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This blog has the tagline “an illustrated introduction to criminal law and procedure.” It’s part webcomic and part law class, and all interesting. Author Nathaniel Burney breaks down criminal culpability into small pieces so we can understand some of the many facets of crime and the justice system. In the latest post, there are quite a few people who hate “you,” but they have different intents and take different actions. Which ones are guilty of attempted murder? The concepts are laid out in logical order from the beginning of the blog, but it’s not totally necessary to read them in order. Link -Thanks, Wiseayse!
Hudson Urban Bicycles decided to try out something interesting in New York’s SoHo neighborhood-chain up a bike, take a picture of it every day and see how long it takes to disappear, piece by piece.
The findings were surprising at first (it took nearly six months for the first piece to be stolen), then slipped rapidly into familiar territory (only took another 30 days or so for the bike to disappear completely).
Hey, at least the thief (or thieves) waited almost six months before snatching the bike up piece by piece, that has to be a world record!
–via Geekosystem
People who write for the internet will make a list out of anything. That said, I wish I had thought of this one first! It appears that tacos make people go crazy and commit crimes. They throw tacos, get in fights over tacos, complain about tacos, steal tacos, and smuggle things in tacos. Buzzfeed has thirty, count ‘em, 30 examples. Link
A woman in Sandy, Utah, was held against her will, along with her 17-month-old son, for almost five days by the father of her child. He had taken her cell phone and refused to let her leave, but she eventually found a laptop and was able to access Facebook.
Police Sgt. Jon Arnold said the woman hid in a closet with a laptop to post her plea for help on the social networking website, saying she and her son would be “dead by morning” if they were not rescued.
The post prompted someone to call police, who went to the home to check on the woman’s welfare.
“Facebook was her only outlet that she had at the home,” Arnold said. “It just happened that she was able to use it.”
Police arrested Troy Reed Critchfield, 33, and booked him into jail Saturday for investigation of aggravated kidnapping, forcible sodomy, aggravated assault, domestic violence, child abuse, animal cruelty and other charges.
Critchfield was on probation for charges related to a domestic violence incident. Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Salt Lake County Jail)
The police mug shot was invented by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in the early 1880s. Those mug shots were accompanied by body measurements for criminal identification in what was called the Bertillon System. By 1896, the New York Police Department was using the Bertillon System, and the image here is of the first NYPD mug shot. See a gallery of early mug shots at Flavorwire. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
(Image credit: NY State Division of Criminal Justice Services)
Anthony Miranda was arrested in Chicago for an attempted mugging. The 24-year-old approached a man in a car and demanded money at gunpoint on Friday night. After some money was turned over, Miranda made the driver get out of the car.
At some point, Miranda’s attention was diverted and the victim was able to grab control of the gun and the two wrestled.
During the fight, Miranda accidentally discharged his gun, shooting himself in the ankle, Mirabelli said.
The victim — who told police he’s a martial arts expert and ultimate fighting champion — was able to pin Miranda down until police arrived. Police arrived to find Miranda with a face full of lacerations and two black eyes. He was taken to Holy Cross Hospital for treatment, police said.
Link -via The Daily What
You know the name, but you probably don’t really know much about drug lord Pablo Escobar. Now you can read the short version of how he clawed his way up the ladder in the cocaine business.
The profits were astronomical at every step. In 1978 each kilo probably cost Escobar $2,000 but sold to Lehder and Jung for $22,000, clearing Escobar $20,000 per kilo. In the next stage they transported an average of 400 kilos to south Florida (incurring some additional expenses in hush money for local airport authorities) where mid-level dealers paid a wholesale price of $60,000 per kilo; thus in 1978 each 400-kilo load earned Escobar $8 million and Lehder, Ochoa, and Jung $5 million each in profits. Of course the mid-level dealers did just fine: after cutting the drug with baking soda each shipment retailed on the street for $210 million, almost ten times what they paid for it.
Soon Lehder was hiring American pilots to fly a steady stream of cocaine into the U.S., paying them $400,000 per trip. At one trip per week, in 1978 this translated into wholesale revenues of $1.3 billion and profits of $1 billion.
The profits and risks soared after that. The Jung in the quote is American George Jung, whose story was told in the 2001 film Blow. Read the rest of Escobar’s astonishing biography at mental_floss. Link
The economy was tanking. Millions lost their jobs. Stocks were down. And since bankers seemed to be riding out the bad times better than anyone, the government appointed a commission to look into who was to blame for the crash. But this was 1933, and Ferdinand Pecora was chief counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency.
