America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 3, Episode 14 - On Thin Ice - Full Episode | Forensic Files

MALE ANNOUNCER: Tonight-- can you guess why this crook was skating on thin ice even before he made a major slip up?
And how do you send a wake-up call to career criminals that it's time for a new career?
Catch it all on "America's Dumbest Criminals." [theme music] -Duh. MALE ANNOUNCER: Now, welcome your hosts
for "America's Dumbest Criminals"-- Daniel Butler and Debbie Alan. [applause] -Why don't you tell everybody what
happened to you on the way to the studio? -No. -Come on. -No. -Come on. -All right.
I got a speeding ticket. -And what else? -It was on my own street. -What else? -OK.
I had called the police last year to complain about the people speeding on my street, OK?
They got me. -Bingo. He's on the right show tonight, isn't he? -Yeah, buddy. -Your little mishap, though, doesn't even
begin to compare with our first story. Of course, you've heard the phrase "thick as thieves"?
Well, tonight our show is thick with thieves as we show you excerpts from an undercover operation that
was run by the police department in Redondo Beach, California. -It was the largest sting of its kind
and a huge victory over bad guys, who were grabbing the goods of law-abiding citizens.
Here's the first of our three-part look into Operation Bull Market. -We set up a storefront operation
to buy stolen property back from dumb crooks. -It's been recognized as the most successful sting in California history.
-Our story wouldn't have been possible without probably the dumbest crooks. It was called Operation Bull Market.
We set up a storefront to buy back property from burglars. We invested about $175,000 to buy back $4.3 million
worth of property. MICHAEL WEBB: We can arrest the defendants and put them in jail, but usually the victim just
doesn't get his or her property back. So we wanted to set up a storefront sting operation
so that the defendants would bring the stolen property to us so that we could return it to the victims.
JEFF CAMERON: We used undercover officers behind the counter. The name of the store was IVD Enterprises.
Now, loosely translated from Roman numerals, IVD is 496. 496 in the California penal code is receiving stolen property.
MICHAEL WEBB: And we videotaped everything. We were able to recover over $4 million in stolen property,
including 212 vehicles. DEBBIE ALAN: All right. Great police work. We'll have more on this sting operation a little bit later.
But right now, we turn our attention to the plight of the criminal. Meet a klutzy crook who cut himself during a break-in
and made a bloody mess of things. It's this week's installment of "something to remember me by."
-Well, the subject decided to steal some designer jeans from a local store. And he walked up the window and looked in and saw jeans.
He wanted to bust the glass out. In the processing of busting window glass out, he cut his fore-arm open.
He apparently took a bunch of jeans, wrapped them around his forearm, and left from the scene.
We just followed the blood trail of jeans that he had dropped on the way all the way back to his apartment.
When we got there, the dumbest about it was that none of the jeans that he stole he could use,
because they were all saturated with blood. They were pretty much ruined. And so he wouldn't have gotten anything out of them anyway.
-Crime is dangerous, kids. You know, if you live where ice and snow are a problem,
you probably know these tips for winter driving-- accelerate slowly, tap the brake gently to reduce speed,
remain calm at all times. Fasten your seat belts now, kids, as you'll see ice eating ice.
MALE ANNOUNCER: If you've ever driven on ice, you've experienced a little of this.
But have you ever done anything like this? He comes down the hill, across the street, then ouch!
Oooh. But it's not over yet. No, not by a long shot-- bumper cars and more bumper cars
until finally he comes to a stop. -Coming off that hill, tried to stop. She just-- like a sheet of ice, kept sliding.
See, we gained momentum. Just all over the place. I was trying to steer, because she
wasn't having no part of it. -I wish she would've totaled us, because I'd get a new car out of it.
I wanted her to come back and hit it again. [laughter] MALE ANNOUNCER: It's a rare thing
to get away with breaking a law of the land. But breaking the laws of physics? Don't even try it.
MALE ANNOUNCER: In Houston, no one can get on or off the train without first showing a special health certificate.
-Our next story involves health, but not trains. Perhaps the driver caught speeding
had seen too many doctor shows on TV. He thought he could play mind games with the officer,
but he just wasn't up to the task. -I had a couple of teenage boys-- one of our little state routes here
