# Dumb Crook Stories



## Nick (Apr 23, 2002)

BETTER HOLD ON TO THOSE PANTIES...THEY COULD COME IN HANDY

A repeat offender got a life sentence for a small-time shoplifting caper in
Jupiter, Florida. The man stole $49.73 worth of boxer shorts, panties, a
sports bra and some cigarette lighters from a Wal-Mart store. His fatal
mistake was flashing a knife at a security guard -- which turned his petty
theft into a felony. Since the man had been released from prison less than
three years ago, Florida's repeat offender law required the judge to send
him away for life without the possibility of parole.


INSULT TO INJURY

An unemployed sanitation worker in Miami is also facing life in prison --
for shooting himself in the privates. In a drunken stupor, the man reached
for a pistol he had hidden in his pants. The gun went off, and the bullet
struck the man in the... nuggets. At first, he told officers someone else
had shot him, but changed his story after paramedics found the shell casing
in his underwear. Cops ruled the shooting accidental, but the man was
charged with a concealed weapons violation and possession of a firearm 
by a convicted felon. The maximum sentence for those crimes is normally 
15 years but, because the man has a record as a violent career criminal, 
a Miami prosecutor is asking the judge to send him away for life. The man's 
public defender calls that "ridiculous," and says the unlucky man's injury is
punishment enough.


HEY -- WHAT ABOUT MY ACCOMPLICE?

A luckless thief pleaded guilty to the attempted robbery of a convenience
store in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. The thief told a passereby he was going
to rob the store, gave the man a dollar, and asked him to go inside and buy
a scarf to hide his identity during the crime. The bystander took the dollar, 
went inside the store... and called the police.


OOPS! OF THE WEEK

A thief in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina has learned a valuable lesson: if
you're going to steal restaurant equipment, be sure to remove pictures of
the original owner's grandchildren before setting the stuff up in your own
restaurant. John Ubbing, owner of Giovanni's Pizzeria in Calabash, North
Carolina, lost an assortment of pizza-making equipment in a March robbery. 
A refrigerator stolen in the heist later turned up inside the Myrtle Beach
restaurant -- where cops found pictures of Ubbing's grandchildren still
stuck to the side of it. The owner of the second restaurant was arrested.


I TOLDJA COMPUTERS WERE RUINING AMERICA!

During a high school break-in in Plymouth, North Carolina, two burglars
found a camera in one of the classrooms and amused themselves by taking
pictures of each other committing the crime. When they couldn't figure out
how to get the film out of the camera, they concluded it wasn't loaded and
left it behind. The men apparently didn't realize they'd been fooling around
with a digital camera that stores pictures on a computer disk. Investigators
downloaded the snapshots to a computer and got a complete photographic
record of the break-in. The suspects were quickly arrested.


I THOUGHT THIS'D BE THE LAST PLACE THEY'D LOOK...!

A Nevada fugitive wanted on fraud charges was arrested in Connecticut after
he blew his cover by applying for a job... as a police officer. The Connecticut 
cops discovered the man's fugitive status during a standard background check.
He had passed both the written and agility tests before being found out. Police
called the man in to headquarters under the guise of getting his fingerprints,
and served him with an arrest warrant instead.


AND FINALLY...

Admitting his 0-4 record is not impressive "on paper," trainers announced that
Lucky, a German shepherd guide dog for the blind in Wuppertal, Germany, is
available for his fifth owner. Lucky led his first owner in front of a bus, killing 
him. Then he led the second off the end of a pier, drowning him. He nudged his
third owner off a railway platform in front of an express train, killing him. And 
he walked his fourth owner into heavy traffic, abandoning him to be hit and 
killed. The new owner won't be told of Lucky's record -- trainers say the dog
might sense nervousness "and do something inappropriate for a guide dog."


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## cdru (Dec 4, 2003)

One of my favorite dumb crook stories happened a few years back locally. A man broke into a woman's house, disrobed, and climbed into bed, presumably to rape the woman. However the woman would have nothing of that, reached down, and grabbed ahold of the man's nuggets (as so delicately stated above). As she started to twist, she dragged the man screaming in agony out of the house and threw him out on the porch naked. He ran off, but police quickly apprehended him as his wallet with drivers license was left in his pants on the bedroom floor. The jury took 10 minutes to convict the man and it only took that long because two jurors had to use the restroom before deciding on the verdict.