Assigned to probe the causes of the 1929 crash, he led what became known as the “Pecora commission,” making front-page news when he called Charles Mitchell, the head of the largest bank in America, National City Bank (now Citibank), as his first witness. “Sunshine Charley” strode into the hearings with a good deal of contempt for both Pecora and his commission. Though shareholders had taken staggering losses on bank stocks, Mitchell admitted that he and his top officers had set aside millions of dollars from the bank in interest-free loans to themselves. Mitchell also revealed that despite making more than $1 million in bonuses in 1929, he had paid no taxes due to losses incurred from the sale of diminished National City stock—to his wife. Pecora revealed that National City had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and pawning them off to unwitting investors. By the time Mitchell’s testimony made the newspapers, he had been disgraced, his career had been ruined, and he would soon be forced into a million-dollar settlement of civil charges of tax evasion. “Mitchell,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash.”
That was just the beginning. The proceedings became a “circus” and a media sensation. Read about how Pecora unearthed the dirty secrets of the banking industry that led to the Great Depression at Past Imperfect. Link
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
How straight-laced were the Pilgrims? They tried to be, but you know how it goes. A shoe gets unbuckled, a bonnet becomes unlaced, and suddenly your hormones go into overdrive. The next thing you know, your horn of plenty hath spilled forth with wicked abundance.
Pretty much everything we “know” about the Pilgrims is untrue. Our modern-day image of the stern, clean-living, God-fearing residents of Plymouth Colony is largely mythical. It’s an illusion that took shape in the nineteenth century, as some overzealous American attempted to construct an official, more respectable history of our growing nation.
Historians cannot even determine exactly how many of the approximately 100 passengers on the Mayflower were Puritans and how many were just leaving to find better lives away from the gripping poverty that plagued England at the time. It is generally believed there were more of the latter than the former.
First off, they never referred to themselves or thought of themselves as “the Pilgrims.” The term “pilgrim” was reserved for Muslims making the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Pilgrims referred to themselves as “the Saints” or “the Separatists.”
They also referred to themselves as “Old Planters” or “Old Comers.” Draw your own conclusions from that. The name “the Pilgrims,” as we call them today, caught on around the time of the American Revolution.
Yes, they were notorious beer drinkers. They weren’t even headed for Massachusetts; they aimed for Georgia or a place further south, because of the milder weather. One of the reasons they ended up in Massachusetts in the first place was the lack of beer. According to one of the diaries of a Mayflower passenger, “We could not take time for further search …our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.”
One of the first structures built when they landed was a common brewery for the colonists. Many of the Pilgrims were brewers, this being done primarily in the home at the time.
While we don’t have the details about their private lives, we do know that by 1636, the colonists had a published set of rules that listed capital offenses. Among them were sodomy, rape, buggery, and some cases of adultery. So they were certainly concerned with sex, if not necessarily always having it.
However, court records from the colony indicate that sex-related crimes were common transgressions. Fornication, which was defined as sex outside of marriage, was a frequently committed crime, one that often resulted in a fine. Sometimes the evidence of a conviction was solely of the birth of a child in the early months of a marriage.
The only recorded execution for a sex crime occurred in 1642, when 17-year-old Thomas Granger was convicted of buggery. The young man had engaged in unfortunate, intimate relations with some local sheep, and he paid the ultimate price for it.
Less severe penalties (relatively speaking), often consisted of whippings. And like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, adulterers were sometimes required to wear the capital letters “AD” on their clothing.
No, the Pilgrims weren’t exactly saints. But they definitely took their sins seriously!
Author Sam Harris writes about the possibility of violence and how one should respond to it. Real-world crime is different from what we are used to seeing on TV dramas. The article lines out three principles of self-defense, with the overreaching goal being to avoid violence if at all possible.
If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your purse or wallet, hand it over immediately and run. Don’t worry about being shot in the back: If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range. By running, you make yourself harder to kill. Any attempt to move you, even by a few feet—backing you off a sidewalk and into an alley, forcing you behind a row of bushes—is unacceptable and should mobilize all your physical and emotional resources.?[8]
If you find yourself in a situation where a predator is trying to control you, the time for listening to instructions and attempting to remain calm has passed. It will get no easier to resist and escape after these first moments. The presence of weapons, the size or number of your attackers—these details are irrelevant. However bad the situation looks, it will only get worse. To hesitate is to put yourself at the mercy of a sociopath. You have no alternative but to explode into action, whatever the risk. Recognizing when this line has been crossed, and committing to escape at any cost, is more important than mastering physical techniques.
