America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 3, Episode 20 - Houdumbi - Full Episode | Forensic Files

DANIEL: Tonight on "America's Dumbest Criminals." If their getaway planning included running around
in circles, these guys are following it to a tee. This man may think he's Houdini, but as you'll see,
he's more like Hou-dummy. And the blockhead in this cell block passes a note that'll leave him fumbling for a response.
Kick back and relax as you'll watch the good guys punt the bad guys right into prison
on "America's Dumbest Criminals." [music playing] [applause] Glad you're with us tonight.
-Hi. -Debbie, what's the biggest thing you've ever won? Huh? -You mean like in a contest or giveaway?
-Yeah, yeah, school cakewalk, Powerball, lotto, anything like that? -OK, an apple pie at McDonald's.
-OK. Wow. -But now you strike me as someone who good fortune just smiles upon. -Actually, it's because he's laughing at me at the irony,
you know, of it. -What's your biggest win? -I-- the Egg McMuffin, actually. I won the Egg McMuffin, got actual pork in there.
-Well, everybody comes out a winner tonight except for the dumb crooks, of course.
-Oh, but they think they're on the verge of scoring big time. Take our first story, for example.
Police in the Bronx used a sting operations to round up dozens of suspects with outstanding warrants.
The bait? Winning a contest. -And did they fall for it? -Oh yeah. -Hook, line, and sinker.
Watch as police officers real in a boatload of crook.s [music playing] DEBBIE: You too could be a winner.
All it took to nab these wanted criminals was the lure of receiving money. Surprise!
This guy even took a 2,000-mile bus ride to claim his cash. -Well, at first he wanted to know
how much money he was getting back. Uh, we told him, well, let me check the computer before you get too excited.
We had a slowly kind of real him in. DEBBIE: The catch of the day was wanted for attempted murder.
And he even suspected a sting. -He knew it was a sting. He knew he was gonna get-- he knew.
He knew. But he still came. I said, you know, why did you come here? Why did you come?
He says, it's 'cause I needed the money. DEBBIE: I hope the guy with the bus ticket
didn't buy a round trip ticket. [applause] -OK. He knew it was a sting, but he went
anyway, because he needed the money. Oh, yeah. There's some smarts for you, huh?
-And our next guy is no Fulbright scholar either. He's a car thief with his brain on auto pilot.
-Now he thought that some good-natured soul had found his missing wallet and just wanted
to give it back to its rightful owner. Well, he's partially right. See what we mean.
-I'd received a call to go and process a stolen car that had been recovered in a vacant field.
When I got down there, the first thing that caught my attention was that there was a wallet laying in the front seat.
Naturally, we looked in the wallet and found a driver's license, which did not belong to the registered owner of the car.
On a hunch, I called the person who's driver's license it was. [phone ringing] -Hello?
Yeah, yeah, this is him. -And told him that I had found his driver's license and wallet.
And would he like to come down to the police department to recover it? -Yeah, that'd be fine.
Yeah, I'll be there. Thanks, sir. Buh-bye. -He was quite excited that we'd found it
and was very complimentary and though we'd done a great job and just so excited to get his money and his driver's
license back, he couldn't stand it. -Hey, Mr. G? -Yeah. -Here's that wallet we found.
-Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. -Glad we could be of service to you.
-And as if I was taking a report on found property, I asked him when we had last seen his wallet.
He told me he just couldn't remember. So I asked him, well, where all had you been that night?
-I was at a restaurant and, well, went to a game. -And he named off four or five places, including the apartment
complex where the car had been stolen from. At that point, I asked him, are you sure you didn't just leave that wallet in that '78 Plymouth?
-What! -You could just see his shoulders sag. Sometimes they leave their calling cards.
Sometimes they leave their driver's license. [applause] -Yeah. -Never leave your wallet in a car you've just stolen.
-Yeah, it's bad for them. It really is. -Sometimes crooks think they're being so clever when they try to out-fox police.
-Yeah, our next guy thought he'd stash his drugs in his swimming pool. But based on his logic, he's apparently tried diving
into the shallow end a few too many times, I think. -He leaves us, Something to Remember Me By.
[music playing] -I was working narcotics and working undercover, and I got a call from another narcotics officer
that we had a guy in our town that was selling drugs. And the guy was infamous for flushing the drugs down
the toilet before the police could get in the door. So I put our undercover officers around the guy's house.
And when everybody was ready, I got on the cellular phone. And I was about a block from his house.
