Hah, great, any story about this?
Well, it was DUI but I wasn’t driving. This was in the early 1980s for time reference.
My ex was only 19 and had no license and wrecked the car into someone’s lawn after we had been “celebrating.”
So I jumped into the driver’s seat and was arrested once the police came.
We were home on leave from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I was in the Navy and he was in the Marines.
I never met his parents before this and they had to bail me out of jail.
The same judge that married us was the one who sentenced me in the courtroom.
The entire courtroom was laughing when I explained that I had to be back in Cuba in 2 days and could not return in several months for whatever they were asking at the time.
The judge was a bit frustrated and just fined me and told me not to drive in Ohio.
So his parents had to drive me and my car back to the PA border where I could then return home to Pittsburgh to get my flight back to Cuba.
My ex husband had to go to California to his next duty station and I had no idea when I would see him again.
Maybe that’s why we were drinking?
Great way to start a marriage.
Paul Simon says that there are fifty ways to leave your lover, but he only lists five. I guess this is one of the others.
Or a fantastic game of Fiasco.
Stranger
My dad sold meth for the Hells Angels in the '70s and early '80s before I was born. He wasn’t a full member, just a hanger-on who did jobs for them, and so far as I know he never did any serious time for it.
Based on some things he said to me when I was a kid (such as some very specific and highly detailed advice about why you should never borrow money from them), I believe he also did odd jobs for the Mafia when he was growing up in Boston in the '50s and '60s, but he was only half-Italian so he could have only gone so far with them.
My great grandmother was a bored out of her skull round heeled girl on the Menominee reservation In Wisconsin, smitten with the Chicago hoodlums who’d come up to fish. She recalled spending a weekend with one of them in bed the entire time, shooting flies on the walls of the cabin with his pistol.
My grandmother, the product of one such assignation, was young and pregnant with my dad on March 13, 1934, sitting in a park across the street from the First National Bank of Mason City Iowa when John Dillinger engaged in a gun battle with authorities who knew he was coming but didn’t clear the area.
My own mother, heavily pregnant with me in 1960, came to pick up my dad at the after-hours club in Illinois where he dealt blackjack. Stuck in the snow, she was rescued when every member present of the local extension of the Outfit rose from their table to push her car out.
On the side of Law and Order stood my great-uncle Walter, an FBI agent who was the initial investigator at the Kansas City Massacre. But his inattention allowed Volney Davis to escape, as noted in the linked article, and he was terminated on the express order of Director Hoover
I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die…
When I first met the woman who is now my wife almost 20 years ago, she introduced me to her wider family by bringing me to a big picnic-type event in a local park. (Persians have specific holidays where they traditionally eat outside, so it’s more than “just” a picnic. Anyway.) Midway through the event, we hear the approach of a deafeningly loud engine, and then this guy in a very expensive supercar pulls into the parking area, gets out, and approaches.
This turned out to be her first cousin, who my wife explained was newly wealthy after having started a very successful import-export type business with another guy. Nobody quite understood what they did, but it involved large-scale acquisition of electronics for overseas markets.
He didn’t stay very long; he made it very clear he was extremely busy with his business, and was putting in only the minimum appearance necessary to be polite. And when he left, he revved his engine repeatedly on the way out, making sure everyone along the way would know what he was driving.
I thought he was an asshole, but when I started broaching that view with my wife, she shut me down. First, we weren’t married yet so I wasn’t allowed to insult her family. Second, the level of material financial success the guy had achieved was worthy of respect in her culture, regardless of the fact that, one-on-one, the guy was a total dick.
Less than two months later, he and his business partner was arrested by the feds.
His import-export company turned out to be a scam. The upshot was, he and his partner were buying significant volumes of mobile phones and tablet devices, posing as a reseller business. On delivery, the package routing went to him first. He would then carefully open all the boxes, take out the devices, and replace each one with a common household ceramic tile of the same dimensions, so the box weight was still reasonably convincing. He then resealed the boxes and routed them on to his partner. The partner would make an insurance claim for lost goods, and the original devices were shipped to the Far East for sale.
Yes, it’s just as stupid as it sounds. They made a huge amount of money in a short amount of time, but obviously the repeated insurance claims attracted quick attention, and they were busted. Lord only knows why they thought this was going to work long term.
Anyway, as the feds dug into his life to determine the extent of his fraud, they determined that this wasn’t his only crime. He’d also been involved in insider trading schemes (using the cashflow from the bogus business to play the market using information shared by yet another partner, adding another six figures of ill-gotten profit) and had defrauded a local bank (using an inflated valuation of the fake business to secure a seven-figure loan which he used to buy the supercar, among other luxuries).
He got five years in federal prison, followed by supervised release. He has to wear an ankle bracelet because he’s considered high-risk for repeat offense and his movements are monitored. Last I heard, he’s working as a personal trainer in a local gym.
And he isn’t invited to any more events like the one where I met him, because the community was utterly humiliated that this golden boy whose success they were crowing about turned out to be a common crook.
My late wife’s extended family was mixed Italian & Sicilian. Most of who immigrated to the US northeast in the late 19th century. It was widely rumored that one branch of the family, like her second uncle or something, was fully in the Mafia. The elder patron and at least one of his then-adult kids.
I never met those folks, never even got their names, and have no way to verify it. But the rest of the family sort of relished the tale even though they always told it with a genteel shudder.
