America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 3, Episode 24 - Short Fuse - Full Episode | Forensic Files

ANNOUNCER: Tonight on "America's Dumbest Criminals," he's got a handful of dynamite and a short fuse.
But you won't believe how he blows. It's good this crooks is getting familiar with license plates,
because he'll be making them soon. Doesn't this look like an accident just waiting to happen?
You can't cut us off now, because things are just getting interesting for America's dumbest criminals.
[theme music] ANNOUNCER: Now, welcome your hosts for "America's Dumbest Criminals," Daniel Butler and Debbie Alan.
-Big show tonight. -Oh, you don't know the of if. -What do you mean? -Remember, how you talked about getting a speeding ticket?
-Yeah. -And missing your court date? -Well, yeah, yeah, but it happened only because I was
focused on creating quality television programming. -Oh, please, save that speech for when
you accept your Emmy, OK? -Well, what are you getting at? -Nothing, nothing. -OK, sure.
-We have a very special show tonight with lots of surprises, that all I'm talking about.
-I'm all tingly in anticipation. I really am. -Our first criminal got a surprise
as well when he tried to pull a fast one in a drug store. Now, I love to find a bargain.
But our first villain was looking for a steal. -But this guy wasn't going for jewels or cars.
He was going for pictures, trying to avoid paying for film development. -What should have been a simple sales transaction,
blew up into something larger than life. [siren sound] DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER): In the next five seconds
a crime is going to be committed. Watch closely. Did you catch it? We'll give you a second chance to see
what caught the security guard eye. Here's a look from another angle. This student at the University of California Santa Barbara
takes a look at these pictures, then pockets them, oblivious that the camera caught it all.
Then he makes his way out of the store where he's confronted by security. Now here's the mind boggling part of this whole story.
This was his second attempt to steal these very same pictures. He had just paid $200 fine of restitution
and picked up the film from the office when this video was shot. Here's a financial rundown on what just transpired.
The cost of building developing, $12.49. Cost of first civil demand for restitution, $200.
Cost for round two, $400, plus he was arrested for theft. So the difference between obeying the law
and breaking the long, a whopping $587.51. I sure hope he wasn't an economics major.
-And that didn't include attorney fees, you know. -Isn't that pitiful. Now, we head to Woodland Park, Colorado,
for a story that is pure dynamite. -You know how Wile E. Coyote lowers the plunger
in an attempt to blow the Roadrunner to kingdom come? Well, this is nothing like that.
But it does involve someone armed with dynamite. -Or to be more correct, partially armed.
First he uses sticks of TNT as a weapon to threaten bank tellers. Talk about sending interest rates through the roof.
Then he realizes that his threat kit is incomplete. -Well, a little. His quest for wholeness brings us
to something to remember me by. -I was involved in an investigation, involving an individual that robbed a supply
store for dynamite in Triple Creek. The next day, he uses this dynamite to rob a bank, not realizing the dynamite wasn't
really good without the blasting cap. -Fill it out. That's enough. -That afternoon he calls the store owner.
He tells the owner that he was the guy that robbed him the day before for the dynamite and that he wanted
to get some blasting caps from him. And the store owner said that he didn't have any in stock
right now. But if he called back this afternoon, he would tell him if the shipment came in.
In the meantime, he called the police and working with several agencies, we set up a location for him to meet
with the suspect to buy the blasting cap. That evening he calls the owner back again
and tells the owner doesn't want the blasting caps. So when he shows up at pre-designated location,
the only thing that's in the van is the SWAT team waiting for him. The only blast that this dummy got was jail time.
-I was driving behind this group of guys and gals. The gals were in one car. The guys were in another car.
The guys we're obviously flirting with the girls. The girls were just kind of giggling and having fun.
The guys were so busy flirting with the girls, they didn't even see me. The girls saw me.
They kind of were smiling a little bit because they knew that the cops right next to them.
And finally one of the guys yells out, we've got some beer. About that time, one of the passengers in the guy's car
