Crime Doesn't Pay

I don’t understand why there are still criminals of any kind in this day and age, a time when you really can’t get away with anything. But yet there are dim-witted people out there who wake up one day and think to themselves “I’m going to rob a bank! Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Then all my money woes will be gone forever!” And so they shall be. But your “Uh-oh, I’m gonna be somebody’s bitch in prison” woes will just be starting.

There are closed circuit television cameras everywhere, people. Perhaps not as many as they have in England, where officials can peer into almost every aspect of your life, but unless you have been living in an ice fishing shack on Antarctica for the last 25 years, you know that at the very least, banks have cameras, for crying out loud. And guess what? Wearing that NY Jets ski mask to conceal your identity is pointless if you write the “Gimme all your money and no one gets hurt!” note on your own pre-printed-with-your-name deposit slip.

One of my favorites is when people get pulled over for speeding and the cop discovers 85 pounds of marijuana or a kilo of cocaine. I mean really. How incredibly clueless do you have to be? If I had as little as a single joint in my car there is no way I am going even one mile an hour over the limit. Stupid pot-heads. “Dude, go faster! Let’s see if we can go real fast and travel to the future and sell this pot for like, way more than it’s worth now! Whoa…what’s that light and noise behind us, dude? Is that the time tunnel sucking us back, or what?”

The other day I read about two very stupid criminals, one a shoplifter/petty thief, the other a car jacker. Brainless thief #1 decided to rob the same corner store in Brooklyn that he had been chased from earlier that day for trying to shoplift a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English 800 Malt Liquor. He must have been successful in stealing a bottle of the demon brew from one of the dozens of small stores all within a stone’s throw of each other that populate Brooklyn from one end to the other, because he grew a set of (drunken) balls and went back to the store from which he had been chased, and he accosted the owner for cash from the drawer. The owner handed him a few measly dollars and the thief stumbled outside and ran past a beat cop who happened to be right there. The cop chased the guy down the street, into a building, and up to an apartment. The cop knocked on the door and a different man answered. The cop mistook him for the drunken thief he was just chasing and arrested him. (Apparently stupidity is not confined to the “robber” side of “cops and robbers.”) But the real robber showed his true-but-dull colors because as the cop led the unfortunate look-alike away, the real thief shouted from his window to the cop, telling him how stupid he was for arresting the wrong guy. Guess what the cop did then? Yeah, he went back upstairs and arrested the mind-numbingly un-smart braggart. What a dumb ass.

And thief #2 has a story that is not as colorful but just as incredible on the idiot scale – it’s the story of a car thief who called cops repeatedly to brag about having gotten away with stealing a car. Except the brainiac was using his own cell phone, so the police were able to easily track him down and jail him. How dense can you really be? I mean, really? That's as bad as the kids who do stupid petty crimes, videotape themselves doing it, post it on YouTube, and then are surprised when they get arrested. But presumably we can blame their stupidity on raging hormones. A grown person has no excuse.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t bother breaking the law. You won't get away with it anyway, and you will end up on the pages of “Stupid News, Stupid Criminals.”



Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker