America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 1, Episode 7 - Fooled You - Full Episode | Forensic Files

this is an adc warning the crimes you're about to see are true only the names were changed to protect
the ignorant [Music] tonight on america's dumbest criminals you'll see a fool and his jewels a crime
that was not well done and three lightweights with a heavy load these are just a few of america's
dumbest criminals [Music] hi and welcome to the show i'm daniel butler we all know that hollywood is famous for
its portrayal of criminals as being cunning and powerful masterminds of crime fearless in the face of danger and
the law their criminals are known for their uncanny knack of adaptability and their skill of last-second escapes
well folks as they say this ain't hollywood this is the real world of america's dumbest criminals
our first case was slightly open when it was closed from foster arnett in knoxville tennessee one of our patrol
officers got a call of a burglary in progress when he arrived on the scene he did a
cursory examination on the outside of the house and then he made entry into the house
searched the entire house and when he got to the kitchen there was a door that led into the
garage but it was locked from the garage side so the officer went outside walked
around the front of the house and saw that there was about oh probably a foot gap between the bottom of the garage
door and the top of the driveway and the officer got down on all fours with his flashlight and as he got down
to look in the burglar was on the inside looking out they both both saw each other at the
same time and it scared both of them so badly that the burglar stood up hit his head and it knocked him out and the
officer was able to reach in and take him into custody the only thing he got away with was a
lot on his noggin [Music] in boston it used to be against the law for nightclubs to have frog jumping
contest but it was legal to have frog-like line dancing sergeant ernest burt of birmingham
alabama was serving a warrant when he got a big surprise and so one day me and my couple of
partners we went out to this location out in the eastern part of town and we got it knocked on the door
hello how you doing hey how are you doing fine sir we need to know if a one grace reed is here we have a felony
warrant for her arrest nor she does okay so when was the last time that you saw miss reed and i explained the laws that
we have to come in and search for so by that time my partner was at the back we had a big rumble
looked like something something the wall was falling so we thought it was going out the back door i'm a problem
we found out he just female and fell out the ceiling almost broke her neck hit him sank anything about 280 some pound
foot stuck up in the air and she looked at me and said who are you i said i'm the police who are you it
wasn't funny but then it was you know hiding in the ceiling so i said what you doing up to the ceiling
cleaning up that's okay then i told her who he was and explained to her she was on the
arrest she was fine we're still checking the house [Music] adc quiz number 171 how many inmates in the u.s were
incarcerated per week in 1994. was it a 1602 b entirely too many or c 1994. the correct answer is a
1602 which is entirely too many however by midweek at least 800 are digging their first escape tunnel
this is actual surveillance cam footage of america's dumbest driver it's just another quiet night in an open
all-night convenience store notice the car backing into the telephone pole in the parking lot keep your eye on him our
female clerk decides to take a break and doesn't realize a kamikaze shopper is headed her way
uh oh oh no he's got it in drive wait a minute no no no that's not a drive-through window no not yet
gee do you think this guy was drinking let's see that one more time there's no drive-through window in this
convenience store but there is now remember folks friends don't let friends drive through stores
coming up see a dumb criminal who falls asleep on the job on america's dumbest criminals
[Music] in our next story we find that the only thing that makes a dumb criminal
dominant is having a dumb partner here's sleeping on the job one night we're working swing shift and we get a
call to go out behind the bank there's a person laying behind a dumpster so we go out there thinking that it's
probably somebody that's you know vagrant asleep or something this nature we pull up in the parking lot and we
park the car so that the headlights are on the dumpster and we put spotlights on
and everything and to our bewilderment this head pops up from behind the dumpster wearing a
ski mask and looking at us and it's not winter time and so we get out of the car with our guns drawn
tell them get their hands up you know if there was more than one back there and come out
so we do a little bit of interrogation of the kid after giving the rights and everything and he eventually tells us
that his friend and he had worked for a rental car agency and they knew that the rental car
manager made the night drop every night at the back of this bank and they had been fired
so they were going to get back at the maryland car manager and they were going to rob him
well the one kid dropped the other one off behind the bank his biggest complaint his friend had was
he'd been driving around waiting for the other kid to pull a robbery he was almost out of gas
well a rental car manager came in made the night drop and left and meanwhile this kid's asleep and the
kid didn't wake up till we pulled up on the police car and saw him so the trigger man fell asleep and the
getaway car ran out of gas and neither one of the dumb criminals ever saw their intended victim
this was not a perfect crime it turns out they didn't pull a robbery they got caught and they both got
