As Thick as Thieves: Foolish Felons & Loopy Laws

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

UK STUPID CRIME FILES

OVERSEAS STUPID CRIME FILES

THE LAW IS AN ASS

SILENCE IN COURT

COPYRIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks to Marcel O’Leary for the illustrations. Vast, colossal, ginormous – bigger than the biggest thing ever – bigger than a Douglas Adams allusion – thanks to Oliver Ledbury for wise counsel and proofing. And special thanks to commissioning editor Jenny Briancourt and Chris Ogle at The History Press.

INTRODUCTION

Crime doesn’t pay. Really, it doesn’t. So stop thinking about that workplace scam now. What’s the most likely outcome of committing a crime: holiday or Holloway? Well, we’ve gathered the evidence.

Robbers and burglars are often incompetent. If not, why have specific crimes called ‘attempted robbery’ and ‘attempted burglary’? Most professions do not require such phrases as ‘attempted nursing’ or ‘attempted accountancy’. This reflects badly on the nation’s bungling burglars.

That’s why we’ve asked you to come down to the station and inspect our assembled line-up of thick thieves, asinine assailants, feeble felons and swindling simpletons – all standing in an ID parade of incompetence, waiting to be picked out as Britain’s stupidest criminal. They won’t rob you of your sense of humour. Or prove capable of robbing anything else.

Dipping their stolen bucket of opportunity into the well of other people’s stuff, only to fall into the well themselves (and get the bucket stuck on their head), this book chronicles the crimes against common sense committed by these dim-witted deviants.

Featuring the bank robber who used a No. 72 bus as his getaway vehicle (it was almost as though the police knew where he was heading to next); the bag snatcher who robbed an elderly lady of the bag she’d just used to clear up responsibly after her dogs; and the burglars who left their four-year-old son, and a wallet containing full ID, at the crime scene.

Also rounded up for routine questioning are the bank robbers who gifted the police a dropped map marking the preferred route from bank to hideout, and armed robbers who raided a laundry van to steal used towels whilst their intended target, a wages van, drove slowly past.

Read them their right to remain ridiculed. Like the man who handed himself in to claim the ‘wanted’ reward money; the ‘professional’ thieves caught unloading the stolen gear from their heist on CCTV – their own CCTV camera; and the bank robber who couldn’t escape the building society because he was repeatedly pushing the pull door – until he took a run up and knocked himself out. Joining them inside HMP Stupid is a shoplifter who cunningly removed the security chips from items, only to stuff the tags into his pockets. Plus a pill-popping ninety-two year old who, when arrested for kerb crawling, decided to make a run for it. Unsurprisingly, the police were able to catch up with him.

Charged with being in possession of an idiotic plan and sentenced to a life term of stupidity, they’re reversing the getaway vehicle into a police car and handing over their belt to the custody sergeant with the inevitable consequence of their trousers falling down. It’s a case (admittedly, a rather easy one) for the police to Dial M For Muppet.

Everyone likes to see justice done – to someone else!

ONE

UK STUPID

CRIME FILES

TARRING AND FEATHERING VILLAINS

When a known bag-snatcher spotted a frail old lady holding an inviting bag outside the post office in a deserted street, the words ‘candy’ and ‘baby’ must have crossed the criminal’s mind.

Sprinting towards the defenceless old lady in Tarring near Worthing, West Sussex, he swiped her carrier bag. The crook then selected the gear he usually reserved for being chased by Lidl’s security man, and legged it at maximum speed from the crime scene.

The stolen bag must have felt excitingly heavy. Obviously the state pension was more generous than its reputation, since the old lady’s weighty purse felt like it must be stuffed with lots of cash. Then the dim-witted deviant felt a warmth emitting from the grabbed bag. Mmm. Maybe grandma had popped into the bakery after she’d picked up her pension. Perhaps he dipped his hand inside to reveal the warm tasty treat within. At exactly this point his optimism would have evaporated.

The old lady had responsibly cleaned up after her dogs, and it was this bag and its contents that the pooch poo purloiner had just snatched!

By now he had discovered the truth: he was a crap thief. Literally.

TRACKY BOTTOMS

Intent on proving that youth is fleeting, but immaturity can last a lifetime, a twenty-eight-year-old man decided to steal an iPad after heavy snow.

Breaking into a house in Darlington, County Durham, one night in 2013, the nocturnal nicker carried the high-tech loot to his own house through deserted pre-dawn snowy streets. On arrival, the police immediately had a clear impression of who was responsible – specifically, the clear impression of his size 11 trainers with a distinctive sole pattern.

