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NARRATOR: Tonight on
America's Dumbest Criminals, meet a crook who decides to
drop in unannounced at a car
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dealership, discover the
backbreaking burden of stealing $3,000 in coins,
and what happens
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if you mess with a wire
surging with 15,000 volts of electricity? For the Shocking answers,
stay where you are.
00:00:24
You're wired into
the crooked dealings of America's Dumbest Criminals. [theme music]
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NARRATOR: Now, welcome your
hosts for America's Dumbest Criminals, Daniel
Butler and Debbie Allen.
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-Hi, there. -Hey, Debbie. How's it going? -It's going great. -All right. -You want to explain
your friend right there?
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-What? Oh, no, I just cashed my
check for co-hosting the show. -Yeah? But it looks like you're
making more than me.
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Wait a minute. And its jingling. What is the jingling noise? -Well, yeah. I've got almost, what?
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$60 in change in here. Yeah. -And that's because? -Well, it's so I can tell all my
TV co-host buddies that I bring
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down some heavy coin
for doing this show. -Oh, brother. -Plus I'm developing some
pretty impressive biceps.
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You want to feel that? -Go ahead.
Make your muscle. -Hey, hey, hey. -Come on. -What?
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-Weenie. -No. Well, a ton of coins figure
into one of our stories that we're going
to get to later.
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But first, we meet up
with a real homewrecker. -Yeah. And if you've ever gone
in a model home and said,
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this is exactly how I
want my house to look, don't follow through
like this guy did.
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-Nope. We've got him, caught on camera. -We received a
call for a burglary at one of our sample
homes in the township.
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When they called
for the burglary, they said the furniture that
was inside the sample home
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had been taken,
including the sofas, some stuffed chairs,
and some other items. When we arrived
there, they advised us
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that there was a swatch from the
sofa, an armchair cover, that had been left behind
by the actors.
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And we followed the footprints
in mud across the road, right to the back of the house.
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When we knocked
on the back door, the subjects came running
out of the bedroom, looked out the front,
assuming that the knock
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had come from the front door. When they looked out,
they saw the police car. I'm watching from the back door.
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I see them pick up the
sofa and the chair, carried it in the bedroom,
carry out the stuff, I guess,
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that they had had
there originally, put that in the room, and then
they go to answer the door.
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At that point I knocked on
the back door and told them, hey, we saw you carry this stuff
back into the back bedroom.
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We also took their issues so we
could match the footprints up to those that we had found
in the mud, and at that point
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they confessed and
carried the stolen goods back to the
sample home for me. Using all my years of detective
training at my training
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at the FBI Academy, why, I was
able to track the subjects down just by following
the muddy footprints.
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-Well, I'm sure the guy
that robbed that model home has now become a model prisoner.
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-I'm sure has has. -Hey, have you ever seen those
car dealers who talk about how
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they've knocked the
roof off high prices? -Mm-hm. -Well, we found
a crook who tried
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to do pretty much
the same thing. -We take you to
Clinton, South Carolina, for the midnight madness of
Something To Remember Me By.
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-Hi. One time we had a fella
break into a car dealership, and we got a call from the
car dealership that morning.
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And we went over there, they
found a hole in the ceiling. And I'm looking at the
hole in the ceiling,
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he'd climbed down upon
some file cabinets. We started looking
around the file cabinets, decided to
start brushing for prints,
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and everything. We found a piece of
paper on the floor. Picked up the piece of
paper, and it was a warrant
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for a fella we'd
arrested a few weeks earlier, for another burglary. So, figured what
had happened, it
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had fallen out of his pocket. If they were all this easy,
we'd catch a lot more fish.
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-Daniel, for this next one,
I turn matters over to you. Will you please use your
command of the English language
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to delicately describe this
next surveillance footage? -Yeah. Well, OK, let's see.
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This man that was caught
by a security camera was a lonely man, and he
was, well, busying himself
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while calling a 1-900
phone line at work. For his sake, now,
as well as ours, we'll keep evidence
against him to a minimum.
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-Well, we received information
from the phone company through our auditing system
that we were receiving
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a lot of phone bills
for the 900 phone sex taking place at the
criminal courts complex.
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These calls seem to have been
taking place after hours, where there shouldn't have
been anybody inside.
