America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 4, Episode 5 - Back-Breaking Burden - Full Episode | Forensic Files

NARRATOR: Tonight on America's Dumbest Criminals, meet a crook who decides to drop in unannounced at a car
dealership, discover the backbreaking burden of stealing $3,000 in coins, and what happens
if you mess with a wire surging with 15,000 volts of electricity? For the Shocking answers, stay where you are.
You're wired into the crooked dealings of America's Dumbest Criminals. [theme music]
NARRATOR: Now, welcome your hosts for America's Dumbest Criminals, Daniel Butler and Debbie Allen.
-Hi, there. -Hey, Debbie. How's it going? -It's going great. -All right. -You want to explain your friend right there?
-What? Oh, no, I just cashed my check for co-hosting the show. -Yeah? But it looks like you're making more than me.
Wait a minute. And its jingling. What is the jingling noise? -Well, yeah. I've got almost, what?
$60 in change in here. Yeah. -And that's because? -Well, it's so I can tell all my TV co-host buddies that I bring
down some heavy coin for doing this show. -Oh, brother. -Plus I'm developing some pretty impressive biceps.
You want to feel that? -Go ahead. Make your muscle. -Hey, hey, hey. -Come on. -What?
-Weenie. -No. Well, a ton of coins figure into one of our stories that we're going to get to later.
But first, we meet up with a real homewrecker. -Yeah. And if you've ever gone in a model home and said,
this is exactly how I want my house to look, don't follow through like this guy did.
-Nope. We've got him, caught on camera. -We received a call for a burglary at one of our sample homes in the township.
When they called for the burglary, they said the furniture that was inside the sample home
had been taken, including the sofas, some stuffed chairs, and some other items. When we arrived there, they advised us
that there was a swatch from the sofa, an armchair cover, that had been left behind by the actors.
And we followed the footprints in mud across the road, right to the back of the house.
When we knocked on the back door, the subjects came running out of the bedroom, looked out the front, assuming that the knock
had come from the front door. When they looked out, they saw the police car. I'm watching from the back door.
I see them pick up the sofa and the chair, carried it in the bedroom, carry out the stuff, I guess,
that they had had there originally, put that in the room, and then they go to answer the door.
At that point I knocked on the back door and told them, hey, we saw you carry this stuff back into the back bedroom.
We also took their issues so we could match the footprints up to those that we had found in the mud, and at that point
they confessed and carried the stolen goods back to the sample home for me. Using all my years of detective training at my training
at the FBI Academy, why, I was able to track the subjects down just by following the muddy footprints.
-Well, I'm sure the guy that robbed that model home has now become a model prisoner.
-I'm sure has has. -Hey, have you ever seen those car dealers who talk about how
they've knocked the roof off high prices? -Mm-hm. -Well, we found a crook who tried
to do pretty much the same thing. -We take you to Clinton, South Carolina, for the midnight madness of Something To Remember Me By.
-Hi. One time we had a fella break into a car dealership, and we got a call from the car dealership that morning.
And we went over there, they found a hole in the ceiling. And I'm looking at the hole in the ceiling,
he'd climbed down upon some file cabinets. We started looking around the file cabinets, decided to start brushing for prints,
and everything. We found a piece of paper on the floor. Picked up the piece of paper, and it was a warrant
for a fella we'd arrested a few weeks earlier, for another burglary. So, figured what had happened, it
had fallen out of his pocket. If they were all this easy, we'd catch a lot more fish.
-Daniel, for this next one, I turn matters over to you. Will you please use your command of the English language
to delicately describe this next surveillance footage? -Yeah. Well, OK, let's see.
This man that was caught by a security camera was a lonely man, and he was, well, busying himself
while calling a 1-900 phone line at work. For his sake, now, as well as ours, we'll keep evidence against him to a minimum.
-Well, we received information from the phone company through our auditing system that we were receiving
a lot of phone bills for the 900 phone sex taking place at the criminal courts complex.
These calls seem to have been taking place after hours, where there shouldn't have been anybody inside.
And quite honestly, we figured out real quick that it had to have been somebody that was working security.
So we set up a little surveillance camera in the control both, and lo and behold,