And I call him up on the cellular phone, and I tell the guy, hey man. I just got out of the jail, and I was in there.
And there were a couple of narcotics officers. And they had a search warrant, and they were talking
to somebody about some guy named Henry. And they're gonna come down there, and they're gonna hit your house.
Man, if you've got anything in there, you better get it out of there. And the guy goes, hey, what's your name?
And I told him, my name's Jim. And the guy goes, oh, thanks a lot. That's great.
Hangs up on me. 30 seconds later, the guy comes running out the front door. And he's got a bag, and he's looking around
back and forth in a total panic. And he sees one of our undercover guys, and he yells out like a scream, and he runs into his backyard.
And the next thing we hear is [splash]. So we run over to the fence, and we look in the fence,
just as we catch him going in the house. So we get the guy out of the house. And we walk him back here, and we tell him, get down there
in the pool and get the drugs. And what he had done is pull the light out of the pool
and stuffed the drugs behind the light. So he pulls the drugs out, and he hands them to us.
And I'm thinking, all the drugs are gone. It's all in the pool. And inside the bag, he's got it all sealed nice
for us in a Ziploc bag that protected it from the water. So we got all his drugs.
And I asked him, I said, how come you came running out the front door with all the drugs in your hand?
And he says, hey some guy called me on the phone and told me you guys were coming.
I said, no kidding. I said, what was his name? He thinks a minute. He goes, his name was Jim.
And I said, glad to meet you. And the guy looks at me. And he hangs his head down low.
He says, you guys knew I would do that, didn't ya? I said, yep, sure did. He goes, I can't believe how dumb I am.
[applause] [music playing] DANIEL: In Oklahoma, you can be fined, arrested, or jailed for making ugly faces at a dog.
[applause] -Yeah, but what if the dog starts it? I guess that's a matter for the courts to decide.
You know, some people will resort to any form of manipulation at their disposal to weasel out of a ticket.
One of the more popular is the I'm a friend of a lot of police officers approach.
Well using this buddy-buddy system blew up in our next guy's face in a big way. We got a probo Utah for a shining
example of America's dumbest excuses. [music playing] -I was running radar in a residential area.
It's a 25 mile an hour zone. I clocked a vehicle doing 40. I finally got him pulled over.
He immediately started to try to get out of a citation. He gave another trooper's name and a deputy sheriff's
name that was in the area. He said, my next door neighbor married a probo cop. I know him real well.
I said, oh, what's his name? Oh, his name's Scott Frasier. -Officer Frasier. -Officer Frasier.
-Yeah, Scott Frasier. -That's me. I know him, good looking guy. -Yeah. -Yeah. I never met him before.
-I went to school with his wife and stuff. He's a good guy. -Really? I asked him, hey, is he a good guy?
I don't know him. He's, oh, he's a great guy. I've known him for a long time. That's probably the dumbest excuse
I've heard to get out of a citation. Needless to say, he got one anyone. [applause]
-Liar, liar, pants on fire. Hey, Daniel, should we sing, "It's a Small World After All?"
-No, maybe for you. But I'm 6' 4". But it's hard to know just how tall our next crook is.
Why? Because she spends so much of her time crawling around on the floor. How do we know this?
She was scurrying about in plain view of a surveillance camera that caught her sneaky maneuvers.
Let's take a peek at our itsy bitsy spider. [music playing] DANIEL: She stowed away in a back room
of this beverage store. It closed, then nosed around, completely unaware of this camera watching her every move.
-This is very unique. In fact, it's probably the most unique crime I have worked since being in investigations.
DANIEL: She would go snooping, set off an alarm, then hurry back to her hiding place.
After police responded several times and saw no problems, the alarm was turned off.
That's when she made her escape, taking a money order machine and some cash. But she left one of the owners with a case of the willies.
-Walked by there so many times, and it's like, you know, just thinking about her being there while you walk by
and talking and stuff. It's just a weird feeling. DANIEL: When authorities came knocking on her door,
it was her turn for weird feelings. The game was over, and she won't be playing hide and seek for quite some time.
[applause] -One of my favorite movies is "The Fugitive." Harrison Ford beats the odds to gain
his freedom after a prison bus crashes. Now the only thing this would-be escape beats is his head.
Watch a getaway that gets nowhere fast. -We were on patrol one night when we got a radio call that there was
an escapee from one of the other officers. We were in the area, so we went to the scene of the escape.