turns his head and looks and sees me. He gets a shocked look on his face. The girls at that point, since they saw me,
they just started laughing pretty hard at that point. And their light turned green, so they took off.
And they were gone. Didn't see them again. The guy's went ahead and continued on
through the intersection. And I pull them over. I walk up to the car and asked them
if they had some beer in the car, which they say, no, no, we were just having fun, flirting with the girls.
We were going to get some beer later if they go with us. I can see a six pack of 12 ounce bottles with open beers in it.
Pull the bottles of beer out of the car, end up arresting the driver for DUI and underage drinking,
and then also arresting the passenger for underage drinking and possession of marijuana.
They missed out on dates with the girls and instead got a date with the judge. -All right, as my childhood friend Joey Angilini once said,
never crack wise to a priest. -And that goes double if the priest is also a police officer.
-Triple if the officer is a nun. See if you don't think this man is one holy terror.
Let's go back to Woodland Park for the story. -I have a friend that's a police chaplain
and was also a regular officer. And he was transporting a prisoner to jail. And the prisoner asked him, if I ran, would you shoot me?
And he looked at him and smiled and he said, son, I can play with you. I could pray for you.
Or I can pray over you. He didn't say anything after that. ANNOUNCER: And now, another of America's dumbest laws.
In Natchez, Mississippi, it's illegal for elephants to drink beer. -Oh, yeah, the last thing the world needs
is a passel of punchy pachyderms staggering around. I wonder if the drunk elephant sees pink people.
Well, we'll think about that later. You've heard the old expression, so drunk, he
couldn't see straight. Well, our next story concerns a woman who recognized that she was too intoxicated to drive.
But then she turns the wheel over to someone who was also at-- shall we say-- a disadvantage.
It definitely ranks among America's dumbest excuses. -I had the opportunity to observe a car coming at me.
He came over my line, ran me off the road into a convenience store parking lot. Turned around on him, came back up.
He's going across three, four lanes of a five lane road, going from side to side.
I had my blue lights, siren on. Chased him for about nine miles. And finally I got him stopped and he came out a car.
And I noticed he was leaning on the car. I thought it was for support. Come to find out that he was blind.
I could see his eyes and it was pretty obvious he just couldn't see anything at all.
He get to the end of the car and fell. There was a female passenger in the car also.
And I asked her, well, why weren't you driving? She was intoxicated also. So it's one of those things that's kind of surprising.
-Yeah, the moral of the story is designate a driver who can actually get you home in one piece.
And on that sober note, over to you, Debbie. -Well, our next guy was offering the deal of a century.
For a one time fee, you could get unlimited cable, including those pricey pay-per-view events,
without paying anything. The electronic device the egghead was selling was called a black box.
It unscrambled all cable channels. And that made the cable company madder than a wet hen.
When authorities pull the plug on his operation, noticed that the crook's expressions are rather blank.
-It's not illegal. It's just an electronic device. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER): That's what the man said after he was
busted for selling two black boxes to an undercover officer. That's a serious felony.
He could go to jail for quite some time. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER): These tinker toys
will give you free access to everything cable offers, even pricey pay-per-view events without paying a nickel.
As this cable company rolled out a major crackdown and began knocking on doors, they
found all sorts of inventive electronics at work, all of it, a criminal offense.
Maybe instead of peddling illegal gizmos, this guy had better go back to fiddling
with legal electronic devices. -All right, pay attention, a quick overview of our next story.
It involves a man, a big knife and the attempt to hide the said knife in his pants.
In this disturbing melodrama, the part of the criminal will be played by John Wayne Bobbitt.
Made you wince, didn't I? Settle down, easy. It's not quite as bad as it sounds.
But it's close. -A young man walks into a convenience store, walks up to a display of knives.
And apparently, he wanted one real bad but didn't have enough money to buy it. So he took the knife off the display
and shoved it down the front of his pants. Just then he noticed that security was on to him,
