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NARRATOR: Tonight on
"America's Dumbest Criminals." These fugitives think they're
setting sail for a good time,
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but a sinking feeling
is about to set in. And this is no
pinata, but is there a surprise inside for
this would-be car thief?
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Things are seldom as they seem
and never as crooks dream, here on "America's
Dumbest Criminals."
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[music playing] Now welcome your
hosts for "ADC," Daniel Butler and Debbie Allen.
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[applause] -Debbie, Debbie? -Yeah, yeah? -I sense a little
something unfair here.
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-What is the problem? -Well, I checked
the show run down, and it says Debbie
and Daniel enter
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wearing boas across
their shoulders. OK, yours comes from
Victoria's Secret, and mine came from
the Garden of Eden.
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[laughter] -Actually, I don't think
you're wearing a boa. I think that's a python.
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-Oh, well, yeah, I feel
so much better now. -Oh, you're not scared, as you? -Me, are you kidding?
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No. -We could swap. -Great, oh, that'd be swell. Yeah, I'd go from looking like
Alice Cooper to Ethel Merman.
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Give me a great. [laughter] Then I'd have to start
belting out show tunes. I'm not prepared for that, no.
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-I think you're chicken. -The lady in the ostrich
feathers is calling me chicken.
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Oh, yeah, of course. No, I'm completely comfortable
with this representation of pure evil draped
across my shoulders!
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But just for
safekeeping, you know, I think I'll-- I'll-- turn him
over to someone more qualified
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to deal with his mood swings.
[laughs] He's squeezing. He's squeezing. He's squeezing.
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He's squeezing. There you go. Oh! OK, thank you, Blair. Thank you. -Wait a minute, you
don't have the nerve
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that a cute
17-year-old girl does? -Well, ah, huh, you
think this is scary? You should see her boyfriend.
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Woo. [laughter] -We're going to get to
a story about snakes in just a little bit.
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But first we turn
from boas to boats. -Ooh, these people boarded a
boat bound for trouble, even
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without Gilligan being aboard. -Join us aboard a ship of fools
who were caught on camera.
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[music playing] -I spoke with the
chief of police and asked him about
trying to clear up
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some of our old
outstanding warrants. We decided to do a
cash sweepstakes. We decided to plan it on
the 4th of July weekend.
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We utilized a
restaurant that was on the lake to have
a nice atmosphere. We created all of these
letterheads and mail
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merged them with a number of
different names from our files. -They had a phone
line set up for people
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to call to confirm it. Because I know a lot of people
call up the police time. What they'd just
them was, yeah, sure.
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Just come on down here. You know, let's-- it's
legitimate as far as we know. It's being held at
Lake Chargoggagog--
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a-gog-- manchogagogago-- there's
quite a few "gogs" in there and chagungagoamong.
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We call it Webster Lake. -There's only one road in and
one road out to the restaurant,
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so we were trying to
figure out how we were going to transport
everybody out. After the brainstorming with the
chief and some other officers,
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we decided that we would use
party boats and ship people across the lake to
a memorial beach
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where we had a sheriff's
department van waiting. We even went to the
extent of ordering a cake
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from a local supermarket
in red, white, and blue with Congratulations
Liberty Sweepstakes
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Winners printed on it. We brought people down. One at a time behind the
restaurant under the pretense
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that we were going to take
their picture by the water as they were presented
with this check,
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and we sprang it on them. -It was amazing how
many people said, I knew it was kind of hinky.
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But I just had to come
down for the money. -And all they got
was a free boat ride.
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Overall, we were
the real jackpot winners of this sweepstakes. We net at 32 people in all.
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[applause] -How far would you go
to feed your addiction? -Well, in this case,
we're not talking
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about heroin, or crack,
or butter pecan ice cream. -We're talking about a
technology junkie, a guy that
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got his fix from cable
TV and 1-900 phone lines. -Yeah, see how far
we've sunk as a society
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with the media
maven who provides something to remember me by. [music playing] -Numerous reports came in
where neighbors were reporting
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that they had 900 calls coming
in on their home phones, unexplained, couldn't figure
out what was going on.
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Shortly thereafter,
another report came in. Woman comes home,
walks in the door,
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and she notices a
stranger, white male, sitting in her living room,
shoes off, watching TV.
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She startles the suspect. He gets up, grabs his stuff,
and runs out the backdoor.
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Well, he leaves one
of his shoes behind. We do a sketch later on
and shortly thereafter,
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we have another sighting. A woman sees a young
man in the backyard. So she calls the place.