And there was a kid running with his hands handcuffed behind his back. And we figured that must be him, so we gave chase.
The kid was running as fast as he could trying to get away from us. We were in a shopping center area
that had a stairwell that went to two different levels. He ran down the stairs, tripped, and before I could get to him,
he was up again and he was running again. He went down the other set of stairs, and I knew that he was faster than I was,
so I threw my night stick at his feet to try and trip him. When I threw it, I missed.
And he focused on the night stick, and he turned around, still running full speed ahead.
He didn't see it coming. And he turned around just in time for his nose to make contact with the side of the van.
He was going so fast that it turned him off like a light switch. He fell down, and then he was taken into custody.
And he probably the dumbest criminal I ever came across in my tour with Anchorage Police Department.
[applause] -Here's Daniel with ABC headlines. [music playing] -All the usual suspects were standing in the line up.
The detective asked each man to repeat the words, "Give me all your money or I'll shoot."
But the true criminal couldn't contain himself. He corrected the officer by shouting,
that's not what I said! Oops. OK. Neighbors got an eyeful when they attended a neighborhood
watch meeting hosted by a couple in their community of Oroville, California. The wife was wearing a dress stolen from one neighbor
and a stolen TV from another neighbor was in plain view. When a search warrant was issued, $9,000 in stolen goods
were recovered from the neighborhood watch meeting. [laughter] Old habits are hard to break .
That was apparently the case with a man in Boulder who immediately, after being released,
went out to the courthouse parking lot and stole the judge's car. OK. And that closes the file on ADC headlines,
news ripped from somewhere near the back of your local newspaper. Debbie? [applause]
-When you think of Ivy League schools, you think of grand traditions, massive libraries,
scholarly pursuits, and great big tuitions. Well, one such school seemed to have people engaging
in an independent study that was hardly sanctioned by the dean-- counterfeiting.
I suppose the privileged can never be too privileged. Class is now in session for counterfeiting 101.
Many young people go to college so they eventually can make more money. But four dumb criminals at Columbia University
took that thought one step too far. They did make money, but it was in the basement
of the journalism school. -Here we are at journalism, which is supposed to spread
the truth to this country and the world at large. And we have dishonest people in the basement
making dollar bills. It sucked. DEBBIE: Three former Columbia University students
and another man used a color copier to manufacture 20,000 $20 bills. After extensive lab tests, the phony bills
were traced to the copier in the Printing and Services Department located in the basement.
-I feel like a place like Columbia, people should be a little more aware of what's going on
in the-- you know, not some stupid things. DEBBIE: All four were arrested and Secret Service agents
recovered about $75,000 in bogus bills as well as cutting equipment. The four copycats may not have careers in journalism anymore,
but their future in sales-- rather cells-- looks pretty good. [applause] -Interesting scholarship opportunity.
You know, every once in awhile we all call wrong numbers. But here's the story of a call girl
who couldn't have picked a wrong-er number if she dialed all day. It's a perfect example of I'm where?
You're who? -I'm an undercover narcotics investigator from the Abilene, Taylor County, Texas are.
One day I was out checking some possible narcotics trafficking location when I get a page on my pager.
And upon checking the number, I realized that it was not a number I was familiar with.
I call the number back, and a female answered the phone. I just said hello and talked to her a little bit.
When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was looking for me. We visited back and forth over the phone
for about 10 or 15 minutes, just talking. And I finally deduced that they-- this
lady I was talking to-- was a working woman. She actually thought I was somebody she had met the day
before that had given her a pager number.' after talking to her and visiting with her, I decided that I would go ahead
and go along with it and see if it'd be any potential to make a case. And I told her that I would have to get back in touch with her
later on in the day, that I was tied up at work, and what have you. And in reality, what I needed to do
was get the vehicle wired for audio and video so we would have it for the criminal investigation.
I went back to my office where she paged me at least two other times. And when I called her back, we discussed price.