so it takes off running out the story. -Well, pretty soon, the knife creeps down inside of his pants
and starts to cut the inside of his leg. And pretty soon he's hobbling outside the store
as gently as he can. He ended up in a restaurant bathroom next door, complaining to the employees that he
was bleeding from the crotch area. And when we caught up with him, he told us the whole story.
Obviously, he was a little embarrassed. And I don't think he'll be concealing anything
in his pants in the next little while. We call this guy Blade Runner at the office.
I'm sure he got the point. -Coming up later, a driver isn't having an out of body experience when he goes toward the light.
But now with the news is a man who does as much for reporting as Marv Albert did for lingerie, Daniel with ABC headlines.
-All right, now you've heard about robbers poking their fingers through a coat to make
victims believe they were armed. Well, that's what this man in Modesto, California
did when holding up a bank, except his hand was in plain view. I'm guessing that his finger wasn't loaded.
The teller alerted police who provided nice handcuffs for the man, who was also equipped with a small silencer
that turned out to be a thimble. Two men in San Diego were arrested when a search revealed
that they were in possession of a stolen video camera. But apparently they'd been tampering with the evidence.
Inadvertently they had recorded themselves displaying their stolen goods and even congratulating each other
for being clever enough to steal the video camera's operating manual, which apparently they hadn't read.
Dressed in raid shirts and holding their police radios, an assault force of narcotics officers
took down a crack house in De Land, Florida, netting 14 arrests. As the investigators were wrapping up,
two true dopeheads approach the uniformed officers and acquired about making a buy.
They were promptly arrested and the stolen truck they were driving was seized. And that closes the file on ABC headlines,
news ripped from somewhere near the back of your local newspaper. Debbie. -She was a very, very stout woman
with a very, very bad disposition. And she wore a very, very yellow dress. She also wore out the officers who were pursuing her.
see for yourself. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER): She tried to hide in the bushes from police
after a high speed car chase that ended in a crash in this driveway. Police saw the woman hit a vehicle
in this apartment complex's parking lot. -She proceeded to drive forward and crash
into other vehicles in the parking lot. And then she put it back in reverse and crash
into the fence and other vehicles. And she managed to push a vehicle out of the way
of the parking lot enough to give herself room to exit the parking lot. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER): After the crash ended the chase,
she tried unsuccessfully to flee on foot and hide. -Myself and all the responding officers
noticed her running and trying to hide in the bushes in the rear of the residences
on Country Road Drive. That's where we all brought her into custody. DEBBIE ALAN (VOICEOVER): She was charged
with assault and numerous moving violations. But moving too fast on foot was not one of them.
-Hey, all crimes are wrong, but some also seem geographically undesirable. I mean, the odds of getting caught seem to mushroom.
Our next crook would have made a terrible bookie, because he perpetrated his crime practically
in the shadow of the police station. His scarfing of a license plate next to the home plate
of law enforcement gives us yet another case "I'm where? You're who?" I'm Lieutenant Karen Bodiford with the Leon County Sheriff's
Office in Tallahassee, Florida. A couple of years ago, I was working a relatively slow shift.
And I went out onto the front porch of the Sheriff's office to get a breath of fresh air.
And when I stepped out onto the porch, I saw a guy crouching behind my marked patrol car
about 30 feet from the front door. And he was removing the tag from my car, the county tag.
It took me just a second to realize what was going on. I hollered out at him to stop.
He proceeded drop his screwdriver and walked away. There aren't that many criminals that are that dumb,
but he went to jail for it. -Maybe this next guy's conversation went something like this, hey, honey, I'll be back in a little while.
I'm going to go pick up some things. And that's just what he did. First, he picked up plenty of booze.
And then he picked up a red light with the front of his car. Here's our ABC reenactment.
But remember, objects in your TV screen are smaller than they appear. -This is one of my favorite stories.
