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When you go to court, dress professionally. Well, maybe not if you’re a professional drug dealer:
A man accused of drug trafficking showed up for court Friday in Fort Lauderdale sporting a jacket that bore a cartoon-style recipe for cooking crack cocaine. [...]
The man’s white jacket looked like a how-to guide for making crack cocaine, with a series of little pictures of a white substance with a spoon, a carton of baking soda and a little pot over a fire. The end product was a “rock,” slang for the drug.
The finishing touch was the slogan “stack paper say nothing” — make money and hold onto it, in the vernacular.
Witnesses, including the man’s attorney Joshua Rydell, would not reveal the name of the man, who did not get into trouble for his threads.
Rydell said his clients still surprise him by wearing drug-related attire to court.
“Giant marijuana leaves on their T-shirts…” Rydell said. “It’s so common that I routinely advise clients, ‘No drug-related clothes when you come to court.’”
Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: Michael D. Weinstein
Do you remember that coworker who was always on break? He’s now turned to crime:
Authorities say a Tampa Bay area man ordered a beer at a bar, left to rob a nearby bank then came back to finish his beer. [...]
A bartender there said Whittle ordered a beer, disappeared for about 30 minutes and then returned to his beer. Deputies say they arrested at the bar about 10 minutes after he left the bank.
Link -via Dave Barry | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user Ty Nigh
Previously: Bank Robber Stops for Lunch Nearby
A man in Vermont is accused of vandalizing his ex-girlfriend’s car. He would have gotten away with carving the word “slut” into her car, except that he misspelled it as “sult”. The woman identified him as the likely perpetrator, so the police called the man into their station to question him:
Police called Hall into the station and issued him a citation. Hall denied any involvement with the vandalism, but when asked to write the sentence “You are a slut,” on a piece of paper, Hall wrote “You are a sult,” instead. The misspelling matched that of the vandalism.
Stay in school, kids, and pay attention in English class. It pays off in the long run.
Link -via Althouse | Photo: Flickr user Shayne Kaye
It would prove to be an unwise decision. The encounter began when the suspect informed the boxer that gentlemen of his race were not welcome in a particular bar:
Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department officials said at the time of Abbey’s arrest that he threatened to stab Baker.
Baker, of Spokane Valley, left the bar to avoid a fight, but Abbey followed him outside and toward a marina, hurling racial slurs.
According to a sheriff’s department report, “Baker stated Abbey told him ‘blacks’ were not welcome in Bayview and he had better leave before something happened.”
Abbey then poked Baker in the chest, the report said.
Baker told sheriff’s investigators that he felt threatened as Abbey followed him, wouldn’t leave him alone, and he instinctively punched Abbey in self-defense.
“Baker stated Abbey immediately fell to the ground and did not get up,” the report said.
Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: Flickr user Todd Huffman
The Wells Fargo Bank in Yuma, Arizona was robbed on Saturday. The alleged robber, 56-year-old Henry Elmer, “fled the scene” and went all the way across the parking lot before he stopped for a pizza and a beer.
Employees at the pizza parlor noticed that their new customer looked “agitated,” but were not otherwise suspicious. He ordered a beer and some pizza, and then had a seat in the back of the dining room. According to an employee, “As he sat down a cop walked in and saw the guy. Then the cop asked me if the guy had been here that long, and I told him 10 minutes tops…. That’s when the rest of the cops came in.”
You may be thinking, that’s a pretty good response time. It is, but on the other hand the cops did not have too far to travel, since the Yuma police station is basically also right next door to the bank:
The story is very similar to another robbery in San Francisco, which you can also read about at Lowering the Bar. Link -via Boing Boing
In retrospect, it may have been a bad idea for Anthony Garcia to commemorate his first killing by having it inscribed on his chest. When a LA County homicide investigator was later looking through pictures of gang members, he noticed something important:
Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.
As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias “Chopper” was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.
Lloyd’s discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia’s arrest for the shooting. Then sheriff’s detectives, posing as gang members, began talking to Garcia, 25, in his holding cell. They got a confession that this week led to a first-degree murder conviction in a killing investigators had once all but given up hope of solving.