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## Richard King (Mar 25, 2002)

MANY years ago (1967/8?) I took a Dale Carnegie class. The class was largely a public speaking class and each week a few of the 25 or so class members would get up and give a short talk. One week a fellow class member, Richard Cosgrove, who was a "travel agent" by profession got up and gave a talk about how much he enjoyed conducting tours to the Middle East. His favorite place in the Middle East was Jordan. This agent was obviously rather successful since he lived in Edina, Minnesota which at the time had the highest per capita income of the various twin cities suburbs.

Fade story out.

Fade story back in three years or so later.

While reading the morning paper (Minneapolis Tribune) I find a front page story about the bank robbery gone bad. The story describes the adventures of four would be robbers holding up the First National Bank of *Jordan*, Minnesota. The four entered the bank in typical bank robber fashion with pistols drawn and masks on their faces. They went to the teller and demanded to gain entrance to the vault. They loaded a bunch of loot, including a LARGE, HEAVY bag of coins into their getaway car outside the bank. In the process of lugging the bag of coins to the car one of the robbers had a slight accident and shot himself in the foot. Two of the other robbers assisted their wounded partner to the car while a third continued hauling the coin sack to the car. They eventually got themselves all loaded in the car and took off with the local police in pursuit. On the outside of town, with the police chasing, they decided to dump the bag of coins. One of the fellows grabbed the bag, swung open the back door, tossed the bag overboard and in the process followed the bag out the door when his fingers got tangled up in the bag. This left three in the car, one with a hole in his foot. The police eventually closed the gap on the robbers and so the robbers decided it was time to shoot at the police to make them back off. WARNING!!! Do NOT shoot at the police through the back window of your car. Use the side window method. The first shot fired by the fellow in the back seat was through the back window, deafening everyone in the car with the sound of the shot and the window shattering. The police did back off a bit, but stayed on the trail, following at a safe distance. WARNING!!! When you plan your bank robbery, do so only AFTER you have filled the tank of the car with gasoline. As the police followed the car, for some reason the gap between them began to close as the get away car slowed to a crawl and eventually stopped in it's tracks. It was out of gas. The three in the car gave up without resistance.

That leaves one robber still at large, along with a large bag of coins. The remaining robber dragged the coins into the underbrush, brushed himself off and climbed back up to the road and started to hitch hike back toward town. He was picked up by a young lady heading in his direction (hitch hiking was common back then and done by all sorts of folks, including myself). The young lady introduced herself as a reporter for the small town newspaper in Jordan. Once back in Jordan she promptly drove straight to the police station with her passenger as she had been listening to the police radio in her car while the robbery was going on. She delivered the passenger to the waiting arms of the local police.

The name of the person who had been ejected from the car was "Richard Cosgrove", a former resident of Jordan, Minnesota who worked as a mechanic at a gas station in Edina, Minnesota. As I could tell from the picture attached to the article, it was in fact the same Richard Cosgrove who had been in my class a few years before. If he had put his natural abilities of creating fictional stories to good use, who knows, he may have been able to write the great American novel. :lol:


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## Bogy (Mar 23, 2002)

I was present for a bank robbery 30 some years ago in a suburb of LA. It was a quiet affair, and nobody but the teller and the robber realized what was going on until he left and all hell broke lose. All of a sudden the were slapping paper down on the counter, and things were crazy. The other customers and I were asked to wait until they checked to make sure they had a good picture of the guy. They did, which was good because I couldn't have told anyone a thing about him. It was a guy they were calling the "Freeway Bandit". He robbed banks just off a freeway, and only took what was in the tellers drawer. This way he was in the bank a minimal amount of time, and in a matter of moments would be on the freeway, blending into traffic. He was robbing a bank a day for over a week. Never a big haul, since it was just what was in the drawer. His downfall? He used the same stolen car for all the heists, and finally it ran out of gas as he pulled away from the curb.


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## Bogy (Mar 23, 2002)

BTW, I don't know about the rest, but the story about Lucky is not really about a crook, and it is also evidently not true.

http://www.snopes.com/critters/malice/lucky.htm


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