Crime and Morons

<body>

Crime Doesn't Pay... If You're a Complete Moron

Kidnappers who abducted Gildo dos Santos near his factory in a suburb of Sao Paulo, Brazil,demanded $690,000, but Santos escaped. The next day, Santos got a phone call asking for $11,500 to defray the cost of the abduction. After negotiating a discount of 50 percent, Santos called police, who were waiting when Luiz Carlos Valerio showed up to collect payment.

Police in Virginia Beach, Virginia charged Charles Robertson, 19, with robbing a bank when he bungled his way into their hands. After handing the teller a holdup note, Robertson started to flee but stopped when he realized that he had forgot his note. He dashed back and grabbed the note, but this time he left the keys to his getaway car -- a fact he didn't discover until he reached the vehicle. he managed to elude police, butwhen he got home he told his roommate, whose car he had borrowed, that it had been stolen. She reported the car missing, and about 20 minutes later Officer Mike Koch spotted it a block from the bank. Playing a hunch, Koch got the keys the robbery suspect had left behind. When they fit the car that had been reported stolen, detectives went to the address the owner had given and found Robertson.

A bicyclist who confronted three well-dressed men walking to their hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, pointed what looked like a 9mm semi-automatic handgun at them and demanded money. The three men turned out to be off-duty federal agents, who drew their own weapons and fired more than 20 shots, hitting the would-be robber, as well as three cars, a truck, two homes and an office building. The injured suspect's weapon turned out to be a pellet gun.

FBI agents in Jacksonville, Florida, arrested brothers Robert, 54, and Kenneth, 49, Alberton, accusing them of talking dentist John Rende into letting them chop off his finger with an ax so they could claim it was an accident and collect a fortune in insurance money. Rende at first agreed to the scheme, then changed his mind. The Albertons forcibly cut off his right index finger anyway. Unable to continue practicing dentistry, Rende collected $1.3 million. He paid the brothers $45,000. Later, they tried to extort $500,000, so he notified the FBI.

In April, 1995, a gunman in Columbia, Tennessee, announced a bank robbery, but the bank had closed the previous August. "He walked in here and said, 'Give me your money,' and I laughed," said Lea Ables, who works for the insurance company that moved into the office. "I didn't think he was serious at first. He then sort of looked funny and asked, 'This ain't a bank anymore?'" He left after robbing two workers of $127.

Two gunmen wearing ski masks burst into the Old Colony Credit Bureau in Plymouth, Massachusetts, ordered the owner and three other workers to lie on the floor, then ransacked the office. They fled with a small amount of cash and some jewelry. Police were baffled why the robbers would target Old Colony, which compiles credit reports and keeps little cash on hand, although some officials speculated that the holdup was a botched bank robbery, with the robbers mistaking the credit bureau for a credit union.

In Arlington, Virginia, a man presented a check for $1,450 to a bank teller, who told him to wait for approval and took the check to Assistant Vice President Melinda Babson. She knew the woman whose check it was but didn't recognize the signature, so she called her. The woman said she had not written the check, which Babson then copied and faxed to her. The whole time, the unsuspecting suspect waited calmly, sipping a cup of coffee, according to Senior Vice President Andrew Flott who noted after police arrived and arrested the man, "He was a knucklehead for not leaving." Even if he had left, the teller had his driver's license, which he had given her for identification with the check.

Carl Rankin, 35, was charged with holding up a store near Trenton, New Jersey, using a cup of hot coffee as a weapon. Police said Rankin threw the coffee at a convenience store clerk, then reached into the cash register.

John Schieman, 37, was charged with robbery, assault and grand larceny after his intended victim, Robin Van Bortle, 32, beat him with an anti-theft device known as the Club. She told police she was attaching it to her car steering wheel in suburban Rochester, New York, when Schieman tried to force his way into her car, so she "just started to hit him with it."

In the trial of six men charged with attempting Britain's biggest cash robbery, prosecuting lawyer Guy Boney told the court that the gang forced an armored car carrying $18.2 million to be driven to a wooded area, then used high-powered torches to open it. But, Boney noted, the torches also set off "a horrendously expensive bonfire" that turned up to $2.4 million into ashes and caused the men to flee.

The attorney for Howard "Wing Ding" Jones, accused of selling drugs, sought to lower his client's bail from $150,000, insisting in a Norristown, Pennsylvania, courtroom that Jones was not a risk to flee. At that very moment, Jones bolted from the courtroom and sprinted out the front door.
Police captured him 50 minutes later and returned him to the courtroom, where his bail was raised to $500,000.

New Jersey Trooper Glenn Lubertazzi stopped a car for speeding and was asking the three occupants routine questions when one of them, Tina Stigger, 30, asked if she could have a cigarette from a pack in the car's glove compartment. While handing the pack to the woman, he noticed it contained a marijuana joint. Authorities reported that a search of the vehicle turned up $32,000 in suspected drug-buy money, marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, two masked gunmen claiming to be police officers burst into a home and tied up a 39-year old woman and her two teenagers with duct tape. The men wore black pants, black T-shirts with the word "POLICE" and pantyhose over their faces, according to the woman, who said they asked for a man and, when told he didn't live there, said, "Damn, we got the wrong house." Another daughter elsewhere in the house had already called police, but the men fled before squad cars arrived.

Kansas City, Missouri, authorities charged Dale Richardson, 20, with snatching a purse from a woman dining with a friend at a restaurant. The victim was Jackson County Prosecuting Attorney Claire McCaskill. After making off with the purse, the suspect reportedly called McCaskill's house and offered to return the purse, which contained $50 cash and her prosecutor's badge, for a $250 reward. A police officer posing as McCaskill's baby-sitter, met the suspect, who was arrested soon after.

Law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C., discovered more than 200 marijuana plants growing throughout a house during a search and arrested home owner James Rapp and a tenant, Barry Oliver, 44. U.S. Secret Service spokesperson David M. Adams explained that the authorities searched the house only after tracing a call by one of the men threatening the president. According to WRC-TV, Oliver was tape-recorded saying that he had "a score to settle with President Clinton" and that he planned to "cut him from ear to ear."

Police in Bari, Italy, arrested a man suspected of snatching handbags to finance his drug addiction after he sped past one woman on his motorcycle and snatched her purse. The woman was his mother, who recognized him and reported him, said a police spokesperson, adding, "We were rather surprised by the whole episode, I must admit."

Belgian prosecutor Marc Florens was surprised to see a defendant wearing a familiar-looking jacket. It was his, having been taken, along with a camera and some money, during a burglary of his home. The defendant, who had been charged with theft in Bruges, claimed to have bought the jacket in Paris, but the label proved it belonged to Florens, who got it back and turned over the current trial to another prosecutor.

In Mexico, three armed state police officers surrounded a car containing the eldest son of President Ernesto Zedillo and demanded money, apparently unaware of their victim's identity.
They learned it soon enough when another car containing presidential bodyguards stopped, and the guards overpowered the police.

Natron Fubble tried to rob a Miami delicatessen, but the owner broke Fubble's nose by hitting it with a giant salami. Fubble fled and hid in the trunk of a parked car. The car belonged to a police undercover team that was trailing another criminal's truck. After five days, the officers finally heard Fubble whimpering and arrested him.

In February, two boys, ages 15 and 14, were released from court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after a hearing before Judge Larry Seidlin for stealing a car, which according to police, was the 25th car theft committed by the boys in two years. According to police, the boys walked out of the courthouse, realized they had no bus fare home, and promptly swiped number 26, wheich they crashed into a fence 45 minutes later.