Of course, there’s a lot more to consider, but you won’t have time to think these things through if the situation arises, so read the whole thing and think about it ahead of time. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user Pensiero)
It’s time to unlock your body’s full potential.
1. Friends in High Places
In 2003, a 28-year-old Swedish man named Johan Adolfsson took a nine-hour flight from Thailand to Australia with eight extremely lethal snakes -four king cobras and four emerald tree boas- strapped to his inner thighs. His plan to cash in on the $3,500 booty for black market serpents was dashed when Australian officers captured him as he passed through customs at Sydney airport. Sadly, it too late for some of the snakes; all four king cobras died midflight.
2. Live by the Seat of Your Pants
The business of trafficking exotic animals is a multibillion dollar industry -and it’s more than just shoving reptiles into pairs of Dockers. In 2010, agents at Mexico City International Airport noticed a bulge moving under a nervous passenger’s t-shirt: Roberta Cabrera, 38, had 16 rare, 6-inch titi monkeys in pouches fastened to his chest with a special girdle. Two were dead. In separate incidents, airline passengers have also been caught with two pigeons, six lobsters, 14 songbirds, and 44 lizards crammed into their slacks.
3. Skirt the Issue
Mammals aren’t the only creatures customs officials have to watch for. In 2005, a 45-year-old woman was detained by customs in Melbourne International Airport after she’d arrived from Singapore. “During the search, officers became suspicious after hearing ‘flipping’ noises coming from the vicinity of her waist,” the Australian Customs Service later told the press. They found she had 51 exotic fish -all alive, hallelujah!- swimming in water-filled baggies hidden inside specially made pockets, which were concealed under her skirt.
4. Love Your Curves
In November 2010, two women were caught leaving a T.J. Maxx in Oklahoma with four pairs of boots, three pairs of jeans, a wallet, and one pair of gloves hidden in rolls of fat around their boons and bellies. All told, they’d squeezed $2,600 worth of loot under their excess body fat. The police officer on the scene later struggled to explain the situation to reporters from a local television crew: “These two were actually concealing them in areas of their body where excess skin was, underneath their, um, and their armpits, and things of that nature.”
5. The Cast System
People have been hiding objects inside of fake casts for centuries. In March 2009, a 66-year-old Chilean man one-upped his predecessors by wearing a real, functional cast that was entirely made of pure cocaine. A little more than two pounds of pressed blow, to be precise. What’s more, the cast was covering an actual injury; the Chilean had broken his own shinbone in a failed attempt to make his ruse seem believable. After the police in Barcelona caught him entering Spain, they rushed him to the hospital to treat his broken leg.
_______________________
The article above, written by Haley Sweetland Edwards, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
A $44,500 ticket is pretty outrageous, but it’s really bad when you consider that the citation claims the violation lasted for over 1,800 years. That’s right, it claims the person parked in their spot over 1,650 years before cars were invented.
How did that happen? The ticket was supposed to be dated back to 2008, but the officer missed one of those critical zeros, dating the ticket 208. Whoops! Since then everything has been fixed and the guilty party was happy to pay his 100 Euro fine.
Link Via The Consumerist Image Via Superchou [Flickr]
Artist He Xiangyu created a life-sized sculpture of activist Ai Weiwei lying face down as though he were dead. While it’s a great work of art with a powerful message, you can be certain that the police in Bad Ems, the German town that plays home to the gallery where the exhibit is shown, are not huge fans of the sculpture. That’s because multiple people have called the police to report the “dead body.”
Sean Faulkner of Ross Township, Pennsylvania was arrested for a bizarre theft that “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Faulkner was apparently tired of carrying a case of beer, so he took a forklift from a construction site. He drove about a mile to a sandwich shop, where he ordered a Reuben, but fled before paying for it.
“He said he was gonna go eat it in the corner and he ended up running out the front door, down the parking lot with the sandwich,” said Kelly Donatelli, who served him. “Just very bizarre. It was weird.”
That’s when he tried to make his getaway in a forklift. Ross Township police caught him.
“Apparently he was tired of walking and he saw the forklift with the keys in it and seemed like a good idea at the time,” Detective Brian Kohlhepp said.