Joining the dots, police tracked the track-suited hardware hauler to his home 1 mile across town. There the authorities discovered the iPad in a wardrobe and its corresponding charger stashed behind the washing machine, where the thief had secreted the items after cold footing it from the crime scene.

GREYHOUND BUST

Whiplash claims are often tempting to the mentally challenged criminal fraternity, who unwisely view them as a source of free money from the insurance industry. This is decidedly odd logic, given the insurance industry is not known for paying out – even for genuine bona fide claims. The small print usually takes care of that: ‘Sorry Sir, but as it clearly says on page 124 of the policy, or it does when you magnify the 0.1 font size and squirt lemon juice to reveal our invisible print, that claims are invalidated if the claimant or policyholder is in possession of a surname. Do you have a surname, Sir?’

Scams have been attempted on a surprising scale. One group of deceptive desperados decided that the currency for measuring credibility is large numbers. If you turn up with thirty ‘extras’, then no insurance fraud investigator will dare be suspicious, right? Er … No. That makes them even more suspicious.

An entire bus was loaded with thirty crooked passengers, all claiming they had chronic whiplash resulting from an accident that was so minor that the driver of the car that had supposedly shunted the multi-ton bus testified that he did not notice, feel or hear any impact.

The crooks’ cover story insisted that the bus was taking them to an arranged night out at a greyhound meeting. The moment when the men’s stories really went to the dogs was the decision by investigators to check with the greyhound track whether a booking had been made. No, it transpired, it had not. Those crafty law enforcers – who would have ever predicted that they would employ sneaky underhand tactics like checking whether everyone’s collective story checked out?

Looking more suspicious than a bald man in a barber’s queue, all thirty of the men were charged with insurance fraud.

TEXT BOOKED VILLAIN

Following a 999 call from a vigilant neighbour, police arrived at a property in Leicester in 2013 to discover that a back window had been smashed and an annoyed burglar was hiding in a garden shed.

Police decided to check the culprit’s phone for potential clues, and discovered he had just sent the text message: ‘I’ve told you 20 times – don’t ring me when I’m out robbing.’

You know that bit the police are always obligated to say upon making an arrest? Something about ‘anything you say may be taken down in evidence and used against you later in court where it may harm your defence’? Well, that’s a particularly exquisite example.

The villain had numerous other convictions, including being caught driving whilst disqualified on five separate occasions. When chased by the constabulary through innumerable red lights in a frantic high-speed pursuit, he stopped his vehicle to place a bag containing a stolen laptop and iPod under a hedge in full view of the police, and then recommenced the chase. The pursuing Bow Street Runners immediately recovered the items. There may be lots of media articles about the young, white, working class becoming invisible, but it rarely means literally.

The defence was unable to explain the text message. A problem not encountered by the prosecution.

A SNITCH IN TIME

A renowned Bristol offender, over-familiar to the authorities as a suspected full-time car thief, woke up one autumnal day in 2012 to find the fuzz fumbling through drawers and searching his house for evidence following an informant’s tip-off. No doubt incensed by the police’s commitment to stop car theft, the recalcitrant crook stormed into the local police station later that day and lodged a formal complaint, pointing out that the police had failed to obtain a search warrant.

This alleged legal oversight was instantly counteracted by the desk sergeant, who pointed out that under the Police & Criminal Evidence Act 2010, Section 23, a warrant was not required; this prompted the suspect to retort, ‘You can’t pull the wool over my eyes, copper – that’s two years out of date.’

Fittingly, two years also turned out to be on the mind of the presiding judge at his subsequent trial.

PET SHOP BOY UP BEFORE THE BEAK

Evidently thinking outside the box – though nowadays not thinking outside of his cell, at least for the next few years – a twenty-three year old in Frome, Somerset decided to go beyond the conventional, verging upon clichéd, traditional break-in targets of banks, building societies, bookies and convenience stores. Instead he took the trailblazing decision to break into a pet shop. And steal a blue parrot. No, not the Norwegian Blue pining for the fjords, but a macaw, presumably because he was pining for jail.

But he wished to make a complaint about the parrot that he definitely didn’t purchase from this very boutique. What was wrong with it? I’ll tell you what was wrong with it.

The parrot, a blue and gold macaw, was described in court by the pet shop proprietor as ‘a miserable old git’. That’s acceptable, as you cannot bring a defamation case for comments made in open court, so the bird is unable to initiate slander proceedings. When the (pet)shoplifter attempted to grab the macaw during a night-time break-in, the bird savagely stabbed him with his powerful black beak. It is worth noting that macaws are capable of effortlessly crushing Brazil nuts, and possess a beak pressure measured at 700lb per square inch – roughly equivalent to a powerful dog bite.

