It began as a typical holdup in Los Angeles in 1994. A young man came into a liquor store, waved his gun at the man behind the counter, and yelled for the clerk to give him all the money in the cash register. And the clerk, realizing this wasn't a game, quickly did as he was told. Then the theif spotted a bottle of good Scotch on the shelf behind the clerk. He asked the clerk to hand that over as well. But this time the clerk didn't comply. "Absolutely not," he told the thief. This wasn't in the usual script. The thief was nonplussed. "Why can't I have the Scotch?" he asked the clerk. "You have to be 21 to get liquor," the clerk said--as he probably said hundreds of times a day. "But I am 21," protested the thief. The clerk wouldn't buy it. No legal ID, no booze. The frustrated thief finally pulled out his wallet and showed his photo driver's license to the clerk. See, he was legal. Good enough. The clerk gave the bottle to the thief, who left happy. Then the clerk called the police and gave them the name and address of the thief. Three men decided to rob the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1975. But they got off on the wrong foot--and never recovered. It all started when they got stuck in the revolving doors of the bank entrance. The incompetent criminals were finally freed by the bank staff and they left the building. They reappeared a few minutes later and announced they were robbing the bank. But the reaction wasn't what they expected. Everyone burst into laughter. Everyone thought it was a wonderful practical joke. The robbers persisted. First they asked for �5,000, but the cashier was laughing so hard that he didn't give it to them. The desperate robbers reduced their demand to �500, then to �50. Finally they asked for anything, just anything. But to no avail. Finally in desperation, one of the trio vaulted over the counter to get the money. But instead he tripped and landed on his ankle, badly spraining it. The other two now decided to make their getaway. They got as far as the revolving door... where they got stuck again. A man with a beautiful girlfriend had a perfect plan for raising cash. He would find a rich married lawyer, she would seduce him, and together they would blackmail the sucker. It couldn't fail. So, one night, while his girlfriend accomplice attracted the right rich lawyer, the man hid in her hotel room closet with a flash camera. Soon the girlfriend brought the lawyer into the room, and not long afterward, lovemaking began. The man waited for just the right moment. Then he took the picture, triumphantly burst open the closet and demanded blackmail money from the lawyer. All seemed fine until the lawyer looked at the picture--it was a wonderful shot of the refrigerator in the corner of the room. The key to burglary is to pick your target well. This was where a burglar in Longmont, Colorado went wrong. All was going well at the store he was attempting to rob. He was busy prying open the front door with a crowbar. Then he stopped. Something seemed a little wrong... He looked up. A large number of people were inside the store. And they were staring at him. At this moment, the master burglar realized that the store was still open. Police needed a confession from a not-too-bright criminal in Radnor, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the station didn't have a lie detector, so the police decided to improvise. They put the criminal's head in a metal colander and attached wires from the colander to a copier machine. Meanwhile, they put a piece of paper in the copier that said: HE'S LYING. Every time the criminal denied his role in the crime, the cops pressed the COPY button and the message HE'S LYING came out of the machine. Seeing this high-tech example of a modern police force working so inexorably well, the criminal confessed. A bank robber was holding up a Portland, Oregon bank. He didn't want to attract attention to himself, so instead of yelling out orders to the teller, he quickly scribbled them on a piece of paper and waited for the teller to reply. First, he wrote: "This is a holdup and I've got a gun" and held it up for the teller to read. The teller silently nodded. Then the robber wrote: "Put all your money in a paper bag" and shoved the note through the window. The teller frowned, then wrote his own reply: "I don't have a paper bag" and returned the note to the robber. The robber was completely befuddled. This wasn't what he had pictured happening. He took the note and left. A Detroit bank robber passed a note to a bank teller--and it said the standard thing: He was armed and the teller was to fill a bag with cash. But then the robber broke from tradition. Noticing all the video surveillance cameras around the bank and hesitant to be photographed too much, he told the teller he'd wait outside for the