Not all criminals are masterminds

I’ve heard it said many times that crime doesn’t pay. It’s also been suggested that those who choose to live on the wrong side of the law will have no luck for it in the long run. Generally speaking, from my own experience, I think that’s true but there are exceptions.

Small-time burglars and petty thieves who steal anything that isn’t nailed down are mostly losers. They often come from dysfunctional families and as a consequence, carry lots of baggage including drugs and alcohol, little or no education and few, if any, prospects of improving their lot in life.

They make small money from their criminality and generally blow it to feed their various habits or throw it away on some useless horse in the bookies. Their families rarely receive any benefit from the ill-gotten gains and the only bit of peace they get is when their heroic bread winner goes for one of his regular vacations to the local prison.

I have been in many of these homes during the course of thirty-five years as a policeman and they rarely showed any signs of affluence. It was often difficult to search these properties without gagging. Certainly nothing to be envious of.

At the other end of the scale though, some clever criminals do manage to amass fortunes from their nefarious activities. Certain organised gangs deal in eye watering sums of money but at the end of the day, are they any better off than their failed counterparts? With so many law enforcement agencies hunting them down, finding time to enjoy their wealth can’t be easy.

Not all criminals are sophisticated though. Back in the early nineties myself and my colleague, John O’Connor, interviewed a prisoner for something or other. We took him to the interview room and after every question he answered, “No Comet”. Neither of us could understand what he was saying and when we asked him, he just replied in the same way, “No comet”.

What he actually meant to say was no comment. He obviously picked up that nugget of advice from some like-minded soul but hadn’t really understood it. These characters would probably starve to death if it wasn’t for prison food.

A good example of a hopeless criminal appeared in the Evening Echo in 1992 when the paper described how the town of Macroom was alive with gossip of a daring robber who turned an attempted bank heist into a comedy of errors. The target was the Allied Irish Bank branch at the Square and the would-be thief struck at 4pm in the afternoon.

A ‘stick-up’ man in his mid-20s, said to have been under the strong influence of drink, entered the premises, carrying a coat over his arm and shouting at staff: “This is a stick-up.” Staff and customers were taken by surprise as the culprit ordered: “Everybody get down.”

However, just when things seemed to be going according to plan, the coat slipped from his arm and-the would-be robber was revealed to be empty-handed. At that stage, the culprit explained to all: “It’s an invisible gun.”

Staff and customers erupted in laughter as the red-faced man ran off without his booty. Garda sources say that there was no danger to people who could clearly see that the culprit was drunk.

Drink often features in cases like this. BBC.com reported on a hapless pair in America who decided to rob the house of a local resident in their hometown. They had a few drinks to steady their nerves but when they left for their burglary, they were so drunk they could barely stand, let alone drive.

Because they were robbing a home in their own town, they needed to disguise their identity, so the two blind drunk criminals covered their faces in permanent marker. Their attempt failed when they were caught after being pulled over for drunk driving.

In the UK an attempted robbery of a newsagent was captured on CCTV in 2012. During his attempted heist, the drunk mastermind removed his balaclava, fell over a drinks display, and failed to open the door to escape because he was pushing it instead of pulling. The lady he had just held up with a toy gun had to open it for him.

Another guy raided a petrol station with an accomplice in June 2013. The slight flaw in his disguise was that he chose to wear a see-through plastic bag. He tried to threaten the garage assistant with a ‘gun’ which was actually a mobile phone and it revealed itself as such when the keypad lit up.

Two Welsh tourists landed themselves in court after they got drunk and stole a penguin called Dirk from Sea World in Australia. The pair broke into the park on Queensland’s Gold Coast, swam with the dolphins and let off a fire extinguisher in the shark enclosure, before making off with poor Dirk.

When they woke up – hung-over and with the flightless bird in their apartment – they tried “their incompetent best” to care for him by feeding him and putting him in the shower. They later released Dirk into a canal but were spotted by locals who called the police.

A magistrate fined them 1,000 Australian dollars and told them to drink “a little less vodka”. Dirk was rescued and returned to Sea World unharmed.

In 2011, a 53-year-old from North Carolina, USA walked into a Wal-Mart store and bought a vacuum cleaner and microwave for $476 and attempted to pay for the items with a million-dollar bill from the Monopoly board game. After demanding change of $999,524 from the cashier, the police were called, and he was arrested and charged with attempting to obtain property by false pretences.

Another failed mastermind.