This particular bird-brain was unaware of this fact – although the macaw knew, and sank his vicious beak liberally into the soft villainous flesh. Indeed, the feathered psycho bit him so hard that blood spurted several feet up the walls. When the scene-of-crime staff arrived at the pet shop the next day, you could imagine even the hardiest, seen-it-all, forty-years-in-the-job cynics – their sensitivity bleached by years of confronting gore – rushing outside to vomit.

Eventually they took samples of the blood which had cascaded down all four walls (and ceiling) of the shop and – as is traditional in TV cop shows – sent it to the boys in the lab for analysis. There was certainly no lack of blood samples from the parrot phlebotomy: the pet shop resembled the set of a horror flick.

Basically the blood gave him away, as the DNA sang like a canary or … er … a macaw. He was charged, and up before the beak. And now the ornithologically challenged defendant is doing some serious bird.

ANOTHER NAIL IN THE COFFIN

When a vicar disturbed an eighteen-year-old thief who had broken into a Merthyr Tydfil chapel, the teenage burglar decided upon a fail-safe hiding place guaranteed to avoid detection. He got into a coffin and lay next to the deceased whose funeral service was the next day.

The police soon arrived, and although the culprit had miraculously come back to life and fled the scene – after first causing extensive criminal damage estimated at several thousand pounds – the boys in blue were able to trace him with reassuring ease. Because the pretend dead burglar hadn’t been able to resist smoking a cigarette in the coffin, and had tossed the fag end of his ‘coffin nail’ under an actual coffin. DNA tests immediately established the identity of the criminal through forensic examination of the cigarette, and matched him to an already extensive accrual of previous convictions.

ARCHER’S EASY TARGET

Jeffrey Archer. You either hate him, or you hate him. But his past duplicitous dealings at least provided the English language with the slang term ‘an Archer’, meaning £2,000.

Several years later, as part of an attempted rehabilitation programme to detoxify the Archer brand, he appeared as a generous, bordering-upon-altruistic, character in an ITV reality show. Members of the public had to justify begging for a sizable gift from Archer and other wealthy altruists, with the request deemed the strongest rewarded by a benevolent donation. My application to go on the show and ‘request £2,000 to keep a prostitute quiet’ wasn’t accepted.

A desperate thief in Essex also wanted ‘an Archer’ in a hurry. Presumably he had been turned down for a bank loan after answering the application form’s ‘reason for loan?’ question with ‘for a drugs deal’. This, he later explained to the court, was why he entered a florist and demanded £2,000.

The absence of any disguise, weapon and getaway vehicle may imply this was not the most comprehensively planned heist. The startled shop assistant explained they did not have £2,000, but if he went to the building next door but one, they would certainly have that much money available. He departed and she dialled 999. The building next door but one was a police sub-station. This led to him spending a lengthy time in a place familiar to Jeffrey Archer.

SWEET SHOP LABOUR

Good to see the old Peter Sellers exit-into-the-closet gag being kept alive and healthy by a Yorkshire-based petty criminal and amateur slapstick enthusiast.

The youthful pathetic purloiner had entered a sweet shop and, er, behaved like a kid in a sweet shop by stuffing confectionery into his pockets with such an enthused alacrity that it took him several seconds to notice the looming shadow of a full-figured forbidding shopkeeper leaning over him.

Making a dash to the door was not an option, as his route was blocked by the stern-faced aggrieved shop owner. Panicking, he made a dash for the back door instead. He hurled himself through the open door and, if not to freedom, then at least into a tiny room filled with boxes. The shopkeeper then calmly turned the door key and dialled 999.

Emulating the characterful antics of famed Pink Panther actor Sellers, the thief had imprisoned himself in a tiny stockroom he had mistaken for the exit door. There were even bars on the tiny window, a bridging detail that would help him adjust to his upcoming new accommodation. ‘We thought about leaving him in there for a bit. He had enough sweets to survive for several days,’ the shopkeeper informed the local press.

LYING LOW ON A LILO

A bank raid in Edinburgh did not end in the way envisaged by the perpetrator, who no doubt imagined a life lying low on sun-soaked lilos. Instead it ended with a more predictable occurrence: lying low on the bottom bunk of a prison cell.

Storming into a building society in Edinburgh, he hollered at the shocked cashier: ‘Give me £5,000 now!’

‘Can you say that again, I didn’t quite catch it?’ retorted the teller.

Without time to process whether this was a case of acute sarcasm, or simply vocal distortion caused by his identity-concealing ski mask, he repeated, with clearer emphasised diction – but without any