America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 1, Episode 13 - Name Game - Full Episode | Forensic Files

NARRATOR: This is an ADC Warning. The crimes you're about to see are true. Only the names were changed to protect the ignorant.
[music playing] Tonight on "America's Dumbest Criminals," you'll see our first twin dumb criminals,
actual surveillance cam footage you won't believe, and Rin Tin Tin meets a dummy.
These are just a few of America's Dumbest Criminals. -Hi and welcome. I'm Daniel Butler.
We've got more criminals on this show then you can shake at night stick at. All dumb, all the time, all for you.
Here come America's Dumbest Criminals. NARRATOR: And now Ed Leach of Birmingham tells us how he conned twin con men.
-We were looking for another wanted felon had a warrant on him. There were two brothers who always used each other's names.
And I knew the difference between them. -So how you doing, Jim? Everything going OK?
-Yeah, it's OK, yeah. -You, uh, you haven't see your brother around anywhere have you?
-No. -I stopped one of them. And I was just talking to him and he'd given me his righteous name because he knew that I knew his true name.
Well, his brother was who I was looking for. And I saw him walking by one of the businesses on our beat
and I called out him using his brother's name that was standing right in front of me.
And he answered me and came to me. And I stood there and he walked up to me, and I said, hi, how ya doing, how things going?
He said, oh I'm fine Officer Leach. I said well I got some bad news. You are Joe and you-- I said you're under arrest.
What, not me. And I said no, yes you. And he just shook his head. I said, you just fell for your own game that's all.
They look alike, they think a like. NARRATOR: In Virginia, it used to be illegal to keep a bathtub inside your home.
Here the first families of Virginia gather to take care of their personal hygiene.
Next, bewildered car thieves turned robbers have to stay one step ahead of the law on foot.
Planning to rob the bank just two blocks away, these two wheeless wonders figured
they'd probably need a getaway car. Not seeing anything that really caught their eye,
they decided a pick-up truck would do just as well. After hot wiring the truck, they drove
down the street to the bank. Pulling on ski masks, they went inside to rob the bank
and they left their getaway truck running. Meanwhile, the owner of the pickup truck
returned to find his pickup truck gone. -Truck! NARRATOR: The man stormed off looking
for his truck or a payphone so he could call the police when he walked by the bank-- the same bank being robbed
by the same two guys who stole his truck. He didn't know that, but he did know was truck so he was gone.
As he turned the corner the untimely two exited the bank and ran to where they parked the stolen truck to find it stolen.
With no means of escape and being the only two guys on the street with ski masks and bank bags,
it was only moments before they were arrested and given a ride to jail. Repossession is 10/10 of the law.
Now actual surveillance cam footage of a guy we call Hi Mom, I'm On TV. This man just did a crack cocaine deal on video
with an undercover officer when he discovers the camera. So what does he do? He walks right up to the camera giving
the police a great ID in court. Officer Jeb Johnston tells us of a sneaky leather thief who
could get away with stealing in his heart but it's his soul that catches him. -There's stickers in them.
They're little inventory control stickers where they put on any jackets or any high dollar item.
Like if you walked out of a store and set off an alarm, prevent shoplifting, catch you without paying.
This guy comes into the store just to steal leather jackets apparently. So he comes in there and he's back in the dressing room
flicking the little stickers off on the ground, checking the sleeves, checking the liners,
make sure he's got them all. So he thought he had them all. So then he starts heading for the door and all
of a sudden the alarm goes off. -Wait, what you got here? What you got here. What you going off for?
-Look man. -Hey this is my coat. -So security comes around and they grab a hold of him
and, uh, they couldn't figure out why the alarm sounded, so then they they got back talking to him
and looked on the bottom of his shoe and when he was flicking them off he thought he was sly.
He had stepped on one. And that's how he got caught. NARRATOR: Now he's stuck in the witless protection program.
Coming up, a dumb criminal with a bag full of trouble. NARRATOR: Welcome back. Now Don Parker tells us about some dumb dope dealers
who answered an ad in the lost and dumbfounded. -Narcotics cases frequently have interesting twists.
I think that this one probably reflected, to me anyway, the quintessentially dumb criminal in action.
Guy lived in the subdivisions, walking down the street, walking his dog, finds a couple of purses,
if you could believe this, in the weeds next to the side of the road. He opens up these purses, finds that they
have some brick shaped objects in there. About the same size and shape as a brick
wrapped up in duct tape. They don't look like anything he expected to caught find it
in a purse so he calls the Sheriff's department. We send a patrol deputy out there,
he opens up the bricks, full of white powder. He does a quick field test, almost pure cocaine.
Calls a narcotics section, they send some people out there, they confiscate the purses and they
decide they're going to stake out the place. They can't imagine why somebody has left almost $200,000
worth of cocaine on the side of the road in some purses, but there willing to try, stake out the place,
all right, this little wooded area. Time goes by, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, no activity