cash. "Just bring it out when you've got it ready." He went outside--and the police, called by the teller the second he left, caught him there, patiently waiting. It looked like a typical bank robbery: Two men ran into a Los Angeles bank, brandishing shotguns. "Everyone lie down on the floor!" yelled one of them. His tone--and the shotguns--convinced everyone that they had better do as he said. And that's what everyone did--tellers, security guards, customers all immediately fell to the floor. In fact, everyone was so obedient that there was no one left standing to get the robbers the money. The two robbers stood there looking confused for a second, then ran away. Two Michigan robbers charged into a Detroit music store, waving their guns. "Nobody move!" one of the robbers ordered. The second robber then moved--and the first one shot him in the head. Two men were on trial in San Diego, accused of armed robbery. An eyewitness was on the stand being questioned by the prosecutor, who was taking the witness step by step through the incident. "Were you at the scene when the robbery took place?" asked the prosecutor. "Yes." "Did you see a vehicle leave in a rush?" Again the witness replied yes. "Did you observe the occupants of the vehicle?" "Yes. There were two men in the car." Perfect. The prosecutor moved in for the kill. "Are those two men present in court today?" At that, the two defendants helpfully raised their hands. In 1976, a hijacker got up from his airline seat. He took out a gun and held up a stewardess. "Take me to Detroit," he said. "But we're going to Detroit already," said the stewardess. "Oh, good," said the hijacker and sat back down. Wazie Jiwi, a Houston convenience store clerk, was being held up by a robber holding two pistols. Thinking quickly, he offered the robber $100 for the guns. The robber agreed. Jiwi pulled the money from the cash register, handed the money over, and took the guns the robber gave him. Then he turned one of the guns on the robber and demanded his money back. It seemed like the typical armed robbery. A man rushed into a grocery store, glared at the owner behind the counter, and yelled the typical: "Give me your money or I'll shoot!" The owner, Mohammed Razzaq, almost complied. But something bothered him. Then he had it. "Where's your gun?" he asked. The would-be robber tried to brass it out on technicalities. He didn't actually have a gun with him, but he would go get a gun if Razzaq gave him any more problems. With that not-so-threatening promise, the man slunk out. A bank had been robbed in Glasgow, Scotland and the police had arrested Robert Dylan. Along with some other men who weren't suspects, he was herded into a police lineup to see if any witnesses would pick him out. But as Dylan stood there, not one witness identified him as the robber. All seemed to be going great for Dylan--until he called out: "Hey, don't you recognize me?" In Vang, Norway, a group of professional thieves were carrying out a carefully planned robbery. Everything was going like clockwork. They broke into a company at night, located the safe, and set up an explosive charge that would just blow the door of the safe off, enabling them to get to the money inside. After setting the fuse, they ran into the next room, crouched behind the wall, and waited for the explosion. It came a few seconds later. The safe door was blown off. So was the roof. In fact, the entire building collapsed, trapping the robbers, still crouching in the next office, under the rubble. There had been one problem they hadn't foreseen: Instead of money, the safe had been filled with dynamite. Larry Shelton James broke into a First Union Bank building in Durham, North Carolina, by throwing a rock through a large window. However, he failed to realize that the bank's lobby was below ground, so that when he climbed through the window, it was a long drop to the floor. He fell onto the broken glass from the window and began to bleed badly. He was able to contol the bleeding for a while as he rummaged through the bank. Finding nothing to take, and still bleeding badly, he turned his attention to leaving. The doors, of course, were locked. Since the bank floor was lower than the ground outside, the windows were all very high up and, for someone whose hands were badly cut, not reachable by climbing. He finally, courageously, dialed 911 for medical attention and was arrested. Kevin Thompson, then twenty-six, was charged with knocking off the Midatlantic National Bank in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in 1987. Kevin did not take back the holdup note, which was actually the back of his paycheck stub. Barry Buchstaber, in San Mateo County, California, in 1989, was standing beside a car that had two freshly broken windows when a sheriff's deputy happened along. When the deputy