we catch a security guard late at night, dialing the phone sex phone numbers. But I think more humorous than that
is we found him buck naked. Well, of course, he denied it until we showed him the video.
And of course, after he saw his own video and his naked body on the TV screen, he realized that we had him,
and there was no denying that he was the one making the phone calls. NARRATOR: In Providence, Rhode Island,
you may not sell toothpaste and toothbrush to the same customer on a Sunday. -Hey, years ago somebody told me this joke
that I still don't get. How many anarchists does it take to change a lightbulb? Fish.
Now, if that makes sense to you, what you're about to see will probably seem perfectly logical.
But for the rest of us, it belongs in the ranks of America's Dumbest Excuses. -You know, usually whenever we're working out
on DWI patrols on a routine patrol, we stop a drunk, first thing he says, I've had two beers.
That's the common answer. Two beers. Well, one night I was out patrolling, and I stopped one of these guys.
As I stopped him, before I could get out of the vehicle, he got out of his truck.
And when he did, he kind of fell over against the truck, and was having trouble standing up.
So I kind of hurried up to him, and I said, sir, are you all right? And I could smell the alcohol.
I said, how much have you had to drink? He just kind of leaned over against he drunk,
he said-- two days! He'd been out drinking, I guess he's been two days. He poured himself into the back of my unit, and we took him in.
-It was early in the morning on a summer morning. It was pretty warm outside, and they
dispatched us to assist police. We arrived at this restaurant. Police officers had been inside and said that there was
a nude man dangling from the ceiling in the kitchen. The person that found him, the early morning person that
came to the restaurant to clean up, she goes to her cooking station. There's a small wok area right underneath this vent,
and here's this man dangling completely naked from the waist down, his legs kicking.
The lady is screaming, she calls 911. And so we put up ladders and got up there,
and we noticed that there was a male sticking out of a vent. When we got to him, we asked him if you had a permit
to operate as a Santa Claus in the city and county of Denver. -Get out of here! -He responded angrily, and he really
wanted to get out of that vent at that point. And we came up with the idea of WD40.
Took about 15 minutes to get him good and lubed up, and then, boom, we jerked him out.
At that time he started to shake, and he had been exposed the weather for quite a while.
And we put him on a backboard and lowered him down, and he was off to jail. -All right.
In driver's ed, they teach you that red means stop, yellow means caution, and green means go.
But what does it mean if you sit at an intersection and are endlessly astonished at this riveting light show?
Red, yellow, green. It means you've earned a slot in tonight's Blue Light Special.
NARRATOR: Don't get us wrong, we're all for using extreme caution when driving. But the guy behind the wheel here was going nowhere fast.
He watched this little rainbow several times without moving, which made the officers in the patrol car
directly behind him suspicious, so they decided to talk to him. But suddenly, the car the wouldn't go wouldn't stop.
As officers would later learn, the man was experienced at driving like this. After all, he already had three DUIs to his credit.
In good time, all things came to an end, and the officers encouraged the passenger of the car
to get down and hug the ground in gratitude that he and his sauced chauffeur had met up
with the law instead of a tree. Let this be a lesson to you. Use caution in choosing your rides,
because you never know when you might get stopped. -What's not to like about this next story?
Even the skimpiest details are intriguing. It involves a ball-peen hammer, an impervious safe,
and a ton of coins. And that's just for starters. For the whole story, we take you to Kaufman, Texas.
-I was working two burglaries here in Kaufman, and one of them was at a hardware store.
The only thing they had taken out of there was a ball-peen hammer, and the other one was-- were
someone had went into the bank through the roof. Turned that they'd used the ball-peen hammer
and made a hole in the roof to get in. They tried to get into the vault. They couldn't get in there, so they just took off
change that was laying out in the bags. It was about $3,000 in nickels, quarters, and dimes.
Wasn't really hard to catch him, because he went to a car lot and paid $3,000 in cash in nickels and dimes,
and quarters for a car. Everybody said that he had a lot of money, but really not a lot
of sense. -We got a call to go to an elk's lodge. One of the members had come in on a Saturday morning
