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ANNOUNCER: Tonight on
"America's Dumbest Criminals," he's got a handful of
dynamite and a short fuse.
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But you won't
believe how he blows. It's good this crooks is getting
familiar with license plates,
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because he'll be
making them soon. Doesn't this look
like an accident just waiting to happen?
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You can't cut us off now,
because things are just getting interesting for America's
dumbest criminals.
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[theme music] ANNOUNCER: Now, welcome your
hosts for "America's Dumbest Criminals," Daniel
Butler and Debbie Alan.
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-Big show tonight. -Oh, you don't know the of if. -What do you mean? -Remember, how you talked about
getting a speeding ticket?
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-Yeah. -And missing your court date? -Well, yeah, yeah, but it
happened only because I was
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focused on creating quality
television programming. -Oh, please, save
that speech for when
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you accept your Emmy, OK? -Well, what are you getting at? -Nothing, nothing. -OK, sure.
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-We have a very special show
tonight with lots of surprises, that all I'm talking about.
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-I'm all tingly in anticipation. I really am. -Our first criminal
got a surprise
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as well when he tried to pull
a fast one in a drug store. Now, I love to find a bargain.
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But our first villain
was looking for a steal. -But this guy wasn't
going for jewels or cars.
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He was going for
pictures, trying to avoid paying for
film development. -What should have been a
simple sales transaction,
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blew up into something
larger than life. [siren sound] DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER):
In the next five seconds
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a crime is going
to be committed. Watch closely. Did you catch it? We'll give you a
second chance to see
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what caught the
security guard eye. Here's a look from
another angle. This student at the University
of California Santa Barbara
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takes a look at these
pictures, then pockets them, oblivious that the
camera caught it all.
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Then he makes his
way out of the store where he's confronted
by security. Now here's the mind boggling
part of this whole story.
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This was his second attempt to
steal these very same pictures. He had just paid $200
fine of restitution
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and picked up the
film from the office when this video was shot. Here's a financial rundown
on what just transpired.
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The cost of building
developing, $12.49. Cost of first civil demand
for restitution, $200.
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Cost for round two, $400, plus
he was arrested for theft. So the difference
between obeying the law
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and breaking the long,
a whopping $587.51. I sure hope he wasn't
an economics major.
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-And that didn't include
attorney fees, you know. -Isn't that pitiful. Now, we head to
Woodland Park, Colorado,
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for a story that
is pure dynamite. -You know how Wile E.
Coyote lowers the plunger
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in an attempt to blow the
Roadrunner to kingdom come? Well, this is nothing like that.
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But it does involve someone
armed with dynamite. -Or to be more correct,
partially armed.
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First he uses sticks
of TNT as a weapon to threaten bank tellers. Talk about sending interest
rates through the roof.
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Then he realizes that his
threat kit is incomplete. -Well, a little. His quest for
wholeness brings us
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to something to remember me by. -I was involved in
an investigation, involving an individual
that robbed a supply
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store for dynamite
in Triple Creek. The next day, he
uses this dynamite to rob a bank, not realizing
the dynamite wasn't
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really good without
the blasting cap. -Fill it out. That's enough. -That afternoon he
calls the store owner.
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He tells the owner that he was
the guy that robbed him the day before for the dynamite
and that he wanted
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to get some blasting
caps from him. And the store owner said that
he didn't have any in stock
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right now. But if he called
back this afternoon, he would tell him if
the shipment came in.
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In the meantime, he
called the police and working with
several agencies, we set up a location
for him to meet
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with the suspect to
buy the blasting cap. That evening he calls
the owner back again
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and tells the owner doesn't
want the blasting caps. So when he shows up at
pre-designated location,
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the only thing
that's in the van is the SWAT team waiting for him. The only blast that this
dummy got was jail time.
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-I was driving behind this
group of guys and gals. The gals were in one car. The guys were in another car.
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The guys we're obviously
flirting with the girls. The girls were just kind
of giggling and having fun.
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The guys were so busy
flirting with the girls, they didn't even see me. The girls saw me.