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And quite honestly, we
figured out real quick that it had to
have been somebody that was working security.
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So we set up a little
surveillance camera in the control both,
and lo and behold,
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we catch a security
guard late at night, dialing the phone
sex phone numbers. But I think more
humorous than that
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is we found him buck naked. Well, of course, he denied it
until we showed him the video.
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And of course, after he saw his
own video and his naked body on the TV screen, he
realized that we had him,
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and there was no
denying that he was the one making the phone calls. NARRATOR: In Providence,
Rhode Island,
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you may not sell
toothpaste and toothbrush to the same customer
on a Sunday. -Hey, years ago somebody
told me this joke
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that I still don't get. How many anarchists does it
take to change a lightbulb? Fish.
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Now, if that makes sense to
you, what you're about to see will probably seem
perfectly logical.
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But for the rest
of us, it belongs in the ranks of America's
Dumbest Excuses. -You know, usually
whenever we're working out
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on DWI patrols on
a routine patrol, we stop a drunk, first thing
he says, I've had two beers.
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That's the common answer. Two beers. Well, one night I
was out patrolling, and I stopped one of these guys.
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As I stopped him, before I
could get out of the vehicle, he got out of his truck.
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And when he did, he kind of
fell over against the truck, and was having
trouble standing up.
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So I kind of hurried
up to him, and I said, sir, are you all right? And I could smell the alcohol.
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I said, how much have
you had to drink? He just kind of leaned
over against he drunk,
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he said-- two days! He'd been out drinking, I
guess he's been two days. He poured himself into the back
of my unit, and we took him in.
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-It was early in the
morning on a summer morning. It was pretty warm
outside, and they
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dispatched us to assist police. We arrived at this restaurant. Police officers had been
inside and said that there was
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a nude man dangling from
the ceiling in the kitchen. The person that found him,
the early morning person that
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came to the restaurant
to clean up, she goes to her cooking station. There's a small wok area
right underneath this vent,
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and here's this man dangling
completely naked from the waist down, his legs kicking.
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The lady is screaming,
she calls 911. And so we put up ladders
and got up there,
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and we noticed that there was
a male sticking out of a vent. When we got to him, we asked
him if you had a permit
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to operate as a Santa Claus in
the city and county of Denver. -Get out of here! -He responded
angrily, and he really
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wanted to get out of
that vent at that point. And we came up with
the idea of WD40.
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Took about 15 minutes
to get him good and lubed up, and then,
boom, we jerked him out.
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At that time he
started to shake, and he had been exposed the
weather for quite a while.
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And we put him on a backboard
and lowered him down, and he was off to jail. -All right.
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In driver's ed, they teach
you that red means stop, yellow means caution,
and green means go.
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But what does it mean if
you sit at an intersection and are endlessly astonished
at this riveting light show?
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Red, yellow, green. It means you've earned a slot
in tonight's Blue Light Special.
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NARRATOR: Don't
get us wrong, we're all for using extreme
caution when driving. But the guy behind the wheel
here was going nowhere fast.
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He watched this little
rainbow several times without moving, which made
the officers in the patrol car
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directly behind him suspicious,
so they decided to talk to him. But suddenly, the car the
wouldn't go wouldn't stop.
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As officers would
later learn, the man was experienced at
driving like this. After all, he already had
three DUIs to his credit.
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In good time, all
things came to an end, and the officers encouraged
the passenger of the car
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to get down and hug the
ground in gratitude that he and his sauced
chauffeur had met up
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with the law instead of a tree. Let this be a lesson to you. Use caution in
choosing your rides,
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because you never know
when you might get stopped. -What's not to like
about this next story?
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Even the skimpiest
details are intriguing. It involves a ball-peen
hammer, an impervious safe,
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and a ton of coins. And that's just for starters. For the whole story, we
take you to Kaufman, Texas.
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-I was working two
burglaries here in Kaufman, and one of them was
at a hardware store.
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The only thing
they had taken out of there was a ball-peen hammer,
and the other one was-- were
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someone had went into the
bank through the roof. Turned that they'd used
the ball-peen hammer
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and made a hole in
the roof to get in. They tried to get
into the vault. They couldn't get in there,
so they just took off
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change that was laying
out in the bags. It was about $3,000 in
nickels, quarters, and dimes.
