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DANIEL: Tonight on "America's
Dumbest Criminals." If their getaway planning
included running around
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in circles, these guys
are following it to a tee. This man may think he's
Houdini, but as you'll see,
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he's more like Hou-dummy. And the blockhead
in this cell block passes a note that'll leave
him fumbling for a response.
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Kick back and relax as
you'll watch the good guys punt the bad guys
right into prison
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on "America's
Dumbest Criminals." [music playing] [applause] Glad you're with us tonight.
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-Hi. -Debbie, what's the biggest
thing you've ever won? Huh? -You mean like in a
contest or giveaway?
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-Yeah, yeah, school
cakewalk, Powerball, lotto, anything like that? -OK, an apple pie at McDonald's.
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-OK. Wow. -But now you strike
me as someone who good fortune
just smiles upon. -Actually, it's because he's
laughing at me at the irony,
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you know, of it. -What's your biggest win? -I-- the Egg McMuffin, actually. I won the Egg McMuffin,
got actual pork in there.
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-Well, everybody comes
out a winner tonight except for the dumb
crooks, of course.
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-Oh, but they think they're on
the verge of scoring big time. Take our first
story, for example.
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Police in the Bronx
used a sting operations to round up dozens of suspects
with outstanding warrants.
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The bait? Winning a contest. -And did they fall for it? -Oh yeah. -Hook, line, and sinker.
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Watch as police officers
real in a boatload of crook.s [music playing] DEBBIE: You too
could be a winner.
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All it took to nab
these wanted criminals was the lure of receiving money. Surprise!
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This guy even took a 2,000-mile
bus ride to claim his cash. -Well, at first
he wanted to know
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how much money he
was getting back. Uh, we told him,
well, let me check the computer before
you get too excited.
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We had a slowly
kind of real him in. DEBBIE: The catch of the day
was wanted for attempted murder.
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And he even suspected a sting. -He knew it was a sting. He knew he was
gonna get-- he knew.
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He knew. But he still came. I said, you know, why
did you come here? Why did you come?
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He says, it's 'cause
I needed the money. DEBBIE: I hope the guy
with the bus ticket
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didn't buy a round trip ticket. [applause] -OK. He knew it was a
sting, but he went
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anyway, because he
needed the money. Oh, yeah. There's some smarts
for you, huh?
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-And our next guy is no
Fulbright scholar either. He's a car thief with
his brain on auto pilot.
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-Now he thought that some
good-natured soul had found his missing wallet
and just wanted
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to give it back to
its rightful owner. Well, he's partially right. See what we mean.
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-I'd received a call to go
and process a stolen car that had been recovered
in a vacant field.
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When I got down there, the first
thing that caught my attention was that there was a wallet
laying in the front seat.
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Naturally, we
looked in the wallet and found a driver's
license, which did not belong to the registered
owner of the car.
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On a hunch, I called the person
who's driver's license it was. [phone ringing] -Hello?
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Yeah, yeah, this is him. -And told him that I
had found his driver's license and wallet.
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And would he like to come
down to the police department to recover it? -Yeah, that'd be fine.
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Yeah, I'll be there. Thanks, sir. Buh-bye. -He was quite excited
that we'd found it
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and was very complimentary and
though we'd done a great job and just so excited to get
his money and his driver's
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license back, he
couldn't stand it. -Hey, Mr. G? -Yeah. -Here's that wallet we found.
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-Oh, thank you, sir.
Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. -Glad we could be
of service to you.
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-And as if I was taking a
report on found property, I asked him when we had
last seen his wallet.
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He told me he just
couldn't remember. So I asked him, well, where
all had you been that night?
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-I was at a restaurant
and, well, went to a game. -And he named off four or five
places, including the apartment
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complex where the car
had been stolen from. At that point, I
asked him, are you sure you didn't just leave that
wallet in that '78 Plymouth?
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-What! -You could just see
his shoulders sag. Sometimes they leave
their calling cards.
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Sometimes they leave
their driver's license. [applause] -Yeah. -Never leave your wallet in
a car you've just stolen.
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-Yeah, it's bad for them. It really is. -Sometimes crooks
think they're being so clever when they
try to out-fox police.
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-Yeah, our next guy
thought he'd stash his drugs in his swimming pool. But based on his logic,
he's apparently tried diving
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into the shallow end a few
too many times, I think. -He leaves us, Something
to Remember Me By.