convicted conspiracy to commit robbery in indiana once your breath leaves your body it is no longer your property here
we see a state guard inspecting the impounded breath of 65 winos and now inside the courtroom for trial
and error a very professional international drug cartel was busted by one little old lady
who lived near their warehouse because of your phone call the police went to the warehouse
and seized 22 tons of cocaine with a street value of more than six billion dollars
the largest drug raid in u.s history what did the suspects do to give themselves away
well i was trying to get some sleep and they wouldn't quit backing up what do you
mean backing up they wouldn't quit backing up the the trucks and making that annoying beep beep beep sound
that's why you made the call well who could sleep with all that noise all that backing up and beep beep beep
in ohio it is against the law to tailgate however it's not against the law to leap from
annetta nunn of birmingham alabama tells us about a case we called fooled you working burglary unit
wearing plain clothes driving a plane car those criminals know their police cars
this guy was right across the street from city hall getting ready to leave go on the case or whatever and i had walked
through the door throwing my purse in the car and was about to get in and i heard somebody say hey
they were standing right up on me he scared me throw some rings out of tennessee sure
did take a look at these see some views huh yeah these are these here they're not 900.
he opened this little ring case but if you look at it you know it's a little five dollar ring from the bargain store
and they've changed the price tags on it he's got like 900 dollars on him i say you stole these out of tennessee
yeah but don't let the man see you don't let the man see you i said okay and i held it up he said put it down put it
down don't let the man see say okay so about this time he he leans forward and he sees the mobile radio and
the floorboard on the car he says you're the police i say yeah yeah i'm an innocent man no i can't really just go
inside and talk about it come on you ain't got nothing on me i don't know about that why don't you bring the
jewelry back out let's just let's go get the jewelry back he said well i'm gonna
go with he said cause i'm gonna show you just how big a fool you are there's nothing you can put me in jail for
i said okay come on go with me so we're going across and i'm trying to think what can i charge this guy with this
stuff is not real but when i get in is one of the older detectives inside he asked me say what
do you have well it seems to me we have this ordinance that says you can't sell inside the business luke without a
license so i'm sitting there writing up he said what are you doing i say you going to
jail he said you can't put me in jail i say yes i can and say don't ever call me
a fool i know a case we call the mystery of the flushameter this device is called a flushometer or
flushometer you see this in most public restrooms but in new york city you can see them disappear over 150 flushometers
were stolen in one month a flushometer retails for about 150 but only brings four dollars when sold for scrap
one was even stolen from the mayor's restroom and city hall once again dumb crime flushes taxpayers money down the
drain coming up a robbery that turns to rubble on america's dumbest remedy [Music]
the next crime may make some men squeamish because it's painfully dumb we got a call uh early monday morning
from one of the local businesses said that the suspicious circumstances we think we've been burglarized and the uh
the burglar is still on the premises so the officers responded as an in-progress
call got there with the guns drawn ready and he gets to inspect and then we find
out what the story is is that this was early monday morning saturday night around 11 o'clock or so fella decided to
break into the establishment going through the roof and he found a vent up there and he says
hey i can take this thing off and crawl through their event and get inside nobody ever know
so he proceeded to do so he took the top off got it open put his feet down through the vent first
and started to ease himself down as he got so far in he lost his grip and slipped and when he did his arms went up
over his head and he slid down the vent which was centered over a crossbeam [Laughter]
and when he landed he straddled the wall with a foot going on each side of the wall
he had been there rained on with his hands in this position when they cut him out they took him out
on the way out it was very obvious that a certain part of his anatomy had swollen up to grapefruit size and being
from florida we know our grapefruit here so obviously he had done some damage to
himself took the fire department to get him down he had obviously served his sentence
before we even got the call to come to the burglary [Music] [Applause] in columbia tennessee a man walked into
a building and announced that this was a bank robbery the only problem was that this was no longer a bank
fortunately the jail was still a jail [Music] and now actual footage of the case we
call please hold the onions on that burglar the san antonio police and fire department answered an unusual silent
alarm at a convenience store it seems they had a dumb criminal wedged in their kitchen vent
with his sneakers on the grill the dumb criminal came down the chimney just like
santa but our dummy was a little too wide to squeeze out oh i think that left sneakers about time
he must have been a dumb criminal combo meal because he did come with fries and a toy
the rescuers tried bringing him out the way he got in but finally they had to dismantle the exhaust hood to get the
dumb criminal out he immediately sat on the warm grill just warming his buns for a crime that