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They kind of were
smiling a little bit because they knew that the
cops right next to them.
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And finally one of the guys
yells out, we've got some beer. About that time, one of the
passengers in the guy's car
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turns his head and
looks and sees me. He gets a shocked
look on his face. The girls at that point,
since they saw me,
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they just started laughing
pretty hard at that point. And their light turned
green, so they took off.
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And they were gone. Didn't see them again. The guy's went ahead
and continued on
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through the intersection. And I pull them over. I walk up to the
car and asked them
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if they had some beer in the
car, which they say, no, no, we were just having fun,
flirting with the girls.
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We were going to get some
beer later if they go with us. I can see a six pack of 12 ounce
bottles with open beers in it.
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Pull the bottles of
beer out of the car, end up arresting the driver
for DUI and underage drinking,
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and then also arresting the
passenger for underage drinking and possession of marijuana.
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They missed out on
dates with the girls and instead got a
date with the judge. -All right, as my childhood
friend Joey Angilini once said,
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never crack wise to a priest. -And that goes
double if the priest is also a police officer.
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-Triple if the officer is a nun. See if you don't think this
man is one holy terror.
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Let's go back to Woodland
Park for the story. -I have a friend that's
a police chaplain
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and was also a regular officer. And he was transporting
a prisoner to jail. And the prisoner asked him,
if I ran, would you shoot me?
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And he looked at him
and smiled and he said, son, I can play with you. I could pray for you.
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Or I can pray over you. He didn't say
anything after that. ANNOUNCER: And now, another
of America's dumbest laws.
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In Natchez, Mississippi,
it's illegal for elephants to drink beer. -Oh, yeah, the last
thing the world needs
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is a passel of punchy
pachyderms staggering around. I wonder if the drunk
elephant sees pink people.
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Well, we'll think
about that later. You've heard the old
expression, so drunk, he
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couldn't see straight. Well, our next story
concerns a woman who recognized that she was
too intoxicated to drive.
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But then she turns
the wheel over to someone who was also at--
shall we say-- a disadvantage.
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It definitely ranks among
America's dumbest excuses. -I had the opportunity to
observe a car coming at me.
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He came over my line,
ran me off the road into a convenience
store parking lot. Turned around on
him, came back up.
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He's going across three, four
lanes of a five lane road, going from side to side.
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I had my blue lights, siren on. Chased him for about nine miles. And finally I got him stopped
and he came out a car.
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And I noticed he was
leaning on the car. I thought it was for support. Come to find out
that he was blind.
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I could see his eyes and
it was pretty obvious he just couldn't see
anything at all.
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He get to the end
of the car and fell. There was a female
passenger in the car also.
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And I asked her, well,
why weren't you driving? She was intoxicated also. So it's one of those things
that's kind of surprising.
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-Yeah, the moral of the
story is designate a driver who can actually get
you home in one piece.
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And on that sober note,
over to you, Debbie. -Well, our next guy was
offering the deal of a century.
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For a one time fee, you could
get unlimited cable, including those pricey
pay-per-view events,
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without paying anything. The electronic device
the egghead was selling was called a black box.
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It unscrambled all
cable channels. And that made the cable
company madder than a wet hen.
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When authorities pull the
plug on his operation, noticed that the crook's
expressions are rather blank.
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-It's not illegal. It's just an electronic device. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER): That's
what the man said after he was
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busted for selling two black
boxes to an undercover officer. That's a serious felony.
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He could go to jail
for quite some time. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER):
These tinker toys
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will give you free access
to everything cable offers, even pricey pay-per-view
events without paying a nickel.
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As this cable company
rolled out a major crackdown and began knocking
on doors, they
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found all sorts of inventive
electronics at work, all of it, a criminal offense.
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Maybe instead of
peddling illegal gizmos, this guy had better
go back to fiddling
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with legal electronic devices. -All right, pay attention,
a quick overview of our next story.
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It involves a man, a big
knife and the attempt to hide the said
knife in his pants.