to open up, do a little cleaning. He walks in, opens up, and hears someone going, hey!
Excuse me. Give me some help. And he walks back to the big conference room, and there's this guy laying on the floor.
He looks up at the ceiling, and he sees a hole, and he says, hm, I should call the police.
So we go around, and it's one of our local bad guys. We've arrested him before for break ins.
So we ended up carrying him to the hospital. He's got two broke ankles. Basically what happened is he broke in through the ceiling
tile at the top of the ceiling, fell through, and broke both his feet and laid there for two days.
After interviewing him, I said, is there everything else different you'd do? And he goes, next time I'll bring rope.
-And now with the news from a man who puts the anchor in anchorman, here's Daniel with the ADC Headlines.
-When a robber confessed to sticking up over two dozen banks, he used a truly original excuse.
He said the money went to finance his addiction to attending Los Angeles Raiders football games.
OK. Wouldn't it have been perfect if this guy's favorite team had been the Steelers?
Right? Participated in internet auctions. Spending over $3 million on items ranging from a van Gogh
painting to a replica of a Viking ship. The problem? He was 13 years old, and his allowance just
wouldn't cover that kind of spending. Well, like lots of us older consumers, it all hit the fan when the bills came through.
Lucky for him, no criminal charges were filed. It's hard to remain anonymous when
you do what this bank robber did. He entered the bank where he had an account and demanded cash from a teller he had once asked out.
She knew his name, she had his number, and he got nowhere fast. And that closes the file on ADC headlines,
news ripped from somewhere near the back of your local newspaper. Debbie? -Things couldn't have worked out more neatly for this escaped
prisoner if he'd had return to sender stamped across his forehead. His story becomes part and parcel
for tonight's Special Delivery. -Some fellow coworkers of mine had arrested a criminal.
He was brought back to the police district. I was in there, he'd seen his opportunity to get away.
So he runs, leaves the police station. Gets about four or five blocks away, sees a car that's stopped.
He asked them if he can get a ride. He said, the police are chasing me. Once he gets in the car, they start
driving back toward the police station. As they gets closer and are about to pull into the lot,
he then realizes that he's a police officer in an unmarked police vehicle. -No animals were hurt in the reenactment you're
about to see, so don't start writing us cranky letters, OK? However, you will see a crook who learns an electrifying
lesson about getting his wires crossed. -I'm Deputy Calvin Dinney, from Pinellas County Sheriff's
department, in Largo, Florida. We had an interesting case of the parrot nappers.
We had three subjects enter a wooded area where a Florida Power transformer was located.
Their purpose there was to steal parrots that roofed, or nested in between the transformers for their girlfriends.
-Well, they parked their car on the dirt road, then proceeded to the rear of the transformer station,
which is usually enclosed by a six foot fence. They weaseled their way through the fence,
and one of the subjects had a ten foot metal pole. Now, we're talking about a transformer, which supplies
electricity for probably 20,000 or 30,000 residents. So the three subjects enter the transformer enclosure.
One of them then hears the parrots, and goes up with his metal pole, hoping to shake up
the parrots that were roofing there. He received a jolt of 15,000 volts of electricity
through that metal pole, which knocked him entirely off his feet. And his partner.
After doing so, Sheriff's department deputies were summoned. They were all charged with felony trespassing,
so they got a little bit more than a parrot. Now let's look back at one of ADC's greatest hits,
from the year 1997. Spring training started off with a bang as juvenile detention
centers in Harris County, Texas began recruiting for inmates. Strike one! One year's probation.
Strike two! Do the crime, we'll guarantee the time. Uh-oh. Traded to the Texas Youth Commission for one year.
Strike three. Transferred to the majors, as this ambitious arsonist is over the age of 18.
He's signed up for five years for felony theft and damaged property. And with this woman's discovery, they are outta there.
In Salt Lake City, it's illegal to walk down a street carrying a paper bag containing a violin.
-Well, I was working an afternoon shift. So I'm listening to the scanner and I hear an ATL, which
is an attempt to locate, for a hit and run vehicle. I'm driving down the road minding my own business,
and there it is right in front of me, getting on the freeway. Follow it for a little while, and notice