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[music playing] -I was working narcotics
and working undercover, and I got a call from
another narcotics officer
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that we had a guy in our
town that was selling drugs. And the guy was infamous
for flushing the drugs down
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the toilet before the police
could get in the door. So I put our undercover
officers around the guy's house.
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And when everybody was ready,
I got on the cellular phone. And I was about a
block from his house.
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And I call him up on
the cellular phone, and I tell the guy, hey man. I just got out of the
jail, and I was in there.
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And there were a couple
of narcotics officers. And they had a search
warrant, and they were talking
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to somebody about
some guy named Henry. And they're gonna
come down there, and they're gonna
hit your house.
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Man, if you've got
anything in there, you better get it out of there. And the guy goes,
hey, what's your name?
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And I told him, my name's Jim. And the guy goes,
oh, thanks a lot. That's great.
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Hangs up on me. 30 seconds later, the guy comes
running out the front door. And he's got a bag,
and he's looking around
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back and forth in a total panic. And he sees one of
our undercover guys, and he yells out like a scream,
and he runs into his backyard.
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And the next thing
we hear is [splash]. So we run over to the fence,
and we look in the fence,
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just as we catch him
going in the house. So we get the guy
out of the house. And we walk him back here, and
we tell him, get down there
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in the pool and get the drugs. And what he had done is pull
the light out of the pool
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and stuffed the drugs
behind the light. So he pulls the drugs out,
and he hands them to us.
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And I'm thinking, all
the drugs are gone. It's all in the pool. And inside the bag, he's
got it all sealed nice
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for us in a Ziploc bag that
protected it from the water. So we got all his drugs.
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And I asked him, I said, how
come you came running out the front door with all
the drugs in your hand?
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And he says, hey some guy
called me on the phone and told me you
guys were coming.
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I said, no kidding. I said, what was his name? He thinks a minute. He goes, his name was Jim.
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And I said, glad to meet you. And the guy looks at me. And he hangs his head down low.
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He says, you guys knew I
would do that, didn't ya? I said, yep, sure did. He goes, I can't
believe how dumb I am.
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[applause] [music playing] DANIEL: In Oklahoma, you
can be fined, arrested, or jailed for making
ugly faces at a dog.
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[applause] -Yeah, but what if
the dog starts it? I guess that's a matter
for the courts to decide.
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You know, some
people will resort to any form of manipulation
at their disposal to weasel out of a ticket.
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One of the more
popular is the I'm a friend of a lot of
police officers approach.
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Well using this
buddy-buddy system blew up in our next
guy's face in a big way. We got a probo
Utah for a shining
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example of America's
dumbest excuses. [music playing] -I was running radar
in a residential area.
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It's a 25 mile an hour zone. I clocked a vehicle doing 40. I finally got him pulled over.
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He immediately started to
try to get out of a citation. He gave another trooper's
name and a deputy sheriff's
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name that was in the area. He said, my next door
neighbor married a probo cop. I know him real well.
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I said, oh, what's his name? Oh, his name's Scott Frasier. -Officer Frasier. -Officer Frasier.
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-Yeah, Scott Frasier. -That's me. I know him, good looking guy. -Yeah. -Yeah. I never met him before.
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-I went to school with
his wife and stuff. He's a good guy. -Really? I asked him, hey,
is he a good guy?
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I don't know him. He's, oh, he's a great guy. I've known him for a long time. That's probably
the dumbest excuse
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I've heard to get
out of a citation. Needless to say,
he got one anyone. [applause]
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-Liar, liar, pants on fire. Hey, Daniel, should we sing,
"It's a Small World After All?"
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-No, maybe for you. But I'm 6' 4". But it's hard to know just
how tall our next crook is.
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Why? Because she spends
so much of her time crawling around on the floor. How do we know this?
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She was scurrying about in plain
view of a surveillance camera that caught her
sneaky maneuvers.
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Let's take a peek at
our itsy bitsy spider. [music playing] DANIEL: She stowed
away in a back room
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of this beverage store. It closed, then nosed
around, completely unaware of this camera
watching her every move.
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-This is very unique. In fact, it's probably
the most unique crime I have worked since
being in investigations.
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DANIEL: She would go
snooping, set off an alarm, then hurry back to
her hiding place.
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After police responded several
times and saw no problems, the alarm was turned off.
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That's when she made
her escape, taking a money order machine
and some cash. But she left one of the owners
with a case of the willies.
