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NARRATOR: This is
an ADC Warning. The crimes you're
about to see are true. Only the names were changed
to protect the ignorant.
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[music playing] Tonight on "America's
Dumbest Criminals," you'll see our first
twin dumb criminals,
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actual surveillance cam
footage you won't believe, and Rin Tin Tin meets a dummy.
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These are just a few of
America's Dumbest Criminals. -Hi and welcome. I'm Daniel Butler.
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We've got more
criminals on this show then you can shake
at night stick at. All dumb, all the
time, all for you.
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Here come America's
Dumbest Criminals. NARRATOR: And now Ed
Leach of Birmingham tells us how he
conned twin con men.
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-We were looking for
another wanted felon had a warrant on him. There were two brothers who
always used each other's names.
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And I knew the
difference between them. -So how you doing, Jim? Everything going OK?
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-Yeah, it's OK, yeah. -You, uh, you haven't see
your brother around anywhere have you?
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-No. -I stopped one of them. And I was just talking
to him and he'd given me his righteous name because he
knew that I knew his true name.
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Well, his brother was
who I was looking for. And I saw him walking by one
of the businesses on our beat
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and I called out him
using his brother's name that was standing
right in front of me.
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And he answered
me and came to me. And I stood there and
he walked up to me, and I said, hi, how ya
doing, how things going?
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He said, oh I'm
fine Officer Leach. I said well I got some bad news. You are Joe and you-- I
said you're under arrest.
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What, not me. And I said no, yes you. And he just shook his head. I said, you just fell for
your own game that's all.
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They look alike,
they think a like. NARRATOR: In Virginia,
it used to be illegal to keep a
bathtub inside your home.
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Here the first
families of Virginia gather to take care of
their personal hygiene.
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Next, bewildered
car thieves turned robbers have to stay one step
ahead of the law on foot.
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Planning to rob the bank
just two blocks away, these two wheeless
wonders figured
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they'd probably
need a getaway car. Not seeing anything that
really caught their eye,
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they decided a pick-up
truck would do just as well. After hot wiring the
truck, they drove
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down the street to the bank. Pulling on ski masks, they
went inside to rob the bank
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and they left their
getaway truck running. Meanwhile, the owner
of the pickup truck
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returned to find his
pickup truck gone. -Truck! NARRATOR: The man
stormed off looking
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for his truck or a payphone so
he could call the police when he walked by the bank--
the same bank being robbed
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by the same two guys
who stole his truck. He didn't know that, but he did
know was truck so he was gone.
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As he turned the corner the
untimely two exited the bank and ran to where they parked the
stolen truck to find it stolen.
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With no means of escape
and being the only two guys on the street with
ski masks and bank bags,
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it was only moments
before they were arrested and given
a ride to jail. Repossession is
10/10 of the law.
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Now actual surveillance
cam footage of a guy we call
Hi Mom, I'm On TV. This man just did a crack
cocaine deal on video
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with an undercover officer
when he discovers the camera. So what does he do? He walks right up
to the camera giving
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the police a great ID in court. Officer Jeb Johnston tells us
of a sneaky leather thief who
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could get away with
stealing in his heart but it's his soul
that catches him. -There's stickers in them.
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They're little inventory
control stickers where they put on any jackets
or any high dollar item.
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Like if you walked out of a
store and set off an alarm, prevent shoplifting,
catch you without paying.
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This guy comes
into the store just to steal leather
jackets apparently. So he comes in there and he's
back in the dressing room
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flicking the little
stickers off on the ground, checking the sleeves,
checking the liners,
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make sure he's got them all. So he thought he had them all. So then he starts heading
for the door and all
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of a sudden the alarm goes off.
-Wait, what you got here? What you got here. What you going off for?
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-Look man. -Hey this is my coat. -So security comes around
and they grab a hold of him
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and, uh, they couldn't figure
out why the alarm sounded, so then they they got
back talking to him
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and looked on the
bottom of his shoe and when he was flicking them
off he thought he was sly.
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He had stepped on one. And that's how he got caught. NARRATOR: Now he's stuck in
the witless protection program.
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Coming up, a dumb criminal
with a bag full of trouble. NARRATOR: Welcome back. Now Don Parker tells us
about some dumb dope dealers
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who answered an ad in
the lost and dumbfounded. -Narcotics cases frequently
have interesting twists.
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I think that this one probably
reflected, to me anyway, the quintessentially
dumb criminal in action.
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Guy lived in the subdivisions,
walking down the street, walking his dog, finds
a couple of purses,
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if you could believe
this, in the weeds next to the side of the road. He opens up these
purses, finds that they
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have some brick shaped
objects in there. About the same size
and shape as a brick
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wrapped up in duct tape. They don't look like anything
he expected to caught find it
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in a purse so he calls
the Sheriff's department. We send a patrol
deputy out there,
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he opens up the bricks,
full of white powder. He does a quick field
test, almost pure cocaine.