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Myself and my
partner take a hunch and we just go over
to the neighborhood where he's last spotted.
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So we do a little surveillance. We're sitting out there
in our unmarked cruiser,
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sitting there for
about two hours. And low and behold,
here-- here comes our suspect out
between two houses.
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And of all the places
he picked to come out, he walked right in
front of our car.
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And he's looking around to
see if anybody's looking. And we're sitting
right in front of him.
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When he turns his head to
the left side, we duck. We're in the car. And we're thinking,
this guy's made us.
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So he gets into the car, into
his car, thinking he's made it. He's broken into a couple homes.
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And as he's pulling
out, we stop. We try to stop. And he takes off. He just-- just flies down
the road, takes two blocks,
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ends up right at
his house, parks right in the middle of the
road, runs into his house.
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We're right behind him. Shuts the door,
locks the door on us. And shortly thereafter,
we get into the house.
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And he admits to
26 burglaries where he's breaking into
these people's homes, using their phones
to die 900 numbers.
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And I ask him, I said,
whatever happened to that shoe that you happen to have? And walks in his bedroom,
pulls out the shoe,
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has the matching shoe. He kept it. When you leave your shoe behind,
and you walk in front of two
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cops, you're bound
to get caught. [applause] NARRATOR: In West Virginia,
it's perfectly legal
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to take road kill
home for supper. -When you're a drug dealer,
you live life in the fast lane.
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But every once in
awhile, even drug dealers need to take the off
ramp for some down time.
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What happens next provides one
of America's dumbest excuses. [music playing] -Here in Ocala, we work
under the community
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policing philosophy. And under that
philosophy, we often ask for our citizens, our
residents, and our community
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to team up with us to help
us catch drug dealers. Just a few months ago,
one of our residents
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called us, told us
there was somebody in a car outside
her home selling drugs and also using drugs.
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CORPORAL WALTER PRESSLEY:
Upon my arrival in the area, I saw a guy that
fit the description.
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Well, he didn't see me,
because he was asleep. LIEUTENANT BARRY SHRUM: In one
hand was a bag of marijuana,
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in the other hand was a vile
filled with crack cocaine. CORPORAL WALTER PRESSLEY:
So what I did was
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I slipped in the marijuana out
of his-- out of the one hand. And I tested it, and
it tested positive.
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Then I went back, and the
young man was still asleep. So I slid the other substance
out of the other hand.
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And it tested
positive for cocaine. I thin went back to the
car, and I woke him up.
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Sir, I need you to wake up. I need you to get
out of the car. You're under arrest.
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And he told me that he'd
been asleep there for awhile, and someone must've put it in
his hands while he was asleep.
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[applause] -In our next story, the
culprit is a real snake, in every sense of the word.
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Don't believe me? Take a look at our
blue light special. [music playing] -We got a call about a
subject in a lady's driveway.
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And when asked to
describe him, the lady said it was about
nine foot long, had slick skin, and brown eyes.
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She says as long as my car. I'm not scared of
snakes, but that's reason I don't mess with snakes.
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And so I wasn't too
happy about finding a nine-foot snake myself. So I call the fire department.
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The firemen started
drilling holes in the floor joist
of this lady's house. We were down to the last floor
o joist, one of the fireman
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finished drilling the holes. And I saw him jump back,
and we found the snake. And we had no way
of getting it out.
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I squirted the snake
with pepper gas. And when I did, this snake
just sort of went wild.
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Its tail flipped out. And three volunteer
firemen grabbed the snake about the tail.
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And when the snake let
go, it let go all at once. And it fell and just a group
of firemen, so everybody
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takes off and running. And he starts raring up,
like he's gonna bite. So my other policeman went
in and shot at it twice,
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and I went and shot the snake
in the head and killed it. And I believe right now if
we'd a had a video of that,
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we'd be rich people. [laughter] [applause] -On the old TV show,
"Candid Camera,"
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you never knew
when host Alan Funt was going to appear from
behind a two-way mirror.
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I think you'll see some
striking similarities reflected in our next story. Take a good look.
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-Coming to work, and I
was wearing my uniform with a civilian
coat over the top.
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And I was stopping off
in the morning to one of her favorite spots, Donut
World to pick up some donuts
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for the men and
women of our unit before we started the day off. I went inside the
donut store, and I
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had my civilian
coat over the top. And when I turned around after
I got the donuts and the coffee,
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there was someone
breaking into my auto. So I took my coat off,
put the donuts down--
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didn't want to do
that-- but went outside, tapped the guy on the shoulder. He had a coat hanger going
in the side of my car.