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-Walked by there so many times,
and it's like, you know, just thinking about her being
there while you walk by
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and talking and stuff. It's just a weird feeling. DANIEL: When authorities
came knocking on her door,
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it was her turn
for weird feelings. The game was over, and
she won't be playing hide and seek for
quite some time.
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[applause] -One of my favorite
movies is "The Fugitive." Harrison Ford beats
the odds to gain
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his freedom after a
prison bus crashes. Now the only thing this would-be
escape beats is his head.
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Watch a getaway that
gets nowhere fast. -We were on patrol
one night when we got a radio
call that there was
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an escapee from one
of the other officers. We were in the area, so we went
to the scene of the escape.
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And there was a kid
running with his hands handcuffed behind his back. And we figured that must
be him, so we gave chase.
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The kid was running
as fast as he could trying to
get away from us. We were in a
shopping center area
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that had a stairwell that
went to two different levels. He ran down the stairs, tripped,
and before I could get to him,
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he was up again and
he was running again. He went down the
other set of stairs, and I knew that he
was faster than I was,
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so I threw my night stick at
his feet to try and trip him. When I threw it, I missed.
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And he focused on
the night stick, and he turned around, still
running full speed ahead.
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He didn't see it coming. And he turned
around just in time for his nose to make contact
with the side of the van.
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He was going so
fast that it turned him off like a light switch. He fell down, and then he
was taken into custody.
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And he probably the
dumbest criminal I ever came across in my tour with
Anchorage Police Department.
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[applause] -Here's Daniel
with ABC headlines. [music playing] -All the usual suspects were
standing in the line up.
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The detective asked each
man to repeat the words, "Give me all your
money or I'll shoot."
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But the true criminal
couldn't contain himself. He corrected the
officer by shouting,
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that's not what I said! Oops. OK. Neighbors got an eyeful when
they attended a neighborhood
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watch meeting hosted by a
couple in their community of Oroville, California. The wife was wearing a dress
stolen from one neighbor
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and a stolen TV from another
neighbor was in plain view. When a search warrant was
issued, $9,000 in stolen goods
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were recovered from the
neighborhood watch meeting. [laughter] Old habits are hard to break .
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That was apparently the
case with a man in Boulder who immediately,
after being released,
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went out to the
courthouse parking lot and stole the judge's car. OK. And that closes the
file on ADC headlines,
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news ripped from
somewhere near the back of your local newspaper. Debbie? [applause]
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-When you think of
Ivy League schools, you think of grand
traditions, massive libraries,
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scholarly pursuits,
and great big tuitions. Well, one such school seemed
to have people engaging
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in an independent
study that was hardly sanctioned by the
dean-- counterfeiting.
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I suppose the privileged
can never be too privileged. Class is now in session
for counterfeiting 101.
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Many young people go
to college so they eventually can make more money. But four dumb criminals
at Columbia University
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took that thought
one step too far. They did make money, but
it was in the basement
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of the journalism school. -Here we are at journalism,
which is supposed to spread
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the truth to this country
and the world at large. And we have dishonest
people in the basement
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making dollar bills. It sucked. DEBBIE: Three former
Columbia University students
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and another man
used a color copier to manufacture 20,000 $20 bills. After extensive lab
tests, the phony bills
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were traced to the copier
in the Printing and Services Department located
in the basement.
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-I feel like a
place like Columbia, people should be a little
more aware of what's going on
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in the-- you know, not
some stupid things. DEBBIE: All four were arrested
and Secret Service agents
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recovered about
$75,000 in bogus bills as well as cutting equipment. The four copycats may not have
careers in journalism anymore,
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but their future in
sales-- rather cells-- looks pretty good. [applause] -Interesting
scholarship opportunity.
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You know, every once in awhile
we all call wrong numbers. But here's the
story of a call girl
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who couldn't have
picked a wrong-er number if she dialed all day. It's a perfect
example of I'm where?
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You're who? -I'm an undercover
narcotics investigator from the Abilene, Taylor
County, Texas are.
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One day I was out checking some
possible narcotics trafficking location when I get
a page on my pager.
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And upon checking the
number, I realized that it was not a number
I was familiar with.
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I call the number back, and
a female answered the phone. I just said hello and
talked to her a little bit.
