own, but thought better of it. Seeing that his friend was in trouble, the driver of the car did what had to be doneâhe prepared to save his own tail. Before he could get the car in gear, however, he found himself staring down the gun barrels of about a dozen policemen.
The final score was six pounds of cocaine, ten thousand dollars in cash, three suspects arrested, one car confiscated, and a nice leather purse. And the bust might never have been made if that one narcotics officer hadn't posted the sign.
It just goes to show: There
is
a sucker born every minute. And it always pays to advertise.
The Sad Saga of Bad Luck Brown
D
on Parker of Pensacola also has a string of tales to tell about a dumb criminal who richly earned his nickname of Bad Luck Brown.
“We called him that because this guy had atrocious luck,” Parker remembers. “Plus he wasn't all that bright. He was a small-time crook who spent more time in jail than he did out.
“I think the first time I met Bad Luck was in 1978 when I rolled in on a robbery call at a church on Sunday morning during the sermon. Bad Luck had robbed the collection plate. He made good on his escape and got away clean with all the cash, but he dropped his wallet. All we had to do was check his driver's license, then go by his house and pick him up.”
But the dumbest crime Bad Luck Brown ever committed was one of his unluckiest, too.
There had been a string of motel robberies in the Pensacola area, and the police had received a tip on where the motel thieves were going to hit next. They always hit the motels around midnight, and the cops planned to be ready for them. Officers were stationed in the motel office and in parked cars around the parking lot. Parker was in the woods across the street with three other officers.