Link via SayUncle | Photo: LA County Sheriffs
Rodney Knight plead guilty to second degree burglary this past week in Washington, D.C. He was caught because he posted pictures of himself with his loot on his victim’s Facebook wall:
Knight broke in to the Northwest home of Washington Post writer Marc Fisher in December, police said. He helped himself to a number of items, including two laptop computers, a new winter coat and about $400 in cash.
Before leaving the scene of the crime, he put on the winter coat and posed with the cash for a photo he took of himself. He then posted his “loot” photo on Fisher’s son’s Facebook page, the writer said.
Link via Gizmodo | Photo: MSNBC
I guess he was out of toilet paper:
A man who received a parking ticket in Bartlett now faces criminal charges after authorities said he stained the citation with human excrement before mailing it back to the village.
Officials said Alexander J. Bailey, 22, of the 6N600 block of Medinah Road in Medinah, was arrested last week charged with disorderly conduct after a village hall employee found brown stains and a foul odor on the ticket and alerted police, authorities said. The original ticket was for $15, Bartlett police said.
Bailey also scrawled a note on the ticket indicating he’d used it to wipe himself, court documents said.
Link via Digg | Photo: City of Tampa
It didn’t occur to Tasha Lee Cantrell of Florida that she shouldn’t drink a beer while a police officer drove her home from her friend’s DUI arrest:
The 19-year-old Floridian was riding in a car early Monday morning when the vehicle’s driver was pulled over and arrested for DUI. As a tow truck arrived to remove her friend’s car, a stranded Cantrell asked Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Mitchell Landis for a ride home to her Fort Walton Beach residence. Landis agreed, but only after checking Cantrell’s purse for any contraband, according to an offense report. While chauffeuring Cantrell, Landis heard the teenager “open a can of some sort” in the back of the cruiser. “As I looked at my in car video I observed Cantrell drinking out of an unknown can.” Landis stopped his car and, upon further investigation, determined that Cantrell had popped open a can of Steel Reserve, a malt liquor known for its high alcohol content.
Link via reddit | Photo: The Smoking Gun
Two men fleeing from police in Cleveland, Ohio tried to climb a barbed wire fence. One made it over the top (getting cut in the process), only to find himself in a prison yard. He was then arrested.
Bank robbers Albert Bailey and an unidentified sixteen-year-old accomplice were arrested by police in Fairfield, Connecticut as soon as they arrived at the bank that they planned to rob. Perhaps it was calling ahead and telling the bank employees to have the money waiting for them that undermined their cunning plan:
Police arrested 27-year-old Albert Bailey and an unidentified 16-year-old boy on robbery charges on Tuesday afternoon.
Sgt James Perez said the two Bridgeport residents turned up at the bank about 10 minutes after making the call and were met by police in the bank’s car park.
Sgt Perez told the Connecticut Post that, in his opinion, the suspects were “not too bright”.
Link | Photo: flickr user gcfairch, used under Creative Commons license
A fugitive after being sentenced to death in Belgium 22 years ago (since commuted to life in prison, after the abolition of the death penalty), Jean-Claude Demey was finally caught:
But he is now back behind bars after he and two other men took a wrong turning while driving through Reims, in eastern France, on Monday.
They tried to avoid roadworks caused by the construction of a new tram system, and found themselves blocked in the car park of the city’s main police station.
Police said they spotted the van reversing towards the exit, and arrested three men ‘all in a state of inebriation’.
Link | Photo: AFP
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To be fair, the unnamed man in Nuremberg, Germany didn’t know that it was a police vehicle:
The 26-year-old was lining up the powdered drugs on the roof of the car in a disco car park, when the two police officers surprised him, a Nuremberg police spokesman said on Tuesday.
The man had no idea the vehicle belonged to the police, and it was coincidence that the officers – who were walking by their parked car – discovered him just as he was about to take the drugs.
Link | Photo (unrelated): Fresh Scent
This is why I will never get a tattoo:
TAMPA – It wasn’t particularly hard for the victims of a Riverview home invasion to identify the burglar. He was the only one with an outline of the state of Florida tattooed on his face, authorities say.
In addition to the Florida tattoo, Sean Roberts also has the words “Crazy Cracker” written or tattooed on his head, Hillsborough County sheriff’s spokesman J.D. Callaway said.
And to think that if he had chosen a rectangular state like Wyoming or Colorado, he could have escaped.
