Stupidity (Part I)

It was Albert Einstein who said it best when he said, “There are two things infinite, the universe and human stupidity...and I am not sure about the universe.”

We are all prone to doing things that can only be classed as outright stupid. That is because we are all human and there is nothing in this world that can make us immune to our own stupidity. However, sometimes we do things that are so stupid; our peers wonder if we were born stupid. Most of us learn from our stupidity and others continue on as if their stupidity was a way of life for them. Sometimes I wonder how it is that they have managed to survive childhood.

I am convinced that the stupidest people on Earth are criminals. Their stupidity could be brought about for two possible reasons; a great many of them are suffering from some form of mental illness or alternatively, the excitement that is generated in their minds when they commit the crimes confuses their thinking. What follows is examples of their stupidity.

John F. Wheeler, 56 of Irondequoit of New York State was not the kind of man you should to try and steal his sport utility vehicle from. He would get upset. On October 20, 1998, two carjackers forced him into the backseat of his vehicle. The fools didn't tie him up or even search him. The last thing you would want if you are a carjacker is to have your victim in the back seat, especially when his hands are free and he is in possession of a fishing knife. John stabbed one of them to death and injured the other. The police decided not to file any charges against him.

Bank robbers are sometimes the stupidest crooks of all crooks, especially those who don't change their modus operendi. For example, some will wear the same hat every time they go into a different bank to rob it. Hence, the Green Hat bandit or they wear a band-aid on their face, hence the Band-Aid Bandit.

Well, on November 10, 1998, it is alleged that a bandit, Douglas Lyle Hill 48 who went into a bank in Mississauga, Canada to rob it again, was remembered as having robbed it previously and at that time, said "Remember me" to the teller he robbed that particular time. Well, on the third visit, the teller remembered him and after she was robbed, she followed him out of the bank and copied down his licence plate number and soon after, the Band-Aid Bandit' was behind bars. Driving away in his own car? I thought these dummies stole cars from other dummies who go into stores leaving their key in the ignition.

Some criminals are still under the impression that crime pays and the younger the criminals, the deeper the impression. On October 22, 1998, two-17-year-old boys living in Pickering, Canada, snuck up behind a 59-year-old woman and grabbed her purse and after they stole her money, they threw her purse in a nearby trash bin. Now it was stupid of them to not see the fifty dollars in her purse before they threw it away but to get arrested and charged with robbery for stealing a purse is profoundly stupid---especially when you realize that all they got for their troubles was $1.48 Canadian.

Time and time again, we have all heard it. If you want to do crime, do it big. But sometimes, the rewards are small and the penalties are big---I mean, BIG. Take the case of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco International. The prosecutors said that the tobacco firm's affiliate, Northern Brands International was set up for the purpose of smuggling cigarettes into the USA across the St. Lawrence River, just north of Cornwall, Ontario. The cigarettes were manufactured in Canada and properly shipped across the border into the USA where the American authorities were told that they were being shipped to Estonia and Russia. Later, the cigarettes were smuggled into Canada in small boats for the purpose of not having to pay the US excise taxes on them. Between 1994 and 1995, as many as 26 tractor-trailer loads of the cigarettes were smuggled back into Canada, thereby saving the smugglers and the tobacco company $2.5 million in US excise taxes. For that caper, the tobacco company was fined $15 million including forfeitures. The tobacco company later said about their affiliate company on December 22, 1998, and I quote, "Northern Brands International activities is inconsistent with the way Reynolds does business and the company very much regrets this episode." Yep, yep, yep, and if you believe Reynolds, perhaps I can interest you in buying a bridge from me. It's in Brooklyn. As to Northern Brands International, it's out of business, naturally.

Michael LaSane, of Toms River, New Jersey, USA, then 17 on March 14, 1996, kidnapped a school teacher after carjacking her car. The 45-year-old woman had the presence of mind to reach into her pocket and flip on a pocket tape recorder which recorded conversations between kidnapper and victim which would lead anyone listening to the conversations, that the woman was clearly kidnapped. The criminal jerk murdered the woman and then (get ready for this) returned to his home and parked his murdered victim's car in his driveway. When the police caught up to him, he told them that the woman sold him the year-old car for $500.00. Yeah, yeah, sure. He was charged with her murder and convicted naturally considering the fact that they were in possession of the tape with the recorded conversations between the 17-year-old murderer and his victim. Do you really believe that there was something on the tape discussing the sale of the car? Of course you don’t.

But what is really stupid about all of this is what the killer's lawyer had to say to the news media after his client was charged with murder. Get ready for it because here it comes. "On behalf of Michael and his family, I would like to express their concerns which I share, that Michael is being prejudged by many segments of the public." unquote. This statement was made even this dummy lawyer and Michael and Michael's family had heard the conversations on the tape between him and the woman he murdered.