Faulkner faces theft charges for both the sandwich (a misdemeanor) and the forklift (a felony). Link -via Breakfast Links
You know there’s a problem in your neighborhood when drug dealers are brazen enough to post signs saying “heroin for sale” -with an address! That’s just what happened in north Portland, Oregon, last week. Portland police served a warrant on the address on Tuesday.
Officers who raided the home found a small meth lab, 19 grams of marijuana, 10 grams of heroin, 190 pills and $4,143 in cash, police say. They also seized a shotgun.
Police began looking into the home more than a year ago because of numerous neighborhood complaints. At one point, an unidentified neighbor gave police the “Heroin for sale” flier, which also had the address and names of the suspected drug dealers.
In addition, there were a number of public safety meetings where neighbors complained about the drug problem in their neighborhood, and they asked for something to be done, police say.
Six adults were arrested. There was also a teenager in the home at the time of the raid. Link -via Arbroath
The Lego version of CSI is a lot like the real thing, bad puns and all, but the gore is plastic. -via Laughing Squid
Albino hummingbirds may be pretty rare, but for that matter, seeing someone walking around with shorts filled with hummingbirds isn’t an every day sight either. It seems that releasing their birds from their bonds and putting them back in the man’s pants might just be the best punishment for the smuggler.
Link Via BoingBoing
Plenty of people have pet guard dogs, but not many can say their pet bird is also a guard animal. Fortunately, Jack Dukes does because Charlie, his parrot, managed to rescue him from burglars trying to get their hands on his prescription drugs.
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You’ve seen it used as a plot device on TV dramas, but how much do you really know about the Witness Protection Program? I didn’t know that it’s a fairly recent (and American) idea.
It’s kind of surprising that the U.S. was the first to come up with the idea of creating a program to protect witnesses. Even stranger is that witness security is only about 40 years old. It began when the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Justice Department introduced the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 and started to actively protect witnesses in 1971. The law gave the Department of Justice freedom to arrange for the security of witnesses as they see fit, and though it was originally passed in order to curb mafia crimes, it now covers people who testify against drug cartels, gangs, and terrorist groups. The program was expanded by the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 to cover some relatives and associates of the witnesses. Though there are still some problems with the program, it has been incredibly effective in coercing witnesses to provide testimonies that have landed major criminals in prison.
There are more details in the list of 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Witness Protection. Link
Christopher Anspach of Newton, Iowa, was sentenced to serve ten days in jail after he pleaded guilty to not returning books and other media to the Newton Public Library. He checked out the items earlier this year and failed to respond when library staff tried to contact him several times. They then turned to matter over to police.
Anspach pleaded guilty August 31 to a misdemeanor theft count in connection with his failure to return 27 separate items (books and other media) that library brass valued at $770.67. Along with being ordered to pay restitution to the library, Anspach was fined $625.
Anspach, a Pizza Hut employee, is currently serving his sentence at the Jasper County jail.
There is no word on what happened to the library materials. Link -via Arbroath
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.
A dark tale from our “Dustbin of Gruesome History” files.
THE DISCOVERY
One the night of April 28, 1908, Joe Maxson, a hired hand on a farm outside of La Porte, Indiana, awoke in his upstairs bedroom to the smell of smoke. The house was on fire. He called out to the farm’s owner, Belle Gunness, and her three children. Getting no answer, he jumped from a second-story window, narrowly escaping the flames, and ran for help. But it was too late; the house was destroyed. A search through the wreckage resulted in a grisly discovery: four dead bodies in the basement. Three were Gunness’s children, aged 5, 9, and 11. The fourth was a woman, assumed to be Gunness herself, but identification was difficult- the body’s head was missing. An investigation ensued, and Ray Lamphere, a recently fired employee, was arrested for arson and murder. Before Lamphere’s trial was over, he would be little more than a sidebar in what is still one of the most horrible crime stories in American history …and an unsolved mystery.