was not well done next dusty cutler shows us how patrolling the parking lot in a large
shopping mall can be more bizarre than you think i was sitting in a parking lot at a
local mall doing some paperwork just a regular report and when i heard some people yelling i
looked to my left to see what it was and saw a woman running desperately through
the parking lot she was a very tall woman dressed in a nice outfit a dress with high heels
there was two men chasing her and they were yelling that she had robbed them she had robbed a store in one of our
local malls and as she was running i went to call it in on the radio and said i was going to be chasing a female
through the parking lot at the mall and noticed that she had hiked up her dress and she had on a huge pair of
women's underwear that were stuffed full of clothing and as she ran her panties were falling off of her because of the
weight of the clothing and i said uh headquarters i'm chasing a female and about that time her underwear had fallen
to her knees and i saw she was really a man dressed as a woman i started laughing i couldn't radio it
in because i was laughing so hard she fell to the ground her panties tripped her
she pulled them off she had fallen and hurt herself her his self and his privates
as he got up he kicked off his high heels and continued to run and i turned to try and cut him off and he actually
hit the side of my car and went over the hood and i was able to get out and eventually handcuff him and then tell
him what i had [Music] [Applause] so [Music] here's nashville tennessee police officer buddy tidwell to tell us about
the thieves who decided to come back for more and that's when things got heavy many years ago in a rural area i was a
rookie and there was an unfortunate man who was robbed he was robbed of his wallet and the contents
these men at gunpoint had approached him and demanded his money and wallet and they took it but apparently they weren't
happy with the amount of money they had gotten from the man they looked in his wallet and they found a number of
receipts where the man had purchased a stereo and a tv and a vcr and they found a card inside his wallet
that said in case of emergency notifying it had his wife's name his address and his phone number
well the robbers called the man in his house and told him we didn't get enough money and we want you to take this tv
and stereo and all this nice stuff you've bought we want you to set it outside your house in a box and we want
it out there by nine o'clock p.m or we're coming over and we're gonna do you and your family in well naturally the
man was terrified so he called us and we told him to sit tight and we sent a car right by to get
the man and his family and take him to a place of safety my partner and i arrived
there so we went into the man's garage and looked around we found a large cardboard
box and uh there were some stones nearby large paving stones were nearby we took the stones and put them in the
box and we took a roll of duct tape we had in the car and we taped it did then we set it out as the robbers
had described and as we stepped back and looked we thought this would never work
these guys won't be this dumb and about 15 minutes had elapsed it was about five minutes after nine we were
ready to give it up and uh the bushes near the man's house started to rattle and all of a sudden three guys came out
from behind the bushes and they grabbed this huge box full of rocks and we looked at each other and began to
laugh but we as we approached them we yelled police and stopped and put the box down
nothing new and they held onto the box for dear life and they continued to run with a
200 pound box and as they they went farther they got exhausted and they finally just
collapsed with the box and when my partner and i got there we easily took him into custody and
uh showed him what was inside the box he lied to him why would you just shoot him stupid
i guess you could definitely say these guys were dumber than a box of rocks these three were definitely candidates
for their witless protection program [Music] in kansas it used to be against the law
to drive into the city without first walking ahead to warn people but then if you've ever seen the drivers in kansas
you'd understand why you know we couldn't have done this show without the cooperation of the men and
women of law enforcement across america we'd like to thank them for their time their dedication and for making our
lives a lot safer and we learned that cops are just people too with one exception
they're willing to lay down their lives for us [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music]
[Applause] do [Music] you

In this episode of "America's Dumbest Criminals," we'll witness a fool and his jewels, a crime that was not well-done and three light weights with a heavy load.

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

This episode highlights absurd criminal blunders and humorous police encounters across America.

Key points

America's Dumbest Criminals. A humorous look at real-life criminals who made foolish mistakes.
The Burglary Incident. An officer catches a burglar who knocks himself out in a surprising encounter.
The Mystery of the Flushometer. A bizarre crime where flushometers were stolen, including one from the mayor's restroom.
A Robbery Gone Wrong. A man attempts to rob a bank that no longer exists, leading to his arrest.
Robbers Caught with Rocks. Three robbers attempt to collect a box of rocks instead of valuables, leading to their arrest.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This ain't Hollywood, this is the real world.

Introduction to America's Dumbest Criminals

1:22WatchDec 2, 2021

Tension

30/ 100Low tension

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