Criminals aren't the smartest members of society as a general rule, but that doesn't mean they don't occasionally demonstrate some impressive dedication to their craft. Whether your particular modus operandi is robbing convenience stores with sticks or hot-wiring LoJack company vans, it's the sheer gumption you put into your work that friends, family, and fellow parolees can't help but admire.
#6. The Brisket Bandit's Meat Spree
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The owners and employees of Augie's Barbed Wire Smokehouse in San Antonio are likely well aware of the lengths some men will go to to get their hands on delicious Texas barbecue. But they weren't expecting the kind of determination that 34-year-old Alan Meneley brought to bear. After staging a daylight raid on the restaurant's refrigerators (while employees were distracted during a shift change), Meneley was able to stuff 13 briskets and 10 cases of beer into a trashcan and load it all into the back of his van. He then sped off to a secure location that may or may not have been furnished with nothing but a tarp and an entire vat of Stubb's original sauce.
Augie's Barbed Wire Smokehouse
The fact that he didn't take even one roll of paper towels
displays true criminal insanity.
Meneley didn't just have some sudden, uncontainable craving that only hickory-smoked meat could satisfy -- police suspected that this was his fourth barbecue heist in two months. But this latest caper would turn out to be his last, at least for the time being, as the cops soon followed his tangy trail and initiated a high-speed pursuit. Meneley managed to temporarily throw law enforcement off his delicious scent by burning down a trailer home and stealing a cherry-red Corvette. But, unfortunately, perhaps woozy from a large and sudden intake of so much protein, he totaled his new ride at an intersection.
via gearheads.org
There really is a barbecue joint on every corner in Texas.
Meneley was uninjured enough to attempt to flee on foot, but he was soon found in a nearby ditch and taken into custody. Jail wasn't his next destination, however, as the next words out of his mouth to officers was the admission that he had just swallowed an 8-ball of heroin. So it was off to the hospital, where he bolted yet again while getting an X-ray. But, as usual, he didn't make it very far before the police nabbed him yet again and "charged him by proxy," which we assume means they sighed and walked briskly while Meneley waddled in a stupor toward the nearest window. A San Antonio Police Department spokesman declared that they would be treating all of the previous robberies as separate incidents until a link is determined, as if we all didn't already know what that link surely was. It was quite clearly and simply just one man's obsession with savory, mouth-wateringly delicious fire meat.
#5. A Man Invents An Evil Twin To Get Out Of Paying Tickets
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People come up with all kinds of half-baked excuses when trying to get out of paying for a ticket. While your best bet usually is to just show up in court on the assigned date and plead for small mercies, there are still some who insist on the deceptive route, even though trying to convince a judge that you were only speeding because your wife was in labor and also on fire and only the baby has the codes to prevent the nuclear device from exploding somewhere on the Eastern seaboard rarely if ever works. But only in the most exceptional of circumstances do you see a citizen take the convoluted, straight-out-of-a-soap-opera option of blaming it all on a nonexistent evil twin. Like this guy did.
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Blaming amnesia or Susan Lucci would probably have been even more complicated.
When Hackensack, New Jersey, resident Olawale Agoro wound up accruing a sizable amount of traffic violations last year, a man claiming to be his concerned, legally blind twin, "Tony," was kind enough to show up at municipal court to have his brother's court date postponed. The request was granted, but something seemed amiss to Officer Matthew Parodi, who was in court that day and just so happened to be the same officer who originally issued the tickets.
First of all, "Tony" seemed to be walking around and handling paperwork amazingly well for a blind guy. And Officer Parodi became especially suspicious when he discovered "Tony" asking random strangers in the parking lot to drive his car around the corner from the courthouse (and presumably away from the prying eyes of meddlers who are constantly oppressing the blind from operating motor vehicles).
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Although blindness would confirm what we've always suspected about most people
driving on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Officer Parodi was pretty damn sure that "Tony" Agoro was actually Olawale Agoro (plus, he was probably as sick of using sarcasm quotes as we are at this point) and became even more sure when he pulled him over again, issued several more tickets, and impounded the car.
Undeterred, Agoro showed up for court two more times as his alter-ego, requesting adjournments for his brother/himself, who he claimed had gone off to Nigeria to attend a family funeral. Amazingly, the court clerks again acquiesced and gave him the adjournments, but when he missed yet another court date a few days later, a warrant was issued for his arrest. So, naturally, the next day "Tony" showed up to see if there were any more super-nice court clerks around, at which point he was arrested. A birthmark under his lip and a fingerprint scan pretty much blew any further chances of his continuing the ruse, and we're assuming he's watching The Bold And The Beautiful from a cell and cooking up another plan as we speak.
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He's likely hoping for the death penalty, since according to the laws of soaps, it would just
mean he'll be back next season and more powerful than ever.
#4. Guy Cons His Ways Out Of Prison, Decides Prison Isn't So Bad
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We could fill an entire bookshelf (or at least one of the more voluminous models of Trapper Keeper) with the stories of daring prison escapes we've shown you over the years, but the following may just take the file-imbedded-cake for cleverness. By making good use of available technology, having a gift for impersonation, and exploiting the average person's susceptibility to typos, inmate Neil Moore was able to stroll right out of an imposing London prison. And then, just to add that extra twist that all supervillains include in their grandiose schemes, a few days later he decided that prison wasn't so bad after all and came right back.
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To be fair, London is one of the few places where the prison food is
usually preferable to what's available outside.
Moore, who was stewing in the maximum-security Wandsworth facility on several charges of fraud (he and his transgender partner, Kristen, would impersonate female voices to trick banks into handing them money), initiated the first stage of his plan by somehow getting his hands on a smuggled cellphone. The next step was to call an Internet domain registration service to create a bogus web address that closely resembled the one belonging to Britain's Royal Courts Of Justice. This sort of thing is called "typosquatting," and as an example you probably shouldn't visit Cracke.com unless you feel like being redirected to anything from random surveys to possibly images of different angles from the goatse.cx photo shoot.
Then, posing as a court clerk, Moore sent an email from the fake web address to prison authorities, stating that he'd just been granted bail.
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"Wait a min- Eh, fuck it. I'm supposed to be on lunch anyway."
It was apparently convincing enough to compel the guards at Wandsworth to swing the doors wide open and allow Moore to leave, while they presumably gave him a polite tip of the hat and a wag of the finger to imply that he'd better be good from now on or he might have to come back. But after only three days of freedom, Moore incredibly did come back, after a "change of heart" that led him to turn himself in to police. The court wasn't exactly overjoyed about this new development, but they were just as mad at themselves it seemed, as a judge overseeing the case explained:
"The way you contrived your escape was potentially more of a threat to the integrity of the prison system, and therefore to the public, than the mere use of brute force."
... which is just a polite way of saying, "We're extremely PO'd you made us look like a gaggle of drooling jackasses."
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