In September 1992, a prison escaper in Brisbane, Australia, broke into a house shared by two nurses, Leanne Bowman and Caitlin Conroy, both 22 at that time. They convinced the escaper that they would help him avoid the police dragnet. They suggested that he would have to climb into the trunk of their car so that they could drive him out of the area past the police officers searching for him. Yes, my dear readers. He actually climbed into the trunk of their car. Wouldn't you? After all, the nice ladies were going to drive him past the police. They did. About ten feet past the police before they stopped. I don't know who was more surprised---the police or the encapsulated escaper.

Now I said it earlier and now I will repeat it. If you are going to steal, steal big. That's what a Kalida, Ohio, church secretary Linda Siefer did when she systematically removed all the $20 bills from the collection plates at St. Michael's Catholic Church over a four-year period beginning in 1992. She got caught when it finally dawned on a bank employee who thought it odd that the church never brought in any $20 dollar bills to be deposited. Poor Linda. She should have left at least some of the 20s behind. For that little blunder, she got two years in prison.

The Supreme Court in the state of California upheld a man's death sentence on November 19th 1998 for fatally stabbing a 65-year-old Oceanside woman during a burglary of her home. The murderer, Rudolph J. Roybal was 33 in June 1989, when his neighbor, Yvonne Weden, was killed in her home in northern San Diego County. Her husband, Paul, returned from his overnight job at a supermarket and found her body on the bedroom floor. Jewelry, some cash, a gun and a holster were missing. Roybal, who had previously done some yardwork for the Wedens, left Oceanside by bus the night after the killing and returned to his mother's home in Santa Fe, the court said. He had cuts on his face when he arrived. When he offered to sell some jewelry to his half-sister, she called a probation officer and eventually led police to plastic bags in the backyard that contained the Wedens' jewelry. Roybal denied the slaying but the jury voted for death nevertheless.

If he hadn't kept the jewelry, he wouldn't have been arrested in the first place. That piece of stupidity got him the death sentence.

A Utah resident and former Marine, Arthur Gus Bennett, 45, faced trial on charges that he faked his own death by killing another man, putting the body in a trailer and then setting the trailer on fire. He pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in October 1998 to 7 counts that include murder, arson, kidnapping, insurance fraud, theft and sexual assault of a minor. At the time of the blaze, Bennett was facing a court-martial on charges of sexually abusing the child of a fellow Marine in Yuma, Ariz., and at least three young women in Okinawa. Identification of the charred body found in the trailer was nearly impossible. A Navy dentist declared the death a suicide and said Bennett was the victim. The ruling allowed members of his family to collect on a $200,000 government life insurance policy. But Bennett was alive. He moved to Hurricane with his ex-wife and 3 daughters and changed his name to Joe Benson.

His alleged lies unraveled in October 1997, when one of his daughters told authorities he sexually assaulted her. A fingerprint check revealed his true identity. Bennett was eventually charged with sexually assaulting his two oldest daughters, ages 13 and 15, and one of their 13-year-old friends. He pleaded no contest in St. George last May to three 2nd-degree felony charges of sexual abuse and was sentenced to three 1-to-15-year prison terms.

He was sentenced to death for the murder he committed in Utah. Had he kept his penis where it belongs, he probably would have got away with the murder.

In November, 1998, two thieves, "Dumb and Dumber" tried to steal an unmarked police car in Edmonton, Canada. Unfortunately for these two twerps, an undercover police officer was inside conducting a surveillance and because his window was partially open, he heard Dumb and Dumber talking about how they should steal the car. As they tried to enter the car, they were arrested --- naturally.

Most criminals know that when they commit a crime, they should never leave anything behind as evidence. Well, Junior (Cat) Johnson, 19, should have realized that after shooting to death a 16-year-old girl with a shotgun after forcing his way into her apartment in Toronto, Canada in January 1996 when he was 17 years of age. He left behind his red bandanna. That by itself may not be significant but his saliva found on the bandanna certainly was. The DNA testing conclusively identified him as the killer.

Michael Tremblay, 40, broke into a woman's house in Napanee, Ontario, Canada and finding no one there, he decided to go to sleep in the woman's bed without telling the taxi driver who was parked in the driveway waiting for him to return, that he didn't need him anymore. When the woman returned to her home, she was surprised that the taxi was there and even more surpirsed that the thief was sleeping on her bed but the man nevertheless managed to get away before the police arrived. Now it would have been a perfect getaway except for the fact that he left something behind. Oh, you knew what it was all along, eh? Yes, you are right. He left his wallet behind. It didn't take the police long to track him to his lair in Kingston, Ontario. He was charged with break and enter and possession of stolen property.