asked him for some ID, Buchstaber shugged and said he wasn't carrying any. The deputy then insisted on anything that Buchstaber might have with his name on it. Buchstaber then handed him a piece of paper--a copy of a current arrest warrant for Buchstaber for driving with a suspended license. After emerging from a burglary of a Dillard's department store at the Ward Parkway Shopping Center in 1991, a forty-one-year-old man in Kansas City, Missouri, must have wished he'd done a better job of screening his accomplice. As a security guard grabbed him in the parking lot, his less gifted partner jumped in the getaway car and started toward the grappling pair. Just as the car approached, the guard moved out of the way, and the car plowed into the other burglar, giving him a broken jaw, punctured lung, and several broken ribs. Stephen Le, then eighteen, and two companions were attempting a burglary in Larkspur, California, in 1989 when police broke in on them. Two ran off together, and when they passed a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire atop it, running parallel to the road, over they went because the police were on their tails. The fence happened to be the outer perimeter of San Quentin Prison. Anthony Colella, then forty-nine, ran out of a Brooklyn savings bank in 1989 with $2,100. He had run about a block and a half down the sidewalk when another man leaped from a parked station wagon, slugged Colella, and took the money. Colella did what anyone would do under the circumstances: He walked down the street to the local police precinct and reported the robbery, whereupon he was arrested. William Sibila, then thirty-four, fell to his death in an aborted bedsheet escape from the prison ward at the Nassau County, New York, Medical Center in1989. Dangling from the end of a twenty-foot-long bedsheet, which he had badly estimated would be long enough to reach the ground, he found he was still thirty-five feet short of the cement landing. He leaped anyway, and fell on his head. Two men escaped in 1989 in Kansas City, Missouri, despite the failure of their unusual getaway plan. After robbing the Mercantile Bank, the two men threw out behind them boards they had prepared with nails protruding upward to puncture the tires of any pursuers. However, the first thing the men did when the boards were down was to run over one of them in their own car. Sure enough, it punctured a tire. They fled on foot. Larry Quick, then twenty-five, thought it would be a good idea to rob a waterfront restaurant in Keego Harbor, Michigan, and to make his getaway by swimming across Crescent Lake. However, he was not that good a swimmer, and had to be rescued by employees of the restaurant. Gregory T. Mershad, then twenty-one, of Dayton, Ohio, made his demand on the security guards at a Marco Island, Florida, resort in 1983, saying that someone had stolen about $1,000 worth of coke from his room. The guards actually recovered the stuff and called Mershad, who looked it over and said, "It's mine, but a lot's missing." The guards, and local sheriff's deputies, asked Mershad to sign for the return. Said a guard, "I couldn't believe it when the goof signed the reciept." That was just what they needed to arrest him. James Christopher and Tony Allen grabbed cops in El Paso, Texas, and demanded the arrest of the cab driver who gave them oregano when they thought they had purchased $50 worth of marijuana.
One day in January 1991, Jack Carl McMorrow, then forty-seven, stopped by just to inquire whether there were any warrants out for his arrest. As a matter of fact, there were two, and he was arrested. A man in Wichita Falls, Texas, who had come to the police station in 1989 to recover his impounded car was sent in to see the chief himself, Curtis Harrelson, because the man did not have enough ID to reassure officers that the car was his. The man courteously introduced himself to the chief by doffing his hat. Unfortunately, he had forgotten that that's where he kept his marijuana. Two packets fell to the floor right at the chief's feet. Three men in Salt Lake City appeared to be loitering near an underground parking garage when police officers asked them for ID. Each claimed to have none, but one man was acting suspicious, and finally the officer persuaded him to clean out his pockets. One piece of paper was produced. It read, "If you don't want your family hurt, put all the money on the counter and spread out the bundles. Do it fast." Police in Hallendale, Florida, were alerted by a Miami television station to charge Harry J. Bradley with murdering his wife. News reporter Art Carlson had received a call from Bradley announcing that he had killed her and then asking if the station would pay him for the information under its "news tip" policy. Baltimore police shut down a drug operation offering giveaway coupons entitling the bearer to a $1 discount or to a free bag of marijuana with every five purchases. The coupon also gave the seller's address and announced "Tell Your Friends" and "Open 24 Hours." Police went to the address and made a deal through a small slot in the door before making arrests. A cop just happened by a street corner newspaper rack that held a sign announcing bags of marijuana for $10. He asked John E. Garrett, then nineteen, standing alongside, if the sign was his. "Sure. It's the only way I can get people to stop." Michael Smith, then twenty-nine, was arrested in Rochester, New York, in 1990 for a street-corner robbery of a couple getting out of their car. His weapon of choice was a realistic toy gun. However, the female of the couple reached into her glove compartment and pulled out her own realistic toy gun, leading Smith to drop his realistic toy gun and plead for mercy. As Smith started to run away, the couple screamed, alerting a neighbor, who chased Smith a short way and leveled him with a baseball bat to his cranium, drawing blood. Smith escaped, but police followed the trail of blood and soon apprehended him. Phillip Shane Duncan, then eighteen, put his hand inside his shirt and entered the Jet Market in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1989, demanding money. The Jet Market is one of those places in which the clerk sits inside a bulletproof cage. Duncan could not understand why no money was forthcoming through the little drawer, and became hysterical. He and his three cohorts began hollering and trashing the place, but still got no money. However, the loud noises did attract a passing police officer, and the four were arrested on the premises. Carnell Wilder, then twenty-five, wanted desperately to be a police officer in Philadelphia, but feared failing his written exam. He employed his girlfriend to impersonate him on the exam because he thought she was smarter and had a better chance of passing. But instead of just letting her take the exam and see what happened, Wilder thought both of them should take it, each using Wilder's name. Authorities were tipped off when Wilder both passed the exam and failed it. James E. Sanders of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was convicted of trying to pass a single bogus $20 bill. He had cut the corners off a $20 bill and pasted them over the ones on a one-dollar bill. On a Wednesday morning in June 1991, a man in his late twenties or early thirties rushed toward a convenience store in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. A scarf obscured his face, and he carried a semiautomatic handgun. The clerk, who was cleaning up inside, saw him try hard several times to push open the door before he finally withdrew in frustration and left. As a police officer later explained to reporters, "The problem was that in order to get the door open, you have to pull, but he was pushing." There was indeed a sign on the door indicating that the door should be pulled. Michigan state police in Ypsilanti reported in 1990 that a man had come into a Burger King at 7:10 in the morning, flashed the handle of a pistol, and demanded cash. The clerk informed the robber that he could not open the cash drawer unless the robber bought something. The robber thought for a few seconds, then demanded onion rings. As everyone knows, onion rings are not available until lunch time, and the clerk said so. Apparently frustrated, the robber walked out. On November 23, 1998, a man tried to rob the same branch of the First Virginia Bank in Arlington, Virginia, twice within a four-hour period. The first time, the teller placed the money in a bag along with a red dye pack that would later explode and coat the money with a chemical. The man made it only a short distance out the door before the explosion, which scared him and caused him to flee, leaving the money on the sidewalk. The second time, the teller did the same thing; the man made it just as far as he did the first time before the dye pack exploded and he again ran off, scared, leaving the money on the ground. Four teenagers were arrested in the parking lot of the Lakeland Square Mall during Christmas season in 1989. They had been trying to break into vehicles in the parking lot and decided on a van with no side windows. They worked on the door for a few seconds, but unfortunately for them, the van was filled with undercover police officers on a stakeout--trying to detect vehicle break-ins during the holiday season. In 1987, police at the Raleigh-Durham airport had staked out the luggage carousel, suspecting that Reed would come to pick up a drug shipment. Upon arriving at the carousel, Reed became suspicious and so passed up his bag. In order to blend in with the other travelers, he casually picked up another piece of luggage and