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Calls a narcotics section, they
send some people out there, they confiscate
the purses and they
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decide they're going
to stake out the place. They can't imagine why somebody
has left almost $200,000
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worth of cocaine on the side
of the road in some purses, but there willing to
try, stake out the place,
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all right, this
little wooded area. Time goes by, 2:00, 3:00
in the morning, no activity
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whatsoever. They're really getting
bored, as you might expect. They're tired, they're sleepy,
they've worked all day long.
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Finally one of them
comes up with what he thinks is a brainstorm. He finds an old scrap of paper
on the floor of the cruiser
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car, writes on the back to
the paper, "We have found your purses, large
reward expected."
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Then puts it on a
stick and places it right where the purse was. He leaves a phone
number one it, it's
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one of those confidential
phone numbers. It bypasses the switchboard and
rings in the narcotics section.
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Two narcs go home. They're tired, they get up
the next day come to work. Well seemed like a
good idea at the time
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but as you can well imagine
by the time they told the Lieutenant, and
some of their coworkers,
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this was a pretty funny story. What, do you think
they're going to call us to buy their dope back?
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Everybody just kidding
them all day long. They're having to take
grief and the kidding
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continued until about
3:00 in the afternoon when we got a phone call. Guy calls up and says, "You
say you got my purses."
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Calling this confidential
number remember. One of the female
narcs answers the phone
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and said, "Yeah, we got them. We want $10,000 in cash or you
don't get the purses back."
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Guy says, I'm not paying that. She said fine, hangs up. Phone rings again he
says, OK, OK $10,000.
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They make an arrangement to go
out to a local shopping center, describe a particular
phone booth.
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They show up we've got
to place surrounded with off-duty deputies and narcs
and everybody in plainclothes.
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Car full of people show up. Three guys in the car. One of them gets out, he's
got a big old shopping bag.
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Walks across the street, we've
got a male and a female agent standing by this
particular phone booth.
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He looks at them,
they look at him. He says you got my purses? And the lady got the
purses under the arm.
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Said sure, said you got
our money, says right. -On the ground on
the ground now.
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-Drop the weapon! [yelling] -Face down on the ground. -We confiscated one
car, made three arrests,
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got $10,000 in cash, we got
a couple of kilos of cocaine, and of course we got two Gucci
purses, very nice purses.
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PT Barnum said there was
one born every minute, those guys definitely qualified.
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-You can catch some of the
criminals all the time, and all of the criminals
some of the time,
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but you can't get all the
criminals all the time. Except the dumb ones. NARRATOR: In
Pulaski Illinois, it
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used to be against the law
to throw snowballs at trees. Shortly after the law
was passed the Pulaskians
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turned on one another. Now, actual footage we call
Fourth Time's the Charm. This is actual footage of the
police busting the same house
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for the fourth time
in eight months. Each time they found
cocaine and weapons. You'd think they
would at least move.
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Next up, a dumb criminal returns
to the scene of the crime because he forgot he
committed the crime.
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-I got dispatched to a
suspicious person call in a rural area about a
guy knocking on doors.
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So I arrived in the
area and immediately I located a guy
in the front yard holding a beer in his hand.
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So I approached him and
asking him what he was doing, and he explained to
me that he was lost.
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I realized that he
was intoxicated. And he said sir, I've been
with my friends all night,
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but they put me out of
the vehicle and left me. I said, well OK. He said will you please take
me to the nearest pay phone
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and I'll call a taxi
and be out here. I said certainly. So I'll put him in the car
and we drove down the road
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and we approached the
store and I let him out of the car to use the phone. He walked towards the phone and
all of a sudden the store clerk
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comes running out of the
store hollering at me and the suspect, saying,
"Hey that guy right there,
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he just stoled a 12 pack of
beer not two hours ago from " And I said OK. And you could see it
all over the suspect,
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he was like, he
says, I'm caught. So placed him under arrest
and he told me on the way
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to the jail he says,
sir I can't believe it. He says, I can not believe that
I got the Sheriffs Department
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to take me to a place
that I had stole something two hours later. He says, sir I'm guilty, I know.
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Guilty. NARRATOR: Now he really needs
to make that phone call. Inside the court room
for trial and error.
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From the witness stand,
testimony about a dumb criminal who was an eye witless
to his own crime.
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-Mr. Lance, did
you get a good look at the guy who robbed
your drugstore? -Oh, well, we saw each other
when he first walked in.
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Then he uh, he pulled a trash
bag over his head and nobody could see anything. What do you mean?
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Well, he forgot to cut
eye holes in the bag. NARRATOR: Coming up
later, dumb criminals
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who make a change for the worst
on America's Dumbest Criminals. [music playing] Birmingham's Larry McDonald,
with the help of a canine unit,
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sees a dumb criminal lose
his grip and gain an octave. -I was at a beauty shop, which
was located in a old building.
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And there were several
cars got there, canine unit got and
everything, and we could hear the burglar
moving around inside.