it's weaving in the road. Those are some good indicators for DUI, so I get it stopped,
go up and make contact with the guy, and I don't say anything about the hit and run.
I just talk to him. Try and find out what's going on, get his license and registration from him,
and then get him out on the side of the road, and we do some field sobriety tests.
I then decide, well, it's time to arrest him for DUI. And when I inform him of this, he
wants to go back and get his cigarettes out of the car. And I try to get after him, because I know
once he gets to the car, you could have a weapon in there, or jump in the car and take off.
Well, unfortunately, the latter was the case. He wanted to jump in the car and take off.
Reaches for the ignition and gets the car started. I reached in to turn off the ignition,
and the ignition switch comes out in my hand. Craziest thing you've ever seen. It was nuts.
So anyways, he's got this car going now, and I try to get him to turn the car off.
I can't turn the car off. He hits the gas and takes off. So the pursuit is on. Run back to my car, we chase him in and out
of neighborhoods and whatnot. He finally ditches the car, and he's able to jump a fence
and get away from us on foot. The main thing is I've got his registration and his driver's
license still on my clipboard in my car. By running like that, he turned two misdemeanors into a felony
charge, and ended up having to do time over that. -Our final criminal tonight finds himself caught
in the clutches of the double jeopardy of twins. -Yes. And as a kindness to you, our viewers,
the parts of the officers will not be played by the Olsen twins. -Hey, watch it.
I like them. Travel with us into the twilight zone of We're Not Making This Up. -Well, about 15 years ago when I first got into law enforcement,
I had a twin brother who was also in law enforcement in another community about 100 miles east of where I lived.
And we were both assigned to jail divisions, and one morning at about 5:00, US Marshal Service brought
a prisoner into the jail, and he wouldn't get out of the van when he saw me, and we couldn't figure out why.
And so finally I went and asked him, I said, man, why don't you just get out of the van,
come on, let's go to jail and get it over with. He said, I'm not getting out of jail.
You're gonna whip me again. And I said, I've never met you. Well, talked with him just a minute
and found out that my twin brother was the officer that released him from the jail that he was coming from,
and he just couldn't understand how if the deputy Marshal was driving as fast as he was getting here from one town
to the other, how I could have driven faster, changed uniforms, and met him in the sally port just
to make his life miserable while he was in jail. -That's just too weird for words, you know?
Well, like when people come up to me and they ask if we're brother and sister. -Oh, you have got to be kidding. -No.
No. -Well, what do you say? -Well, I say look at the difference in our heights. And then I say, she's my half sister.
-You had to go low, didn't you? -Yeah. Only to find you, babe. -Daniel! Well, we've gotta go for now, but you'll find us right here
next week with more bad news, bad jokes for criminals. -Well, yeah, and other people.
And if you haven't visited our website yet, surf on over. The address is www.dumbcrimes.com.
-Thanks to officers who make this show possible. -And to all who serve society and law enforcement,
our sincere gratitude. The world would be a much scarier place without you. -Thanks for joining us, and as always,
we hope that we've all learned from other's mistakes. -But if you haven't, we just might see you next week
on America's Dumbest Criminals. -Bye, bye.

In this episode of “America’s Dumbest Criminals,” we’ll witness a fella whose sense of judgment goes up in smoke, a guy on the run who called 911 to check if he has any warrants and an officer with a trick up his sleeve.

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

A burglar steals furniture, a car dealer gets caught, and a man learns a shocking lesson about electricity.

Key points

A Homewrecker's Mistake. A burglar is caught on camera stealing furniture from a model home.
The Midnight Madness. A crook breaks into a car dealership and leaves a warrant behind.
The Naked Security Guard. A security guard is caught on camera making inappropriate calls while naked.
The Confused Criminal. A criminal mistakenly asks for a ride from police officers.
The Parrot Nappers. Three men attempt to steal parrots and get shocked by electricity.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Don't follow through like this guy did.

Advice about a homewrecker's actions.

2:02WatchMar 10, 2022

Tension

45/ 100Some tension

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