BACKGROUND
Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storseth in Selbu, Norway in 1859. At the age of 22 she emigrated to America and moved in with her older sister in Chicago, where she changed her name to “Belle.” In 1884 the 25-year-old married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorenson, and the couple opened a candy shop. A year later the store burned down, the first of what would be several suspicious fires in Belle’s life. The couple collected an insurance payout and used the money to buy a house in the Chicago suburbs. Fifteen years later, in 1898, that house burned down, and another insurance payout allowed the couple to buy another house. On July 30, 1900, yet another insurance policy was brought into play, but this time it was life insurance: Mads Sorenson had died. A doctor’s autopsy said he was murdered, probably by strychnine poisoning, so an inquest was ordered. The coroner’s investigation eventually deemed the death to be “of natural causes,” and Belle collected $8,000, becoming, for 1900, a wealthy woman. (The average yearly income in 1900 was less than $500.) She used part of the money to buy a farm in La Porte. But there was a lot more death -and insurance money- to come.
MORE SUSPICIONS
In April 1902, Belle married a local butcher named Peter Gunness and became Belle Gunness. One week later, Peter Gunness’s infant daughter died while left alone with Belle… and yet another insurance policy was collected on. Just eight months after that, Peter Gunness was dead: He was found in his shed with his skull crushed. Belle, who was 5’8″, weighed well over 200 pounds, and was known to be very strong, told police that a meat grinder had fallen from a high shelf and landed on her husband’s head. The coroner said otherwise, ruling the cause of death to be murder. On top of that, a witness claimed to have overheard Belle’s 14-year-old daughter, Jennie, saying to a classmate, “My mama killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died.”
Belle and Jennie were brought before a coroner’s jury and questioned. Jennie denied making the statement; Belle denied killing her husband. The jury found Belle innocent -and she collected another $3,000 in life insurance money. And she was just getting started.
more …
A man entered Eastern Bank in South Boston with the intention to rob it Thursday, but left empty-handed. He went to a teller and presented a note demanding money, but she said her window was closed. The unidentified man then went to the next window and received a scolding about cutting in line!
The suspect was told by a teller and customer that he had to wait in line for his turn, and to take off his hoodie, police said. The suspect refused to remove his hoodie and left the bank.
He was last seen walking toward F Street, police said.
Police said no one was injured and no weapon was shown. The robbery attempt is under investigation and no arrests have been made, police said.
(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user Nathan Huth)
The Smoking Gun has a great game in the “Time Waster” section of their site where you can match mug shots of alleged criminals with the crime they were arrested for. If you like it, there are plenty more mugshot quizzes, including matching with the item they allegedly stole and the arrestee’s reported occupation. The games are both fun and addictive, making them definitely fall into the category of time wasters.
Bernie Madoff is serving time in a federal prison for running the largest Ponzi scheme ever. The U.S. Marshals Service held an auction of Madoff’s possessions to recoup some of the losses. Frederick James designs bought some of Madoff’s clothing, which they have made into iPad cases. You could probably make one out of your own pants, but these come with a bit of notoriety …if that’s important to you. Link -via Everlasting Blort
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The people I know in college always add their favorite professors on Facebook, but if they were still in high school and happened to live in Missouri, that would be completely against the law. Granted, it’s a little questionable for a teacher and minor-aged student to be friends on the internet, but do you guys think it should be illegal?
Link Via Geekosystem
An inflated sculpture named “Is Land” was deployed at the Secret Garden Party music festival in Cambridgeshire, England. The £9,000 helium-filled sculpture is seven meters wide and looks like a chunk of land with grass and trees on top. The island drifted off after someone cut the ropes tethering the balloon on July 24th and is now nowhere to be found. Anyone who sees the island is asked to report it to the project’s website. Donations to the site will go toward getting a second sculpture ready for Burning Man. Link to story. Link to website. -via Fortean Times
If you think crime is bad in your neighborhood these days, ask yourself this: are people stealing bricks from houses on your street? If the answer is no, then your hood’s got nothing on St. Louis, Missouri, where things have gotten so bad people are literally stripping houses to the ground for a few extra bucks. There’s a video all about it at Laughing Squid.
Link Image via Bill Streeter.
I’d like to point out that while it’s obvious these are some seriously wussy robbers, this is also one tough little chihuahua.
Via BoingBoing
Kids selling lemonade on a street corner is a classic American icon, but according to Georgia State Police, it’s actually against the law. Cops recently busted two tweens for selling without a business permit and a food vendor’s license. According to the police chief, the city won’t be backing down soon:
“We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance.”
Who knew lemonade could be so dangerous to the public health?
Link Via Consumerist Image Via ChocoladeHam [Flickr]
Screen Junkies gives us the greatest bank robbery ever to appear in the movies, which is a supercut, because it takes a lot of robberies to be the best! Some language NSFW. Link -via The Daily What