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And uh, after a few
minutes we'd determined he'd get up in the ceiling. And so uh, the more we
stayed there, the more we
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heard him moving around, and we
figured out that he was trying to get from that building
over into another building
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through the firewall. And so we hollered
and told him that we were fixing to send a canine in.
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And so he didn't come out
so we took the dog inside. It's a dog that had a either
good or bad reputation
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according to who
you are and which way you looking at it from. And so we came in
there and the burglar
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apparently heard the dog. So he got to try to come
down and he slipped and fell from someplace higher than the
original ceiling and he split
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the beam with his legs and
uh-- which caused him to hurt tremendously because
he apparently burst
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or came close to
bursting his privates. And he-- both of his feet came
down through the new ceiling
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and so he was straddle
the beam with both feet sticking out the new ceiling. And he could move,
didn't want to move.
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And we had to get the fire
department, the paramedics, to come and get him off
the ceiling, off the beam,
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out of the ceiling because
he was in tremendous pain and he didn't want
us to fool with him.
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NARRATOR: Painful
instant justice. In Georgia, it used to be
against the law for chickens
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to across the street. Here, a large
group of geese mock the chickens by
opening crossing I-20.
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Now a story about vanity
and how a small time house burglar goes from
rags to prison.
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To the police, Cecil Warren
had two reputations-- One for being a thief,
the other for having
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the shiniest shoes
in Roanoke Virginia. It wasn't uncommon
for our vain criminal
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to put a spit shine on
them several times a day. He even carried around his
own monogrammed shoeshine rag.
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It was his trademark. One day he decided
to break into a house by climbing into a window.
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Uh oh, watch those shoes, Cecil. Once inside, he took
several thousand dollars worth of jewelry.
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But it wasn't until Cecil was
about ready to leave that he noticed scratches on his
shoes that were caused when
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he scrambled through the window. Cecil couldn't stand
it, so he immediately got out his monogram
shoeshine rag
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and began to buff his shoes. Within moments, he had a
great high gloss sheen again.
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And Cecil was back
out on the streets. But not for long. He was feeling so good about
the robbery and his shoes
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that he left his
trademark monogrammed rag lying on the floor of the house. For our dumb criminal,
it was a fatal mistake.
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For the police, it was
as good as a fingerprint. A shining example of stupidity.
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ADC quiz number 329. The Chinese Triad Societies
hold a world's record. What record do they hold?
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Is it for A, The
largest manufacturer of adjustable beltless slacks? B, the largest
criminal organization.
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Or C, the most elaborate
secret handshake? The correct answer is B, Largest
criminal organization actually
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they're twelfth in most
elaborate handshakes, behind the Shriners. We've all heard that great
minds think alike well
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this next story is proof
that weak minds do too. -We had some burglars
come over into our city
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from a neighboring jurisdiction
to get over into our city they swam across a canal, I
don't know why could've ran
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across a bridge but-- When
they got over here obviously they were soaking wet. We're looking around the
neighborhood for these bad guys
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and I kind of had a
little gut feeling they might be in this
one particular house
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and, so sure enough the
people whose house I thought these guys might have
been in came home.
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Someone had been in their house. Well, wasn't real hard to find
out who, it was the bad guys
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we've been looking for
because when they changed out of the their, uh, their
wet clothes into the close
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they found into
the home they, uh, left their Florida
identification cards and driver's license inside
the home they had broken into.
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So wasn't real
tough to find them. -I see some of that
water and apparently seeped into the brain.
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And now, the actual
responses of men caught in a prostitution sting. -Please don't arrest me,
I'm gonna lose my job.
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-I just asked her
what $40 would get, I probably broke the camera. -Don't be leaning on me,
I promise I won't never
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do it again, I swear I won't. NARRATOR: Welcome back. Next a drug dealer who is
overdrawn at the memory bank.
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-We had bought some drugs from
an individual, arrested him, and about a month later
we got some information
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he was still selling some drugs. So we got in touch
with him and I met him in a shopping center
parking lot intending
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to buy a couple pounds
of marijuana from him. -Looking to buy? -Yeah, got it on you?
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-Sure. -Let's check it out. -And during the
pulmonary negotiations he kept telling
myself and my partner
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that we should look
like the policeman that had busted him a month ago. -Hey aren't you two guys the
cops that busted me last month?
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-Ah man. -No, man. We get that all the time. I got one of them cop
faces or something.
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-Can't be too careful, you know. -I know, I know. -And we told him
that we've heard that
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from a lot of people, that we
look like a couple policemen. So we continue to negotiate
and a short time later he
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did sell us the two
pounds of marijuana. When we arrested him, the
first words out his mouth
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was "I knew you were cops." He said-- -I just had to try. -A classic case of
double indumbnity.
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-And with that, we come to
the end of another show. Our continued thanks
to police officers
00:18:27
across the nation
for their stories. I'm Daniel Butler saying don't
be dumb, don't break the law.
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So long. [music playing] [music playing]