is posted 45 mile an hour speed limit. I clocked 'em at 84 on my radar. And of course, stop the car, and go up to the window.
And the driver, he's just got a story to tell me, you know, right of the bat. Hey man, you know, officer-- my friend
here, he's got a brain injury. His ears are bleeding. He's hemorrhaging. You can call his coach.
You know, I'm trying to get him to his mother. She's a nurse. And I look over at the guy.
I said, hey, are you OK? He's kind of shocked at what his friend's talking about.
I said, are you sure you're all right? He said, Yeah. He said, I just don't feel real good.
You know, my head is kind of hurting. I said, well, I said, I tell you what. I said, I'm gonna get you an ambulance.
So I summonsed out all kind of medical people just to check him out. I figured it was probably just a front.
They were trying to back out of the citation, because there was going to be a reckless driving ticket anyway.
So make a long story short, the whole calvary's called out-- red lights galore, paramedics, fire trucks.
You name it, they were there. The guy refused the treatment at the scene. And his friend the driver, he kind of took his medicine
and signed on the dotted line at the bottom. So that was probably the wildest one I've ever had.
-Daniel could have used that excuse this morning, because it's not a good idea, though,
to cry wolf with a police officer. Is it, Daniel? -No. I think there was something wrong with his brain,
but it was figuratively, not literally. He might find some kindred spirits, maybe even a support
group, from the folks who got stung by that sting operation we showed you earlier.
For more details on this incredible undertaking, we take your back to Redondo Beach, California.
-In order to get the defendants to come into the store, our officers went out and posted fliers
saying that they would buy property. And that's all it said-- just buy property.
And when someone would come in and offer to sell a car, we would offer about 4% of Blue Book value.
So if it was a legitimate citizen, they weren't going to sell their car for that.
JEFF CAMERON: We would gain the confidence of these dumb crooks and end up buying from them on more than one occasion.
They would end up copping out to us about crimes that they had done that we had no knowledge about.
-They don't have cameras at the back, but they have them at the front. They don't have no cameras at the back gate.
And we go-- we take people to-- we got a D lot where everybody parks for work. So that's when I get 'em.
I just take people over there and keep the car. -So we ended up pinning a lot more crime on them
than they actually had walked into. -One of them stole a car, sold it to these officers,
and then promptly ran back into the parking lot, jumped into the car, and tried to steal it a second time.
JEFF CAMERON: The big take-down day, we invited the media. It was covered by virtually every TV
news station in Los Angeles basin. -Police [inaudible] armed with a search warrant.
I demand entry-- open the door now. JEFF CAMERON: They went out with SWAT teams,
and arrested a number of suspects that had been identified. -Get down on the ground!
Get down! -It was a proud day for law enforcement here in the South Bay. -That's pretty amazing.
We'll bring this story to a close a little bit later in the show. Here's a familiar phrase appropriate to the people we
just saw and those you're about to meet-- be sure your sins will find you out. Or to put that in more practical terms, if you don't turn off
your cell phone before you start bragging about the hoax you're pulling, you're going to get busted.
Instead of covering their tracks, see how these teenagers in Sandy, Utah, got stopped in their tracks.
-I received a call from our dispatcher about a traffic accident. They had originally left the scene of where the accident
occurred and they had waved down another officer. And the dispatcher told me that the five minutes
she was on the phone with them, she had heard them make some statements. She was talking to them for awhile,
and then all of a sudden, for whatever reason, they thought the phone went dead.
And they couldn't hear the dispatcher, but the dispatcher could still hear them.
So they had never hung the phone up. They just threw it up on their dashboard, and they kept making their statements.
They were formulating their lie-- where did he hit us? Let's get our story together.
What were we even doing on the road? How fast were we going? We were coming back from church.
About this point, I arrived. After hearing that information from dispatch, I knew what we were dealing with-- they were
going to file a false police report. Well, I talked to the passenger in the car,