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In this disturbing melodrama,
the part of the criminal will be played by
John Wayne Bobbitt.
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Made you wince, didn't I? Settle down, easy. It's not quite as
bad as it sounds.
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But it's close. -A young man walks into
a convenience store, walks up to a display of knives.
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And apparently, he
wanted one real bad but didn't have enough
money to buy it. So he took the knife
off the display
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and shoved it down the
front of his pants. Just then he noticed that
security was on to him,
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so it takes off
running out the story. -Well, pretty soon, the knife
creeps down inside of his pants
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and starts to cut the
inside of his leg. And pretty soon he's
hobbling outside the store
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as gently as he can. He ended up in a restaurant
bathroom next door, complaining to the
employees that he
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was bleeding from
the crotch area. And when we caught up with him,
he told us the whole story.
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Obviously, he was a
little embarrassed. And I don't think he'll
be concealing anything
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in his pants in the
next little while. We call this guy Blade
Runner at the office.
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I'm sure he got the point. -Coming up later, a
driver isn't having an out of body experience when
he goes toward the light.
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But now with the news is a man
who does as much for reporting as Marv Albert did for lingerie,
Daniel with ABC headlines.
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-All right, now you've
heard about robbers poking their fingers through
a coat to make
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victims believe they were armed. Well, that's what this
man in Modesto, California
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did when holding up a
bank, except his hand was in plain view. I'm guessing that his
finger wasn't loaded.
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The teller alerted police
who provided nice handcuffs for the man, who was also
equipped with a small silencer
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that turned out to be a thimble. Two men in San Diego were
arrested when a search revealed
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that they were in possession
of a stolen video camera. But apparently they'd been
tampering with the evidence.
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Inadvertently they had
recorded themselves displaying their stolen goods and even
congratulating each other
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for being clever enough to steal
the video camera's operating manual, which apparently
they hadn't read.
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Dressed in raid shirts and
holding their police radios, an assault force of
narcotics officers
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took down a crack house
in De Land, Florida, netting 14 arrests. As the investigators
were wrapping up,
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two true dopeheads approach
the uniformed officers and acquired about making a buy.
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They were promptly
arrested and the stolen truck they were
driving was seized. And that closes the
file on ABC headlines,
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news ripped from
somewhere near the back of your local newspaper. Debbie. -She was a very,
very stout woman
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with a very, very
bad disposition. And she wore a very,
very yellow dress. She also wore out the officers
who were pursuing her.
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see for yourself. DEBBIE ALAN
(VOICEOVER): She tried to hide in the
bushes from police
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after a high speed car
chase that ended in a crash in this driveway. Police saw the
woman hit a vehicle
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in this apartment
complex's parking lot. -She proceeded to
drive forward and crash
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into other vehicles
in the parking lot. And then she put it back
in reverse and crash
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into the fence and
other vehicles. And she managed to push
a vehicle out of the way
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of the parking
lot enough to give herself room to exit
the parking lot. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER): After
the crash ended the chase,
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she tried unsuccessfully
to flee on foot and hide. -Myself and all the
responding officers
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noticed her running
and trying to hide in the bushes in the
rear of the residences
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on Country Road Drive. That's where we all
brought her into custody. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER):
She was charged
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with assault and numerous
moving violations. But moving too fast on
foot was not one of them.
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-Hey, all crimes are
wrong, but some also seem geographically undesirable. I mean, the odds of getting
caught seem to mushroom.
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Our next crook would have made
a terrible bookie, because he perpetrated his
crime practically
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in the shadow of
the police station. His scarfing of a license
plate next to the home plate
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of law enforcement gives us
yet another case "I'm where? You're who?" I'm Lieutenant Karen Bodiford
with the Leon County Sheriff's
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Office in Tallahassee, Florida. A couple of years
ago, I was working a relatively slow shift.
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And I went out onto the front
porch of the Sheriff's office to get a breath of fresh air.
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And when I stepped
out onto the porch, I saw a guy crouching
behind my marked patrol car
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about 30 feet from
the front door. And he was removing the tag
from my car, the county tag.