whatsoever. They're really getting bored, as you might expect. They're tired, they're sleepy, they've worked all day long.
Finally one of them comes up with what he thinks is a brainstorm. He finds an old scrap of paper on the floor of the cruiser
car, writes on the back to the paper, "We have found your purses, large reward expected."
Then puts it on a stick and places it right where the purse was. He leaves a phone number one it, it's
one of those confidential phone numbers. It bypasses the switchboard and rings in the narcotics section.
Two narcs go home. They're tired, they get up the next day come to work. Well seemed like a good idea at the time
but as you can well imagine by the time they told the Lieutenant, and some of their coworkers,
this was a pretty funny story. What, do you think they're going to call us to buy their dope back?
Everybody just kidding them all day long. They're having to take grief and the kidding
continued until about 3:00 in the afternoon when we got a phone call. Guy calls up and says, "You say you got my purses."
Calling this confidential number remember. One of the female narcs answers the phone
and said, "Yeah, we got them. We want $10,000 in cash or you don't get the purses back."
Guy says, I'm not paying that. She said fine, hangs up. Phone rings again he says, OK, OK $10,000.
They make an arrangement to go out to a local shopping center, describe a particular phone booth.
They show up we've got to place surrounded with off-duty deputies and narcs and everybody in plainclothes.
Car full of people show up. Three guys in the car. One of them gets out, he's got a big old shopping bag.
Walks across the street, we've got a male and a female agent standing by this particular phone booth.
He looks at them, they look at him. He says you got my purses? And the lady got the purses under the arm.
Said sure, said you got our money, says right. -On the ground on the ground now.
-Drop the weapon! [yelling] -Face down on the ground. -We confiscated one car, made three arrests,
got $10,000 in cash, we got a couple of kilos of cocaine, and of course we got two Gucci purses, very nice purses.
PT Barnum said there was one born every minute, those guys definitely qualified.
-You can catch some of the criminals all the time, and all of the criminals some of the time,
but you can't get all the criminals all the time. Except the dumb ones. NARRATOR: In Pulaski Illinois, it
used to be against the law to throw snowballs at trees. Shortly after the law was passed the Pulaskians
turned on one another. Now, actual footage we call Fourth Time's the Charm. This is actual footage of the police busting the same house
for the fourth time in eight months. Each time they found cocaine and weapons. You'd think they would at least move.
Next up, a dumb criminal returns to the scene of the crime because he forgot he committed the crime.
-I got dispatched to a suspicious person call in a rural area about a guy knocking on doors.
So I arrived in the area and immediately I located a guy in the front yard holding a beer in his hand.
So I approached him and asking him what he was doing, and he explained to me that he was lost.
I realized that he was intoxicated. And he said sir, I've been with my friends all night,
but they put me out of the vehicle and left me. I said, well OK. He said will you please take me to the nearest pay phone
and I'll call a taxi and be out here. I said certainly. So I'll put him in the car and we drove down the road
and we approached the store and I let him out of the car to use the phone. He walked towards the phone and all of a sudden the store clerk
comes running out of the store hollering at me and the suspect, saying, "Hey that guy right there,
he just stoled a 12 pack of beer not two hours ago from " And I said OK. And you could see it all over the suspect,
he was like, he says, I'm caught. So placed him under arrest and he told me on the way
to the jail he says, sir I can't believe it. He says, I can not believe that I got the Sheriffs Department
to take me to a place that I had stole something two hours later. He says, sir I'm guilty, I know.
Guilty. NARRATOR: Now he really needs to make that phone call. Inside the court room for trial and error.
From the witness stand, testimony about a dumb criminal who was an eye witless to his own crime.
-Mr. Lance, did you get a good look at the guy who robbed your drugstore? -Oh, well, we saw each other when he first walked in.
Then he uh, he pulled a trash bag over his head and nobody could see anything. What do you mean?
Well, he forgot to cut eye holes in the bag. NARRATOR: Coming up later, dumb criminals
who make a change for the worst on America's Dumbest Criminals. [music playing] Birmingham's Larry McDonald, with the help of a canine unit,
sees a dumb criminal lose his grip and gain an octave. -I was at a beauty shop, which was located in a old building.
And there were several cars got there, canine unit got and everything, and we could hear the burglar moving around inside.
And uh, after a few minutes we'd determined he'd get up in the ceiling. And so uh, the more we stayed there, the more we
heard him moving around, and we figured out that he was trying to get from that building over into another building
through the firewall. And so we hollered and told him that we were fixing to send a canine in.
And so he didn't come out so we took the dog inside. It's a dog that had a either good or bad reputation
according to who you are and which way you looking at it from. And so we came in there and the burglar
apparently heard the dog. So he got to try to come down and he slipped and fell from someplace higher than the original ceiling and he split
the beam with his legs and uh-- which caused him to hurt tremendously because he apparently burst
or came close to bursting his privates. And he-- both of his feet came down through the new ceiling