It's about a drunk driver. Early morning hours, driving alone, hit a traffic signal in the center divider,
he clipped the pole, knocked it off its base. A couple of miles later he was spotted by one of our officers.
He was kind of easy to spot because he still had that signal pole with him. It was embedded in his car, laying over the hood of the car
and into the roof of this Mazda RX7. And after a brief pursuit, the officer got the drunk driver stopped.
He walked up on the car and ask the obvious question, what's with the pole and the traffic signal?
The drunk driver replied, it came with the car when I bought it. The officer was given the green line to arrest the defendant
for drunk driving, hit and run, and excessive sarcasm. -You know, Sometimes it can be a cold, cruel world.
And sometimes it's just plain cold. -That's what a juvenile offender discovered when he escaped
from a detention center, then made a hasty u-turn. -Oh, yeah, he sure put the "burr" in "burr-reak" out.
-But the thoughtful kid that he was, he came back so we could bring your another chapter of "we're not making this up."
-I'm the manager of a juvenile detention facility. And about two years ago we were undergoing
remodeling of our main building. So we housed the kids in a temporary facility, which happened to be an old motel.
One night is about to coldest night of the year we had with the temperature about 4 degrees below zero.
In the middle of the night, an officer heard a crash and went running down to one of the rooms just
in time to see a kid exit through the whole that they made in the wall from pulling
the air conditioning unit. Saw his feet go through, ran back to the office to call 911.
About that time, the doorbell rang. Went to the door and it was the kid ringing the doorbell
wanting back in, because he was freezing to death. He only had his socks on. When he rang the doorbell, he also
picked up the newspaper that had been delivered. So he delivered us the newspaper too.
Pretty smooth character. That's the first time I've ever seen or heard of any criminal that actually escaped from custody
and rang the doorbell begging to get back. -Well, it time to thank you for joining us
and express our gratitude to all the law enforcement officers who helped us tonight.
-And all the officers they represent. Thanks for the great job you do for us every day.
There's more dumb to come when we return next week, so make a point of joining us.
-And if you can't wait till then, drop by our website. -The address is www.dumbcrimes.com.
-Hey, Daniel, at the beginning of the show, we talked about, remember, you getting a speeding ticket
and then failing to appear on your court date. -Yeah, it was a dumb mistake on my part.
-It's funny you should use that word "dumb" since it's in the title of our show.
-Yeah, where are you going with this? -It's not where I'm going. It's where you're going to be going.
Allow me to and welcome my special guests, Officers Ben Alexander and Shannon Moore of the police department.
Yes, there are here tonight. And he is booked for a very special appearance downtown.
And look, Daniel, she's about my height. Office Moore will you also book him on telling too many short jokes?
-I think my wife sent them. No really. -Tell him too he has the right to remain silent.
That will be a welcome change of pace, right everybody? Oh, you look so cute. Bye, Daniel.
When's visiting day? We know that we all learn from others mistakes-- -Yeah, yeah but if you haven't, we might just see you and me
next week on "America's Dumbest Criminal." -Wave goodbye, Daniel. It's been nice working with you.
[theme music]

In this episode of “America’s Dumbest Criminals,” we’ll witness a criminal with a handful of dynamite and a short fuse, a crook getting familiar with license plates before jail and a sure-fire accident waiting to happen.

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 bizarre criminal acts, including thefts, a dynamite robbery, and a blind DUI driver.

Key points

Dynamite Robbery Gone Wrong. A man attempts to rob a bank with dynamite but lacks the necessary blasting caps.
Blind Driver Arrested. A blind man attempts to drive while intoxicated, leading to a surprising arrest.
Traffic Signal Heist. A drunk driver hits a traffic signal and tries to drive off with it embedded in his car.
Juvenile Escape and Return. A juvenile escapes from detention but returns to ring the doorbell for warmth.
Dumb Criminals Unite. A series of ridiculous crimes highlight the absurdity of criminal behavior.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

You won't believe how he blows.

ANNOUNCER introduces a surprising twist.

0:09WatchMar 3, 2022

Tension

40/ 100Low tension

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