And she assured me that for $40, the sky was the limit. And I even talked her into letting me bring
a buddy of mine along, and she had a friend also. We set up a time and drove to a predetermined location.
And they came out, and we picked them up in the vehicle, drove a short distance to a motel location.
When we pulled into the motel, they were placed under arrest and were quite surprised.
Before transporting them to jail, after visiting with them, it was realized that the number that they had dialed one
digit off from my pager number. Sometimes all it takes is one wrong number to catch a dumb criminal.
-I'm Corporal Billy Woods with Ocala Police Department in Ocala, California. This particularly evening, we were
running an operation doing securities and checking certain establishments and with motorcycles and bicycle units.
Well, this particular motorcycle unit had caught a burglar in progress. Well, the burglar had t took the time to be quiet
and he's doing his best to get into the vehicle. But he got so frustrated that he ended up breaking the window.
But at the same time, the officer caught him and he fled on foot. I ended up chasing him, catching him
on foot about 200 yards away. Both you hands. We ended up after we did a little more investigating,
it turns out, the vehicle that he broke into-- Hey, man, you know the door's open?
-Man! -[laughs] [applause] [music playing] -Our final crook of the evening stole
his sister's checkbook and her car. What he should have been in the market for was brains.
-Those two things got him in plenty of trouble. But then he felt it expedient to unwittingly rat
on himself about something else. He provides the fodder for tonight's edition of We're
Not Making This Up. [music playing] -What happened is we had a guy that was a guest to the city.
He'd been arrested earlier in the day on some check fraud. He'd borrowed his sister's checkbook
and decided to go write a couple checks. We brought him here, and later on he called his sister.
And she came down to the police station to get the keys to her car that he had borrowed also.
When I was in having him sign the property sheet to release the keys, he said, can I borrow a piece of paper?
-To write a note to my sister. -Yeah. Handed my pen and my notepad, and he jotted a little note
down saying sorry that he had borrowed her checkbook and written some checks. -OK, don't read this, but give it to my sister.
-OK. He handed the notebook back to me, left it at all open. When I was walking it out to her, I happen to-- I
happened to glance down at the note. He wrote on the bottom of the note. He says, whatever you do, don't let anybody look
in the center console of the car. So I took the note out to her, showed her the note,
and told her I was concerned there might be some drugs in the car and didn't want her to get in trouble with it.
So she went down with me to car, looked in it. And sure enough, there were methamphetamine
and some marijuana. He was dumb once for the check fraud. He was dumb twice for the second note.
So that makes him a dumb-dumb. [applause] -Sis, don't let anybody look in the console.
No, really, sis. Oh, that's original. Well, I'm sure that he's the one who needed consoling when
he realized what he'd done, huh? -Maybe it would cheer-- -Console. -I get it. Maybe it would cheer him up to note that he'd
provided amusement to our audience. What do you think? -Nah! -I don't think so, but I do think that we're out of time.
Before we go, we want to say thank you to the officers who helped us out tonight and all the people in law enforcement
across the country who help us around the clock by protecting us from bad guys. -This world would be a scarier place
without you folks on the job. -If you've got a lead on a story 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.
-As always, we hope that we've all learned from others' mistakes. -But if haven't, we just might see you next week
on "America's Dumbest Criminals." -Goodbye! [applause] [music playing]

In this episode of “America’s Dumbest Criminals,” we’ll witness a getaway plan based on running in a circle, a silly crook whose magic trick earns him the name Houdumbi and a blockhead in a cell who regrets passing a note.

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

Criminals make foolish mistakes in various hilarious stories on America's Dumbest Criminals.

Key points

America's Dumbest Criminals. A showcase of hilarious and absurd criminal blunders.
The Contest Sting Operation. Police use a fake contest to catch wanted criminals in the Bronx.
The Wallet in the Stolen Car. A car thief forgets his wallet in the vehicle he stole, leading to his capture.
Counterfeiting 101 at Columbia. Students at Columbia University engage in counterfeiting, leading to their arrest.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He's more like Hou-dummy.

Daniel's humorous take on a criminal's failed escape attempt.

0:16WatchMar 3, 2022

Tension

30/ 100Low tension

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