and so he was straddle the beam with both feet sticking out the new ceiling. And he could move, didn't want to move.
And we had to get the fire department, the paramedics, to come and get him off the ceiling, off the beam,
out of the ceiling because he was in tremendous pain and he didn't want us to fool with him.
NARRATOR: Painful instant justice. In Georgia, it used to be against the law for chickens
to across the street. Here, a large group of geese mock the chickens by opening crossing I-20.
Now a story about vanity and how a small time house burglar goes from rags to prison.
To the police, Cecil Warren had two reputations-- One for being a thief, the other for having
the shiniest shoes in Roanoke Virginia. It wasn't uncommon for our vain criminal
to put a spit shine on them several times a day. He even carried around his own monogrammed shoeshine rag.
It was his trademark. One day he decided to break into a house by climbing into a window.
Uh oh, watch those shoes, Cecil. Once inside, he took several thousand dollars worth of jewelry.
But it wasn't until Cecil was about ready to leave that he noticed scratches on his shoes that were caused when
he scrambled through the window. Cecil couldn't stand it, so he immediately got out his monogram shoeshine rag
and began to buff his shoes. Within moments, he had a great high gloss sheen again.
And Cecil was back out on the streets. But not for long. He was feeling so good about the robbery and his shoes
that he left his trademark monogrammed rag lying on the floor of the house. For our dumb criminal, it was a fatal mistake.
For the police, it was as good as a fingerprint. A shining example of stupidity.
ADC quiz number 329. The Chinese Triad Societies hold a world's record. What record do they hold?
Is it for A, The largest manufacturer of adjustable beltless slacks? B, the largest criminal organization.
Or C, the most elaborate secret handshake? The correct answer is B, Largest criminal organization actually
they're twelfth in most elaborate handshakes, behind the Shriners. We've all heard that great minds think alike well
this next story is proof that weak minds do too. -We had some burglars come over into our city
from a neighboring jurisdiction to get over into our city they swam across a canal, I don't know why could've ran
across a bridge but-- When they got over here obviously they were soaking wet. We're looking around the neighborhood for these bad guys
and I kind of had a little gut feeling they might be in this one particular house
and, so sure enough the people whose house I thought these guys might have been in came home.
Someone had been in their house. Well, wasn't real hard to find out who, it was the bad guys
we've been looking for because when they changed out of the their, uh, their wet clothes into the close
they found into the home they, uh, left their Florida identification cards and driver's license inside the home they had broken into.
So wasn't real tough to find them. -I see some of that water and apparently seeped into the brain.
And now, the actual responses of men caught in a prostitution sting. -Please don't arrest me, I'm gonna lose my job.
-I just asked her what $40 would get, I probably broke the camera. -Don't be leaning on me, I promise I won't never
do it again, I swear I won't. NARRATOR: Welcome back. Next a drug dealer who is overdrawn at the memory bank.
-We had bought some drugs from an individual, arrested him, and about a month later we got some information
he was still selling some drugs. So we got in touch with him and I met him in a shopping center parking lot intending
to buy a couple pounds of marijuana from him. -Looking to buy? -Yeah, got it on you?
-Sure. -Let's check it out. -And during the pulmonary negotiations he kept telling myself and my partner
that we should look like the policeman that had busted him a month ago. -Hey aren't you two guys the cops that busted me last month?
-Ah man. -No, man. We get that all the time. I got one of them cop faces or something.
-Can't be too careful, you know. -I know, I know. -And we told him that we've heard that
from a lot of people, that we look like a couple policemen. So we continue to negotiate and a short time later he
did sell us the two pounds of marijuana. When we arrested him, the first words out his mouth
was "I knew you were cops." He said-- -I just had to try. -A classic case of double indumbnity.
-And with that, we come to the end of another show. Our continued thanks to police officers
across the nation for their stories. I'm Daniel Butler saying don't be dumb, don't break the law.
So long. [music playing] [music playing]

In this episode of "America's Dumbest Criminals," we'll witness our first twin dumb criminals, actual surveillance cam footage you won't believe and Rin Tin Tin meets a dummy.

Crime is no laughing matter, except when the criminals are bumbling fools. Hosted by Debbie Alan and Daniel Butler, this show looks at lawbreakers through a humorous lens.

Brief Summary

Twin con men, clueless car thieves, and a vain burglar highlight this episode of dumb criminal antics.

Key points

America's Dumbest Criminals. A showcase of the most ridiculous criminal acts caught on camera.
Twin Con Men Caught. Officer Leach reveals how he arrested twin brothers using their own trick against them.
The Case of the Stolen Truck. Two thieves steal a truck only to find it stolen while robbing a bank.
Cecil Warren's Fatal Mistake. A vain burglar leaves his shoeshine rag at the crime scene, leading to his capture.
Double Indumbnity. A drug dealer sells to cops he recognizes from a previous arrest.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Only the names were changed to protect the ignorant.

NARRATOR introduction

0:11WatchDec 2, 2021

Tension

40/ 100Low tension

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