and basically told them I knew what they had done. They never hung up their cellphone,
and he kind of shook his head in disgust. I took my codebook over there, and let
him read the law on filing a false police report. Then he told me the whole story, that they
just saw somebody they knew. They started flipping each other off with the infamous middle digit.
Well, they got mad, and he got mad, and they played a little bumper tag down the streets of Sandy.
He was getting afraid at this point that his dad was going to be mad because there was damage
to his truck, which I'm sure would be the case. I walked by the car-- I also noticed
there was a video camera in it. And I asked to see what was on the video camera.
And of course, they didn't want to show me, but eventually they did. It was more or less their pursuit of the guy who hit 'em.
But there were also some parts of them pulling up next to each other and given each other the finger.
Decided not to file any charges on 'em. We took the people who filed the complaint home, let them
tell the story to their mom and dad. To say the least, mom and dad were not happy with their son's behavior.
We felt they were going to get more justice from an angry mom and dad than they would in the juvenile court system,
so we let them resolve the situation. -Round three at the Bull Market sting operation is coming up.
But now, the news from a source whose name is more credible than Stone Phillips,
Cokie Roberts, or Wolf Blitzer. Here's Daniel with ADC Headlines. -Well, a Chattanooga prisoner was on work release
and restricted to the facility, except when commuting to work. But everything changed when a sentencing judge happened
to read the prisoner's score from a charity golf tournament in the local newspaper.
Well, he's now serving his entire four years sentence, and it'll be a long time before his tee-time comes up again.
Penny-wise, pound-foolish-- that was the epilogue on this story of a man in Providence, Rhode Island,
who knocked over an armored car driver, grabbed the four closest money bags, and fled.
Well, it so happened that the bags that he grabbed contained $800 in pennies for a staggering total weight
of 120 pounds. He was easily overtaken by police. I mean, I think you're only brought good luck
from pennies you find one at a time. Beefeater is a brand of gin. Beef eaters with an "s" is a brand of toy dog bones.
Apparently, a pair of thieves in Newark weren't watching their P's and Q's-- or their s's-- when they made off with
799 cases of something they thought would be a black market bonanza, instead of a golden retriever's nirvana.
Well, so much for barking up the wrong tree. And that closes the file on ABC Headline News, ripped
from somewhere near the back of your local newspaper. Debbie? It's time for the closing chapter of our inside look
at the Bull Market sting operation in Redondo Beach. Join us in a post-mortem celebrating the finale
of this stupendously successful charade. -In the end, we identified and arrested 96 suspects.
We filed 539 felony counts. About 84 of the 96 suspects had prior felony arrests,
which meant obviously they've dealt with law enforcement before, so they've got to got to be more of the dumber crooks
that we have to deal with. We recovered 212 stolen vehicles. It was interesting in a number of the conversations what we
heard from the crooks, such as-- they were boasting, I'm never going to get caught, and the cops are so dumb.
They'll never catch me. Well, we've sent them all back to prison, and they'll be there for awhile.
Now, behind the counter in the store was a trophy from the Police Athletic League.
And on a couple of occasions, these crooks would noticed that and inquire why we had such a trophy?
And they were simply told-- with the undercover officers trying to keep a straight face-- that they contributed to the Police
Athletic League, and that was just one way that they kept the police out of their hair.
If it weren't for the dumber crooks, we wouldn't have had Operation Bull Market.
And if it weren't for dumb crooks, I probably wouldn't have a job, and you probably wouldn't have a show.
-Yeah, I guess that makes Debbie and I doubly indebted to the police officers for their great police work.
Now we move on to an operation far less sophisticated-- there are no undercover officers,
no months of planning. In fact, officers didn't even have to leave the station to make this arrest.
Watch the binging bozo bomb as he tries to bail out his buddy. -Several years ago, I was on patrol-- as a matter of fact,
I was finishing up a shift. I was heading up the highway leading toward our police
station when I observed the car in front of me that was going slower than the posted speed limit.
Nothing that unusual about that, but what caught my attention was, he made a right hand turn at the street