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I asked him what he was doing,
he said he lost his keys, and it was his uncle's car.
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And he have to get in
the car right away, get it back to his uncle. And we had a few
words out there,
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but the conversation was over,
that he was not my nephew. The equipment in there was
police equipment in there.
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And he was under arrest. [applause] -And now with news found
tangled in the world wide web.
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Here's Daniel with
ADC headlines. [applause] -They were up a creek
without a paddle.
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In Washington state, several
Boeing aircraft employees successfully stole a life
raft from a 747 plane
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and soon thereafter took it
for a float on a nearby river. But their hearts sank
when they noticed a Coast
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Guard helicopter hovering above. Apparently none of them realized
that an emergency locator
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automatically activates
when a raft is inflated. Beep, beep, beep. You know how young
guys love to impress
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the girls with flashy cars? Get this. A 15-year-old boy in
Middletown, Connecticut,
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was driving a different
vehicle every time he visited his girlfriend. Oh, Bobby, cool Mustang.
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Oh, Bobby, I love
your new Blazer. Whoa, smokin' Yugo, Bobby. Apparently she
wasn't savvy enough
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to figure out that his hot
cars had been hardwired. In fact, the young car hood
went through 16 vehicles
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in two months. Police caught up with Romeo
when they traced his cell phone calls made from the vehicles
to naive Juliet's house.
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And now wherefore art her Romeo? Juvenile detention
is my guess, ah? It was a tense moment
in the courtroom.
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The district attorney
motioned to the two defendants and asked the victim of an
armed robbery, who was seated
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on the stand, which one of
these two men had the shotgun? Truly, without thinking,
one of the defendants
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quickly raised his hand. In a feeble attempt at covering
for his feeble-minded client,
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the defendant's attorney stood
and said, your honor, may the record reflect
that my client
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needs to use the restroom. And that closes the
file on ADC headlines, news ripped from
somewhere near the back
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of your local newspaper. Debbie? [applause] -OK, stop me if
you've heard this one.
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A priest, an old
lady, and a crook are stopped at a roadblock. You haven't heard it?
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Well, instead of me
giving you the punchline, let's go to Sergeant Norman
Denton in Carlsbad, New Mexico,
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for his special delivery. [music playing] -New Mexico has a law that
allows us to do driver's
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license insurance and
registration checks. And I was at one of
those roadblocks.
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Well, three cars
came in on my road. As I was looking at them,
I knew the first one.
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My dad used to own
a funeral home, and he was a Catholic priest. So I was talking with him.
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And as I was talking with
him, the next two vehicles pulled up. One was an old lady in her
brand new Crown Victoria,
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and then what I call a scumbag. I knew from looking
at him he was a doper. I thought, well, I'll
just kind of set him up.
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So talking to the
priest, I said, Father, do you mind if I check
your vehicle out?
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And the priest,
well, Norman, why? And I said, well, I really
don't have time to tell you now.
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But I'll tell you later. So he opens the back door. We pull the backseat out. I open the trunk
up, look through it,
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put everything back. And I said, oh, I'll call you
later on and tell you about it.
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He drives off, and
the old lady pulls up. Brand new car, has a
sticker in the window.
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And I said, ma'am, you know
we're thinking about getting some of these Crown
Vics for police cars.
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You mind if we look
your vehicle over? And of course, older
people love to help cops.
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-Oh, I would love to. -Boy, she jumped out of the
car, opened the back doors. I look inside.
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She opened the trunk. We pulled the spare tire
out, and put it all back. And I thank her.
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Now I'm just standing there,
and I watch her drive off. Well, the scumbag pulls up.
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And I just turned around
and looked at him. I said, hi. He's sitting there
behind the wheel,
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just shaking and sweating. He goes, officer, I-- I
knew you checked them, so I know you're
going to get me.
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And he reaches down
and hands me just under three pounds of marijuana. -It's marijuana.
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I'm sorry. -All I said was hi to him. That was the easiest
drug bust I ever got.
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[applause] -When the commotion started
at a large toy store, the employees must've
thought the Rock 'Em
00:15:00
Sock 'Em Robots
had come to life. But that's not the
case in this case. But to find out just who was
getting their blocks knocked
00:15:07
off, let's go to North
Miami Beach, Florida. -This is a story about
two dumb criminals
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that we found at Toys
R Us in our city. I call them dumb and dumber. A couple years ago,
it was the night
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of December 24th, the
day before Christmas. And these two brothers
decided that they
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were going to rob Toys R Us. They went into the store while
the store was very crowded.