Next closest was the kid across the street when I was little, like age 4-10. He was a few years older and trouble from the git-go. My parents tried to keep me away from him and were mostly successful.
Once a teen he was in and out of juvenile detention. He “celebrated” turning 18 by launching a crime spree that ended with killing somebody during an armed robbery. That conviction ended his criminal career and was the last I ever knew of him. Whether he served 5 years and went straight or spent the rest of his presumably shortened life as a “frequent flyer” in the criminal system I do not know. He’d be a bit over 70 now if he’s still alive.
As Sheriff Buford T. Justice might say: Sumptin’ jus’ tain’t right wit dat bawh.
I was a convicted felon for 20 years, my GF at the time sold an undercover cop a rock of crack cocaine and they had me in tape telling her not to do. So the told me I had knowledge of the crime and did not prevent it.
She went to prison and I got probation. My lawyer at the time had me take a plea deal, he told me they were coming down hard on me because they needed to convict more white people to make the numbers look better. Later the same lawyer became the judge in the district over seeing my conviction and allowed my record to be expunged. He was the real criminal.
The brother of my 6xgreat grandfather was an axe murderer and was hung for his crimes in early 1800s.
He killed his parents, but was interrupted before he killed his wife and children.
So family reunions, now a thing of the past, were always a bit fun as those who are direct descendents got a bit of ribbing.
Have Noone’s family forgiven you yet?
Yup. Well, not me. But people in my extended family, yes. In fact “my” name is mentioned in a book about the mafia (“my” because it’s my grandfather’s name, but we have the same name). My dad had to testify before a grand jury over some mafia issues. When my parents were dating, my mom thought it was ‘really cool’ that they’d get tailed by the FBI.
The mafia, at least in Milwaukee, was closely tied to the restaurant and wholesale produce industry, and we were right there with it.
My first American ancestor was a military deserter from the Prussian Army.
Of course, the Napoleonic Wars had begun, so maybe he was just smart.
One of my uncles got sent to a penitentiary because he was trying to score one of his “friends” a bag of weed. His life was never the same, prison really f**cked him up. When he got out couldn’t land a job other than hard manual labor so women didn’t really want to be around him. He ultimately became a vagrant alcoholic and died broke and alone.
There was a lot of collateral damage done to families chasing down petty drug charges in the name of being “tough on crime.”
The only good I could see that ever came out of it is that my brothers and I knew we didn’t want to end up like him so we all stayed away from any real legal problems. Still that’s a huge price to pay for a bag of weed that is now legal in half the country.
I like the Clash reference in the thread title.
Two of my 10th-great grandfathers fled their homeland to avoid persecution, sailing off on a leaky old boat called Mayflower and then, upon landing, stealing land from the original occupants. Neither served any time.
Seriously, other than misdemeanors, I know of no hardened criminals in the family.
One of my relatives was involved in an armed robbery in the north of England in the 1830s. There was a man who lived with his family on the edge of a village and my relative and a couple of other guys got the idea that he would have money in his house. One of the robbers had a gun; they went to the house one night and somehow got them to unlock the door. It turned out there wasn’t very much money in the house (a few pounds?) and they took a bolt of cloth as well. In the end, one of the robbers had a girlfriend who squealed on them and they all got hanged.
One of my maternal grandfather’s brothers served time in Joliet Prison (suburban Chicago). I never knew him, but I remember hearing stories about relatives visiting him in “college” (family euphemism to spare our childish sensitivities). When I started doing family genealogy research I came across a census record which listed him as an inmate, but haven’t been able to track down any records of why he was incarcerated.
While doing some genealogical research I discovered my great great grandfather stabbed and almost killed the town marshal of Wapakoneta, Ohio in 1897:
(At least I am pretty sure he’s my GG grandfather. Other evidence supports it.)
I’m pretty sure I shared this story elsewhere here. A jailbreak! My maternal grandfather was imprisoned in a Siberian jail during the 1917 Russian Revolution, and he later broke out and escaped from jail.
He had a girlfriend bake a file into a loaf of bread, and he used that to escape after several months of sawing through the bars on his cell window. He timed his escape for a New Year’s Eve when all the guards were drunk on vodka, when he jumped through the now-open bars on his window and down onto the frozen fields. While running away zig-zagging on the frozen fields the guards tried shooting at him but they repeatedly missed. He got away and escaped on foot across Siberia and down to Manchuria to China, where in Shanghai he boarded a ship bound for the US. That was his plan, to get to the US. But he never made it.
The ship stopped in Manila Bay for a week, and after his Siberian experience he thought the Philippines was an island paradise. When his ship continued east to the US he decided to stay a little longer in the warm Philippine Islands. He’ll catch another ship, later.
He continued staying in the Philippines, always planning to catch another ship to the US, later. He eventually met my grandmother there (a Filipina) and they fell in love, got married and started a family. They had two children, my uncle and then my mom. Both kids grew up in the Philippines with a Russian last name.
My mom grew up to become a flight attendant for Philippine Airlines and she was described as a Eurasian beauty when she was awarded as ‘Miss Aviation’ for 1959. She was on a cover photo of the Sunday Manila Times magazine.
Anyway, my grandfather (her father) lived out the rest of his days in the Philippines, never having made it to the US. That is why I am Filipino-Russian and also why I’m not short like many Filipinos are. His escaping from a Siberian jail cell is pretty cool.