prior to the police station. He almost struck the curb. So I followed him up that street and I intended to pull him over
as he made a left hand turn into the parking lot at the police station, basically.
At that point in time, he went through a marked stop sign and a "do not enter" sign and went around the rear
of the police station where it's restricted access, right past the back door of the police station, around
the far side of the police station, and pulled his car over near our sally point,
where we bring our prisoners in. And as he got out of the car, I asked him if he needed any assistance, if I can help with anything.
-Uh, yeah, I just-- I came to pick up a friend of mine. -And I realized from his demeanor, his staggering,
that he was drunk. -Uh, I think y'all arrested him for drunk driving. I haven't had anything to drink.
Not at all. No. No. What? Turn around? What for? POLICE OFFICER: Put your hands behind your back.
-Oh. POLICE OFFICER: You're under arrest for DUI. -No, really, I just came to pick up a friend of mine.
Y'all arrested him. I'm trying to do him a favor. -So basically, he surrendered himself.
I walked him 20 feet inside the police station and arrested him for drunk driving at that point.
-I just came to pick up a friend of mine. Y'all arrested him. POLICE OFFICER: Come on.
In the building. In the building. -I'm trying-- I'm trying to do him a fa-- favor!
POLICE OFFICER: Watch your step, watch your step. MALE ANNOUNCER: Coming up-- tonight's chapter in "we're not
making this up" shows a crook's civility towards a civil servant, and it's nothing to sneeze at.
-Would you allow me to quote Emily Post? -Well, all right. Go ahead. [snorts] -Daniel.
You can dress this guy up, huh? -What? -All right. Emily Post said that manners are a sensitive awareness
of the feelings of others. -Mm-hmm. -And our last story tonight portrays one of the most sensitive criminals
we've ever come across. -Yeah. Excuse me. Oh, he's a real pussycat, this one. Yeah, Deb.
-I'm glad you said "excuse me." You've heard that bad manners can cause problems?
Well, watch how good manners bring this criminal's downfall. -Several years ago-- I was still a police officer--
I had a conditions call, a burglary call. The purpose of that job was to help bring down
burglaries on the midnight shift. One day, we responded to a burglary in process.
By the time we got to that particular job, several uniformed police cars had already arrived.
They had done a thorough search, and they didn't come up with anybody. -You all right?
You got a cold, or something? -Yeah, I've had a cold for-- gosh, about two weeks now.
-We were getting ready to leave. Police officer sneezed. I heard a voice said "gesundheit."
-Did you hear that? CRIMINAL: Gesundheit! -I [inaudible] he had climbed up into the ceiling.
I heard a voice said "gesundheit." -Ah. There you go. DEBBIE ALAN: Aww. He's a nice guy-- he did have some good habits.
-He did, except for that little breaking and entering habit. -Naughty, naughty. -And we'll take this opportunity to say bless you for watching
"America's Dumbest Criminals"-- keeps us in a job and off the streets. And that's got to be good for something, right?
-In your case, yes sir. Well, we're signing off for now, but we'll count on seeing you next time.
-There's a lot more dumb where these stories came from. -If you've got a lead on a story,
or you just can't wait till next week for more state of the art stupidity, visit our website at www.dumbcrimes.com.
-We want to thank you for joining us and extend our gratitude to the law enforcement
officers who make this show possible. Every day, they lay their lives on the line
to keep us safe from the stupidity of would-be criminals. -As always, we hope that we've all
learned from other's mistakes. -But if you haven't yet, we just might see you next week
on "America's Dumbest Criminals." -Goodbye! [applause]

In this episode of “America’s Dumbest Criminals,” we’ll witness a crook sliding on thin ice before a major slip-up, a wakeup call for criminals to select a new career and much more.

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 covers a successful police sting, a clumsy burglar, and a drunk driver who surrendered at the police station.

Key points

Operation Bull Market. A successful sting operation in California recovered over $4 million in stolen property.
Klutzy Crook's Mistake. A thief cuts himself during a break-in, leaving a bloody trail back to his apartment.
Teenagers' Mistake. A group of teens gets caught lying to police after leaving the scene of an accident.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Crime is dangerous, kids.

4:12WatchMar 3, 2022

Tension

40/ 100Low tension

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