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It took me just a second to
realize what was going on. I hollered out at him to stop.
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He proceeded drop his
screwdriver and walked away. There aren't that many
criminals that are that dumb,
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but he went to jail for it. -Maybe this next guy's
conversation went something like this, hey, honey, I'll
be back in a little while.
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I'm going to go
pick up some things. And that's just what he did. First, he picked
up plenty of booze.
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And then he picked
up a red light with the front of his car. Here's our ABC reenactment.
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But remember, objects
in your TV screen are smaller than they appear. -This is one of my
favorite stories.
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It's about a drunk driver. Early morning hours,
driving alone, hit a traffic signal
in the center divider,
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he clipped the pole,
knocked it off its base. A couple of miles later he was
spotted by one of our officers.
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He was kind of easy to
spot because he still had that signal pole with him. It was embedded in his car,
laying over the hood of the car
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and into the roof
of this Mazda RX7. And after a brief
pursuit, the officer got the drunk driver stopped.
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He walked up on the car and ask
the obvious question, what's with the pole and
the traffic signal?
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The drunk driver replied,
it came with the car when I bought it. The officer was given the green
line to arrest the defendant
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for drunk driving, hit and
run, and excessive sarcasm. -You know, Sometimes it
can be a cold, cruel world.
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And sometimes it's
just plain cold. -That's what a juvenile offender
discovered when he escaped
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from a detention center,
then made a hasty u-turn. -Oh, yeah, he sure put the
"burr" in "burr-reak" out.
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-But the thoughtful kid that he
was, he came back so we could bring your another chapter of
"we're not making this up."
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-I'm the manager of a
juvenile detention facility. And about two years
ago we were undergoing
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remodeling of our main building. So we housed the kids
in a temporary facility, which happened to
be an old motel.
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One night is about to coldest
night of the year we had with the temperature about
4 degrees below zero.
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In the middle of the night,
an officer heard a crash and went running down
to one of the rooms just
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in time to see a kid
exit through the whole that they made in
the wall from pulling
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the air conditioning unit. Saw his feet go through, ran
back to the office to call 911.
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About that time,
the doorbell rang. Went to the door and it was
the kid ringing the doorbell
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wanting back in, because
he was freezing to death. He only had his socks on. When he rang the
doorbell, he also
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picked up the newspaper
that had been delivered. So he delivered us
the newspaper too.
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Pretty smooth character. That's the first time
I've ever seen or heard of any criminal that
actually escaped from custody
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and rang the doorbell
begging to get back. -Well, it time to thank
you for joining us
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and express our
gratitude to all the law enforcement officers
who helped us tonight.
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-And all the officers
they represent. Thanks for the great job
you do for us every day.
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There's more dumb to come
when we return next week, so make a point of joining us.
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-And if you can't wait till
then, drop by our website. -The address is
www.dumbcrimes.com.
00:18:42
-Hey, Daniel, at the
beginning of the show, we talked about, remember,
you getting a speeding ticket
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and then failing to
appear on your court date. -Yeah, it was a dumb
mistake on my part.
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-It's funny you should
use that word "dumb" since it's in the
title of our show.
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-Yeah, where are
you going with this? -It's not where I'm going. It's where you're
going to be going.
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Allow me to and welcome my
special guests, Officers Ben Alexander and Shannon Moore
of the police department.
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Yes, there are here tonight. And he is booked for a very
special appearance downtown.
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And look, Daniel,
she's about my height. Office Moore will
you also book him on telling too many short jokes?
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-I think my wife sent them. No really. -Tell him too he has the
right to remain silent.
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That will be a welcome change
of pace, right everybody? Oh, you look so cute. Bye, Daniel.
00:19:36
When's visiting day? We know that we all learn
from others mistakes-- -Yeah, yeah but if you haven't,
we might just see you and me
00:19:44
next week on "America's
Dumbest Criminal." -Wave goodbye, Daniel. It's been nice working with you.
00:19:50
[theme music]