A young neighbourhood punk broke into my car and stole a flashlight from me back in the 80s. At that time, I didn't know who the thief was. Months later, he broke in again and this time, his wallet fell out of his pocket and remained on the driver's seat when he left the scene. I immediately turned it over to the police. Then I spoke to him at his house and said that he shouldn't have left his wallet in my car when he broke into my car. He insisted that I return the wallet to him. I refused. He called the police. They questioned him at his home and in the process, they discovered my flashlight. I didn't tell the police that the flashlight had been stolen months earlier and he didn't tell them that either so he said he stole my flashlight the latest time he broke into my car. For stealing the flashlight, he got 30 days in jail. Imagine---him getting thirty days for stealing a flashlight that in fact wasn't stolen by him on the second day he broke into my car. He had to know that I knew he didn’t steal it the second time around and that I was keeping my mouth shut. He must have seen the irony of all that.

Michael Wal, 20, of Toronto was convicted of first degree murder on November 26, 1998 and sentence to life in prison with no eligibility for parole until he has served a minimum of 25 years but he almost got away with the raping and bludgeoning to death a 37 year-old Filipino nanny. No one knew that he had committed the crime. But things began falling apart when he did two things no murderer should ever do---brag about it and return to the scene of the murder. Six weeks later, Wall was discovered masturbating in Warden Woods park near the building where he murdered the young woman and when the police approached him, Wall discarded the condom he was wearing. They later had a DNA test done on the Wall's semen in his discarded condom and guess what?

It matched the DNA of the semen found in the murdered woman's vagina. But then you knew that all along, didn't you.

Some criminals will do anything to avoid the consequences of their crimes. I knew a man in the Millbrook Reformatory near Peterborough, Ontario who purposely placed his left hand under a press which then took his hand right off. He figured that he would be released from prison. He figured right. And rather than serve his remaining year in prison, he chose to live without the use of his left hand for the rest of his life. I can think of three words that best describes this man. Dumb, dumber and dumbest.

At Little Rock, Arkansas, a man held at the state mental hospital in November 1998 was ruled competent to stand trial. He didn't want to stand trial so he figured that he knew a way that he could avoid his trial. He gouged one of his eyes out and flushed it down the toilet. That was dumb. After he was returned from the regular hospital after emergency treatment was given to him, he was convinced that the authorities figured that he was still competent to stand trial. So in order to really convince the authorities that he really wasn't competent to stand trial, he gouged out his other eye. That's dumber yet. The irony is that he was still competent to stand trial. The fact that he is outright stupid doesn't mean that he couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong or that he couldn’t tell his lawyer his side of the story as it relates to the crime he was charged with. He will go the rest of his life in complete darkness for trying to prove that he was totally incompetent when in fact, all he proved was that he was totally stupid.

Chung Kyu-chil, 51 of Seoul, Korea, hatched a scheme in which he could reap a landfall of 2.1 million dollars in an insurance scam. He told taxi driver, Kim Kuiyong, 41, that he would give him $65,000 if the scam worked. Of course, Chung would have to be prepared to make a sacrifice and what a sacrifice it would be and what a sacrifice it was. As agreed, on December, 11, 1998, Chung lay down on the floor and Kim chopped off both of Chung's ankles with an axe. Chung told the police that he had been drinking heavily and when he awoke on the floor of his grocery store; both of his feet were missing. They were missing alright. Both were in the Han River that flows past Seoul. The police conducted an investigation and guess what? It seems that Chung had taken out two dozen disability insurance policies a few months earlier. Now that fact alone is obvious to even the dumbest cop on a police force that something isn't right here. They found the taxi driver and he confessed his role in the scam. Needless to say, none of the insurance companies paid off and because of that, Chung wasn't charged with anything because the scam didn't work. The taxi driver however was charged on assault charges however. I like the words of Chung when asked about why he had done what he did so foolishly with his feet. What he said was right on point, "I regret what I did."

One would think that Carlos Collao, 36 in October 8, 1992 of Toronto, Canada, would know how to protect his pocket from being picked since he was facing a charge of pickpocketing a retired postal worker's wallet earlier. While on his way to his lawyer's office just before his sentencing in court, another pickpocket picked his pocket. Then things went from bad to worse--he was sentenced to three months for picking the pocket of the retired postal worker. You know that old adage---what goes around, comes around. Now that was poetic justice.

The last thing people who break the law would ever want to do is to break the law in the immediate vicinity of the police. A massage parlour, called the Cher Massage Studio, in Windsor, Canada, chose an ideal spot to be located---right next to police headquarters. Well, as to be expected with so many police officers going in and out of their building, many observed a large number of men frequenting the massage parlour. A further investigation revealed that some sort of sexual activity was going on the establishment so the owner in December 1998, was charged with keeping a common bawdy house.

In Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, the neighbours of Caroline Ripa's townhouse didn't mind the men coming and going at all hours but they did object to them taking up all the available visitor's parking spots so in December 1998, they called the police. She was arrested and charged with operating a brothel. For that, she got four years in the woman's prison. All that over parking spaces. You never want to piss off your neighbours by taking over their parking spots.

On December 21, 1998, a former police officer, Trevor Jacobs, 30,of the Island of Antigua was one of the island's most wanted criminals and he realized that he would be discovered soon on the small island so he figured the best thing for him to do was catch a plane in Trinidad and fly to Toronto, Canada. But of course, he knew that the police would be searching for him at the airport so he chose to find a spot in the plane where they wouldn't be searching for him. He chose to hide in the wheel well of the landing gear of a transcontinental plane. He was right. They never searched for him there but as the plane soared into the sky and the temperature dropped well below freezing, thereby freezing his body, he must have wished during his final moments of life that the police had found him before the plane took off. His body was still in the wheel well when it arrived in Toronto, and when it was flown to Antigua and finally back to Trinidad. How does Santa Claus do it without getting frozen to death in his sleigh? Oh, yeah. He's bundled up in that big red suit with the white trim.

Smugglers will do anything to get goods into another country and many use their rectum to hide smuggled good into another country. A professional diamond courier from Tel Aviv in Israel, arrived at the Toronto International Airport in December 1998 with $545,000 worth of diamonds in packets that he previously forced up his rectum. He was discovered and fined $10,000 and sentenced to 15 days in jail and he had to also pay $52,000 in duty and penalties if he wanted those diamonds back. Now he would have got away with it except for his cover story which was so stupid, he practically called out for his apprehension. He said that he was a student visiting Canada. One look at his passport tipped off the customs authorities. Students visiting Canada from Israel, don't go via Brussels, then to the USA and finally to Canada. That blunder would have cost him a total of $62,000 if he paid the fine and the duty for his diamonds.

Many times crooks break windows to get into homes and once in a while, the real dumb ones don't take proper precautions before they break the windows. A suspected prowler in Regina, Canada, kicked in the window of a home in that city and while he was doing it, a glass shard severed a main artery in his leg. He passed out a short time later and when he was discovered prone nearby, he was quite dead.

In Haggersville, Ontario, Canada, a 22-year-old man who had stolen some pigeons tried to sell them at an auction barn in this small town. He had stolen them from a pigeon coop in Nanticoke, just southwest of Toronto. The owner happened to be at the auction and spotted his birds. The police were called and the young thief denied that the birds belong to the man who claimed they were his. He said that he always owned the birds. Well, the police figured a way to make the determination as to who really owned the pigeons. The birds were set free and whatever coop they returned to, the owner of the coop would also be considered the owner of the birds. You guessed it. They flew directly to the coop of the victim. The young thief was promptly taken to another cage, one with bars. Did he really think that the pigeons would fly to his own coop?

There are certain tell-tail signs that police investigators look for when they are investigating a murder where the husband claims that his wife was murdered by burglars while he was tied up and helpless to intervene. What is it, you ask? Insurance, of course. Ho Ming Chan of Edmonton, Canada in 1985, smothered his wife to death with a cloth soaked in chloroform. The police began getting extremely suspicious when they learned that this idiot had taken out two insurance policies on his wife's life, just two days before she was murdered. If he waited a year, there would have been less reason to be suspicious. Well he got 25 years in prison. That's plenty of time to consider his impatience. Incidentally, the court awarded the two children $150.000 in December 1998 belatedly for their claim for the loss of their mother.

No one likes to be stopped by the police but we learn to accept it as part of our lives and accept the ticket and fight it out in court or take our lumps. That is except for those jerks who can't accept the tickets graciously. In this case, it ended up tragically because 20-year-old Enzo Romagnuolo of Sunderland, Ontario, Canada had to play the fool. He threatened the police officer for stopping him for a sobriety check while he was driving home about a week before Christmas.

On December 21, 1998, four days before Christmas, four police officers arrived at his police arrived. He didn't want his son arrested and he got into a fight with the police, all the time, calling to his sons for help. At one point, Tony, the dummy that this jerk he was, apparently reached for one of the officer's guns and three of the officers shot him to death. Rocco Romagnulo, one of his sons, had run out of the house and he was accidentally shot and ended up in the hospital with a very serious wound. Needless to say, the jerk son, Enzo was arrested and faced charges of assault causing bodily harm and threatening.

There you have it. I will give you more in another blog sometime later this year.