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Wasn't really hard to catch him,
because he went to a car lot and paid $3,000 in cash
in nickels and dimes,
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and quarters for a car. Everybody said that he had a lot
of money, but really not a lot
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of sense. -We got a call to go
to an elk's lodge. One of the members had come
in on a Saturday morning
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to open up, do a
little cleaning. He walks in, opens up, and
hears someone going, hey!
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Excuse me. Give me some help. And he walks back to
the big conference room, and there's this guy
laying on the floor.
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He looks up at the ceiling,
and he sees a hole, and he says, hm, I
should call the police.
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So we go around, and it's
one of our local bad guys. We've arrested him
before for break ins.
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So we ended up carrying
him to the hospital. He's got two broke ankles. Basically what happened is he
broke in through the ceiling
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tile at the top of the ceiling,
fell through, and broke both his feet and laid
there for two days.
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After interviewing
him, I said, is there everything else
different you'd do? And he goes, next
time I'll bring rope.
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-And now with the
news from a man who puts the anchor in
anchorman, here's Daniel with the ADC Headlines.
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-When a robber
confessed to sticking up over two dozen banks, he
used a truly original excuse.
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He said the money went
to finance his addiction to attending Los Angeles
Raiders football games.
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OK. Wouldn't it have been
perfect if this guy's favorite team had
been the Steelers?
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Right? Participated in
internet auctions. Spending over $3 million on
items ranging from a van Gogh
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painting to a replica
of a Viking ship. The problem? He was 13 years old,
and his allowance just
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wouldn't cover that
kind of spending. Well, like lots of
us older consumers, it all hit the fan when
the bills came through.
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Lucky for him, no criminal
charges were filed. It's hard to remain
anonymous when
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you do what this
bank robber did. He entered the bank
where he had an account and demanded cash from a
teller he had once asked out.
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She knew his name,
she had his number, and he got nowhere fast. And that closes the
file on ADC headlines,
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news ripped from
somewhere near the back of your local newspaper. Debbie? -Things couldn't have worked
out more neatly for this escaped
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prisoner if he'd
had return to sender stamped across his forehead. His story becomes
part and parcel
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for tonight's Special Delivery. -Some fellow coworkers of
mine had arrested a criminal.
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He was brought back to
the police district. I was in there, he'd seen
his opportunity to get away.
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So he runs, leaves
the police station. Gets about four or
five blocks away, sees a car that's stopped.
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He asked them if
he can get a ride. He said, the police
are chasing me. Once he gets in
the car, they start
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driving back toward
the police station. As they gets closer and are
about to pull into the lot,
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he then realizes
that he's a police officer in an unmarked
police vehicle. -No animals were hurt in
the reenactment you're
00:13:38
about to see, so don't start
writing us cranky letters, OK? However, you will see a crook
who learns an electrifying
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lesson about getting
his wires crossed. -I'm Deputy Calvin Dinney,
from Pinellas County Sheriff's
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department, in Largo, Florida. We had an interesting case
of the parrot nappers.
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We had three subjects
enter a wooded area where a Florida Power
transformer was located.
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Their purpose there was to steal
parrots that roofed, or nested in between the transformers
for their girlfriends.
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-Well, they parked their car on
the dirt road, then proceeded to the rear of the
transformer station,
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which is usually enclosed
by a six foot fence. They weaseled their
way through the fence,
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and one of the subjects
had a ten foot metal pole. Now, we're talking about a
transformer, which supplies
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electricity for probably
20,000 or 30,000 residents. So the three subjects enter
the transformer enclosure.
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One of them then
hears the parrots, and goes up with his metal
pole, hoping to shake up
00:14:42
the parrots that
were roofing there. He received a jolt of
15,000 volts of electricity
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through that metal
pole, which knocked him entirely off his feet. And his partner.
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After doing so, Sheriff's
department deputies were summoned. They were all charged
with felony trespassing,
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so they got a little
bit more than a parrot. Now let's look back at one
of ADC's greatest hits,
00:15:09
from the year 1997. Spring training started off with
a bang as juvenile detention
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centers in Harris County, Texas
began recruiting for inmates. Strike one! One year's probation.
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Strike two! Do the crime, we'll
guarantee the time. Uh-oh. Traded to the Texas Youth
Commission for one year.
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Strike three. Transferred to the majors,
as this ambitious arsonist is over the age of 18.