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And they went into
the men's room. They pushed up
the ceiling tiles, and they climbed
up into the roof.
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And they hid up on top of
the air conditioning duct. Well, they were sitting there
for quite a period of time,
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waiting, and they started
talking in a low voice. But they started
arguing with each other.
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The stock boy who
was in the stockroom right next to the bathroom
heard voices from the ceiling.
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So he called his
store manager over. And the store manager
came in, and they both looked up into the ceiling.
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And they heard voices
from the ceiling. So they didn't
know what was going on, so they called the police.
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We get there, and
the officer comes in. And he's listening
to the store manager.
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They push up the ceiling tiles. They bring in a K-9 dog. And they say, OK,
this is the police.
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We know you're up there. Come on down. Well, nothing happened. So we get the dog barking
and said, all right.
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We're going to send up the dog
if you don't come down now. Can you see the K-9 officer
throwing his dog in the air?
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It would never happen. But the dog's barking. They got scared. They came down. They had radio, a walkie-talkie,
and they were in communication
00:16:30
with somebody in
the parking lot, and as soon as that person who
was probably in the getaway car
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saw the police, he
was a dumb, dumb, and dumbest, because
he took off and left this friends sitting
in the store.
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It was quite a crime, a crime
that almost was pulled off. [music playing] NARRATOR: In Wyoming, it's
illegal to take a picture
00:16:55
of a rabbit during
the month of June. [applause] -You've heard the
expression, he was
00:17:02
so drunk he couldn't
see straight? Well, we can go you one better. -It really happened
in Logan, Utah,
00:17:07
and we're not making this up. [music playing] -I was on patrol here
in Logan and working
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the Center Street area. And this car came
off of Center Street, and it was all over the road.
00:17:21
It was having trouble working
the clutch, and the gas pedal, and a new driver, and
there was no traffic,
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so I followed it for
about a block and a half, and it just maintained
this driving pattern.
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And I was able to do a
traffic stop on it a couple blocks down the
road on First West.
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I approached the vehicle and
made contact with the driver and detected an odor of
alcohol coming from the car.
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And then I recognized
the parties. And I'd known them
from prior contacts and asked the driver
to step out and started
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asking him why he was driving. And he began to inform me that
it's because he and his buddy
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had been out drinking,
and they had determined that he had had the
least amount of alcohol.
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And he'd be the safest driver. And I confirmed that story
with the other passenger,
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and then went back to
the driver and said, I appreciate, you know, the
integrity you're showing
00:18:12
and your care and concern
for the citizens of Logan, but you're blind. Why are you driving?
00:18:20
And how did you drive this car? And he says, well, we thought
that my partner was the most
00:18:25
intoxicated, so he would tell
me right or left, or more gas, or break, or-- and so
they had determined
00:18:30
that a blind guy driving
this car away from the bar would be a lot better than
the drunk guy driving it.
00:18:35
They both had too much to
drink, and they both ended up being arrested for
intoxication and DUI.
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[applause] -Great idea. Now I feel like Medusa. -And I feel like Eva Gabor on
"Green Acres." (ACCENT) Oliver!
00:18:53
-This boa was definitely
a better look for you. -Yeah, no. I know. I think-- -I think it's time we said some
very fast goodbyes, please.
00:19:00
-What, what, you're nervous? -Yes. -Come on, you know
in the wild he eats wombats bigger than you?
00:19:04
-[laughs]
-Yeah, oh yeah. -Can we hurry this along? -Yeah, huge. -Where is he? Where's his head?
00:19:09
What's he doing? -He's just right there,
having a good time. -Is he in my hood? -Yeah.
00:19:13
-Snakes in my hood, OK. Hey, if you've got
a lead on a story, or you just can't wait for more
state-of-the-art stupidity,
00:19:17
hurry and write this down. Visit our website,
www.dumbcrimes.com. -He's tightening.
00:19:22
He's starting to tighten. -We want to thank
you for joining us and extend our gratitude
to the law enforcement
00:19:27
officers who make
this show possible. Every day they lay
their lives on the line
00:19:31
to keep us save
from the stupidity of would-be criminals. Isn't that a nice thing?
00:19:34
-[laughs] Yes, it is. -Yeah. Would you like to
discuss it at length? -No! Come on!
00:19:39
As always, we hope
that we've all learned from others' mistakes. -But if you haven't, we
just might see you next week
00:19:44
on "America's
Dumbest Criminals." -Bye-bye! [applause] [music playing]