walked away. Police decided to stop him anyway. When they asked him to open the luggage he was carrying, he said he didn't have the key. Police asked if they had his permission to open that suitcase. He agreed. To the great surprise of the police, not to mention Reed, that suitcase happened to contain a bag of marijuana. Mickey J. Beard, then eighteen, and two younger companions were arrested in Pleasant Prarie, Wisconsin, in 1991 for trying to steal the wheels off a Chevy Corvette in a residential garage in the middle of the night. They had three wheels off but suffered a major accident with the fourth when the car fell on one of the theives. After kicking the car, the other two then gave up and knocked on the door of the owner's home, asking him to help. The owner flew into a rage and called the police, sending the two kids fleeing to their getaway truck. They were found in the truck by police a short time later. They had not been able to drive the truck away because the only one of the three kids who could drive a stick shift was the guy who was trapped under the Corvette. A young man in Seattle in 1988 was ordered released in Judge Philip Killien's courtroom after having been charged with driving a stolen car. Police say, however, that on his way out of the building, he stopped by the courthouse parking lot and stole a car in order to get home. The car belonged to Killien. Donald M. Thomas, then thirty-four, tried to escape from jail on the eighty-ninth day of his ninety-day sentence. He was captured. Armed robbery suspect Frenchman "Teddy" Glover, then twenty-one, was accused by police in Wayland, Massachusetts, in 1989, of the additional charge of using his one phone call to threaten the witness who had just reported him. Billy Dale Anderson and David Cabarett tried to break out of Okanogan County Jail in Washington by chipping through a concrete wall eight inches thick. The piece of metal they were using made so much noise for so long that several inmates complained to guards, and the men were apprehended. If the two had chipped through the concrete, they would have found themselves on a landing eighty feet above the ground. A never-apprehended fella knocked at the door of the unritzy home of a Dallas man, gained entry with a gun, and began rummaging through the house while holding the owner at bay. After a quick tour, he concluded that there was no jewelry or other portable valuables and asked the owner for money. Emptying the wallet produced $8. Dejected, but determined to move on, the robber took the money and proceeded to the door, but then abruptly stopped, turned around, flung the $8 back, and declared, "This house is not worth robbing." A man walked into a gas station and laid $2 on the counter, asking for a pack of cigarettes. It was all a diversion, however. When the clerk turned to fetch the cigarettes and ring up the sale, the customer reached into the cash drawer, grabbed all the paper he could see, and ran out the door. However, the clerk said later, he had just bundled the cash and put it into the in-store drop, so that, to the best of his recollection, the paper contents of the cash drawer consisted of several pieces of paper and a single dollar bill. The robber, of course, had left the original $2 on the counter, giving himself a negative cash flow. Ronald McClanahan, then forty-one, was arrested in Columbia, Missouri, in 1989. His first mistake was to try to knock off a gun shop while armed only with a knife. At first, he had the drop on the clerks and held them at bay while he tried to open the electronic cash register--despite his not having the slightest clue as to how to do that. He randomly pushed buttons for a minute or so, becoming increasingly frustrated. Then he decided to pick up the whole thing and carry it away, but of course it was plugged into the wall, and when he had taken a few quick steps, he lost control of the register, as it stayed attached to the wall and he kept walking. Both he and the cash register fell to the floor, which enabled a store clerk to grab a gun and move in on McClanahan. At first, said store employees, McClanahan lay perfectly still on the floor as the gun was pointed at him. Then McClanahan yelled, "Go ahead and shoot me," scrambled to his feet, grabbed the register again, and started for the door. The clerk held his fire. The register again fell from his hands, and this time the drawer came loose, sending money all over the floor. McClanahan reached down, grabbed as many bills as he could, and ran for the exit; but by that time enough employees had gathered to block the door and grab him. Even though he could not escape before the police arrived, McClanahan refused to loosen his grip on the money, and police had to use force to pry it from his hands.
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