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He's signed up for
five years for felony theft and damaged property. And with this woman's
discovery, they are outta there.
00:15:53
In Salt Lake City, it's illegal
to walk down a street carrying a paper bag containing a violin.
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-Well, I was working
an afternoon shift. So I'm listening to the scanner
and I hear an ATL, which
00:16:03
is an attempt to locate,
for a hit and run vehicle. I'm driving down the road
minding my own business,
00:16:09
and there it is right in front
of me, getting on the freeway. Follow it for a little
while, and notice
00:16:13
it's weaving in the road. Those are some good indicators
for DUI, so I get it stopped,
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go up and make
contact with the guy, and I don't say anything
about the hit and run.
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I just talk to him. Try and find out
what's going on, get his license and
registration from him,
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and then get him out on
the side of the road, and we do some field
sobriety tests.
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I then decide, well, it's
time to arrest him for DUI. And when I inform
him of this, he
00:16:37
wants to go back and get his
cigarettes out of the car. And I try to get after
him, because I know
00:16:43
once he gets to the car, you
could have a weapon in there, or jump in the car and take off.
00:16:48
Well, unfortunately,
the latter was the case. He wanted to jump in
the car and take off.
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Reaches for the ignition
and gets the car started. I reached in to turn
off the ignition,
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and the ignition switch
comes out in my hand. Craziest thing you've ever seen. It was nuts.
00:17:02
So anyways, he's got
this car going now, and I try to get him
to turn the car off.
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I can't turn the car off. He hits the gas and takes off. So the pursuit is on. Run back to my car, we
chase him in and out
00:17:14
of neighborhoods and whatnot. He finally ditches the car,
and he's able to jump a fence
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and get away from us on foot. The main thing is I've got his
registration and his driver's
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license still on my
clipboard in my car. By running like that, he turned
two misdemeanors into a felony
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charge, and ended up having
to do time over that. -Our final criminal tonight
finds himself caught
00:17:38
in the clutches of the
double jeopardy of twins. -Yes. And as a kindness
to you, our viewers,
00:17:44
the parts of the
officers will not be played by the Olsen twins. -Hey, watch it.
00:17:48
I like them. Travel with us into the
twilight zone of We're Not Making This Up. -Well, about 15 years ago when I
first got into law enforcement,
00:18:00
I had a twin brother who
was also in law enforcement in another community about 100
miles east of where I lived.
00:18:07
And we were both assigned
to jail divisions, and one morning at about 5:00,
US Marshal Service brought
00:18:13
a prisoner into the jail, and
he wouldn't get out of the van when he saw me, and we
couldn't figure out why.
00:18:17
And so finally I went
and asked him, I said, man, why don't you just
get out of the van,
00:18:20
come on, let's go to jail
and get it over with. He said, I'm not
getting out of jail.
00:18:23
You're gonna whip me again. And I said, I've never met you. Well, talked with
him just a minute
00:18:29
and found out that my twin
brother was the officer that released him from the jail
that he was coming from,
00:18:33
and he just couldn't understand
how if the deputy Marshal was driving as fast as he was
getting here from one town
00:18:38
to the other, how I
could have driven faster, changed uniforms, and met
him in the sally port just
00:18:43
to make his life miserable
while he was in jail. -That's just too weird
for words, you know?
00:18:49
Well, like when
people come up to me and they ask if we're
brother and sister. -Oh, you have got to be kidding.
-No.
00:18:55
No. -Well, what do you say? -Well, I say look at the
difference in our heights. And then I say,
she's my half sister.
00:19:02
-You had to go low, didn't you? -Yeah. Only to find you, babe. -Daniel! Well, we've gotta go for now,
but you'll find us right here
00:19:09
next week with more bad news,
bad jokes for criminals. -Well, yeah, and other people.
00:19:14
And if you haven't visited
our website yet, surf on over. The address is
www.dumbcrimes.com.
00:19:20
-Thanks to officers who
make this show possible. -And to all who serve
society and law enforcement,
00:19:25
our sincere gratitude. The world would be a much
scarier place without you. -Thanks for joining
us, and as always,
00:19:31
we hope that we've all
learned from other's mistakes. -But if you haven't, we
just might see you next week
00:19:36
on America's Dumbest Criminals. -Bye, bye.