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When I asked her
what she was doing, she said she was looking for me. We visited back and
forth over the phone
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for about 10 or 15
minutes, just talking. And I finally deduced
that they-- this
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lady I was talking to--
was a working woman. She actually thought I was
somebody she had met the day
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before that had given her a
pager number.' after talking to her and visiting with her,
I decided that I would go ahead
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and go along with it
and see if it'd be any potential to make a case. And I told her that I would have
to get back in touch with her
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later on in the day, that
I was tied up at work, and what have you. And in reality,
what I needed to do
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was get the vehicle
wired for audio and video so we would have it for
the criminal investigation.
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I went back to my office
where she paged me at least two other times. And when I called her
back, we discussed price.
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And she assured me that for
$40, the sky was the limit. And I even talked her
into letting me bring
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a buddy of mine along,
and she had a friend also. We set up a time and drove
to a predetermined location.
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And they came out, and we
picked them up in the vehicle, drove a short distance
to a motel location.
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When we pulled into the motel,
they were placed under arrest and were quite surprised.
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Before transporting them to
jail, after visiting with them, it was realized that the
number that they had dialed one
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digit off from my pager number. Sometimes all it takes
is one wrong number to catch a dumb criminal.
00:16:07
-I'm Corporal Billy
Woods with Ocala Police Department in Ocala, California. This particularly
evening, we were
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running an operation
doing securities and checking certain
establishments and with motorcycles
and bicycle units.
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Well, this particular
motorcycle unit had caught a
burglar in progress. Well, the burglar had t
took the time to be quiet
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and he's doing his best
to get into the vehicle. But he got so frustrated that
he ended up breaking the window.
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But at the same
time, the officer caught him and he fled on foot. I ended up chasing
him, catching him
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on foot about 200 yards away. Both you hands. We ended up after we did a
little more investigating,
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it turns out, the vehicle
that he broke into-- Hey, man, you know
the door's open?
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-Man! -[laughs] [applause] [music playing] -Our final crook of
the evening stole
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his sister's
checkbook and her car. What he should have been in
the market for was brains.
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-Those two things got
him in plenty of trouble. But then he felt it
expedient to unwittingly rat
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on himself about something else. He provides the fodder for
tonight's edition of We're
00:17:39
Not Making This Up. [music playing] -What happened is we had a guy
that was a guest to the city.
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He'd been arrested earlier in
the day on some check fraud. He'd borrowed his
sister's checkbook
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and decided to go
write a couple checks. We brought him here, and
later on he called his sister.
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And she came down to
the police station to get the keys to her car
that he had borrowed also.
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When I was in having him sign
the property sheet to release the keys, he said, can I
borrow a piece of paper?
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-To write a note to my sister. -Yeah. Handed my pen and my notepad,
and he jotted a little note
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down saying sorry that he
had borrowed her checkbook and written some checks. -OK, don't read this,
but give it to my sister.
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-OK. He handed the notebook back
to me, left it at all open. When I was walking it out
to her, I happen to-- I
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happened to glance
down at the note. He wrote on the
bottom of the note. He says, whatever you do,
don't let anybody look
00:18:29
in the center
console of the car. So I took the note out to
her, showed her the note,
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and told her I was
concerned there might be some drugs in
the car and didn't want her to get in
trouble with it.
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So she went down with
me to car, looked in it. And sure enough, there
were methamphetamine
00:18:42
and some marijuana. He was dumb once
for the check fraud. He was dumb twice
for the second note.
00:18:48
So that makes him a dumb-dumb. [applause] -Sis, don't let anybody
look in the console.
00:18:54
No, really, sis. Oh, that's original. Well, I'm sure that he's the
one who needed consoling when
00:18:59
he realized what he'd done, huh? -Maybe it would cheer-- -Console. -I get it. Maybe it would cheer
him up to note that he'd
00:19:05
provided amusement
to our audience. What do you think? -Nah! -I don't think so, but I do
think that we're out of time.
00:19:12
Before we go, we want to say
thank you to the officers who helped us out tonight and all
the people in law enforcement
00:19:17
across the country who
help us around the clock by protecting us from bad guys. -This world would
be a scarier place
00:19:23
without you folks on the job. -If you've got a lead on a
story on a story or you just
00:19:27
can't wait till next week,
for more state-of-the-art stupidity, visit our website
at www.dumbcrimes.com.
00:19:34
-As always, we
hope that we've all learned from others' mistakes. -But if haven't, we just
might see you next week
00:19:40
on "America's
Dumbest Criminals." -Goodbye! [applause] [music playing]