Not in my family. But tangentially. My paternal uncle married the daughter of a local Mafia capo or something like that. Those of us descended from his other siblings had no idea the whole time we were growing up. I grew up thinking we were a clean family. I remember my grandmother saying with pride in her voice that our family had never lived in Little Italy. The unspoken implication was that we had no Mob ties. Then her son went and married one. I only learned about a few years ago, after my cousin published a book on being the grandson of a mafioso. It made me very unhappy, bringing the feeling of “ick” a little too close to home. But it figures. My aunt-by-marriage from the Mafia had not been a nice person, but cold and closed off instead of warm and affectionate like the rest of our family.
My great-uncle Sonny is supposed to have killed somewhere around 14 people as a hitman for the Dixie Mafia (though there’s some reason for doubt.) He definitely did the murder he was executed for, the State of Texas put him to death by lethal injection in 2004. I never met him, but my dad has memories of sitting on the porch with him while Sonny killed gophers with a shotgun. For some reason there’s a weird one-post Blogspot site where someone wrote out a bunch more details of his life and killings.
I’ve talked about my brother before on this board. He suffers from both mental illness and drug addiction, as well as just having criminal tendencies in general. He has been incarcerated many times for things like fraud, drug offenses, and violent crimes. I saw his name in our local paper once when they busted an identity theft ring. He also assaulted our mom a couple of times and she has a restraining order against him.
I literally have no idea how many times he has been in and out of jail over the years. He’s out at the moment though. He has never met any of my kids and I don’t plan for him to ever meet them.
I have two cousins who have each been in the county jail several times for petty theft. I used to play with them a lot and they both were easy to be with. It seems our relationship was based on my not having possessions worth stealing. I’ve since been careful in my associations with them.
Local yokel officials I could buy. A bit more shocking that state- or federal-level employees would be in on it too tho. [/but ending hijack]
I didn’t realize we were including distant ancestors as well.
Apparently, I had a distant ancestor (according to one family tree) that refused to sign the 1534 Oath of Succession confirming King Henry VIII’s new wife Anne Boleyn as Queen of England, so he was arrested for high treason. In the trial it only took the jury 15 minutes to declare him guilty, and he was executed in 1535. On the other hand, the Catholic Church made him a saint, so he did get that little honor.
And while I’ve never been arrested and the worst crime I believe I have ever committed was to drive too quickly on a freeway a handful of times (though my most recent ticket was over a decade ago), I’ve been harassed by cops a few times in my youth. The funniest I think was when I was hanging out with my friend Heidi. See, I had two very nosy roommates at the time, and she and I were just friends, and wanted to hang out somewhere in peace. So we parked in the parking lot of a closed dry cleaner down the street from the house I was renting (it was late at night). We had puffy Cheetos and some punch soda from Safeway. We just sat in her car, listening to the radio and chatting. I was probably 20, she was a couple years older.
Cops pulled up, shined a flashlight in the car, and asked what we were doing. We told them we were listening to the radio and just chatting. They asked what we were drinking, and we said punch-flavored soda. They said, yeah right, and we handed them the cans and showed them the 12 pack in her back seat. At that point they busted out laughing, basically saying it was the dumbest thing they ever saw; they couldn’t believe that’s all we were actually doing. I’m glad I didn’t get in trouble but having cops laugh at you for being so lame didn’t feel so great at the time.
Back in the 1970’s, when marijuana was illegal and long hair on men was something of a political statement, I had a very long-haired boyfriend who, on top of that, rode a motorcycle.
You could be pulled over and searched, at the time, for looking suspicious. He was on his way home one night and got stopped and searched. The police found a 35 millimeter film canister in his pocket, and were very gleeful, because those were often used to hold weed.
They were then very disappointed, because what he had in there was film.
(Not that he didn’t smoke weed, which he did. But he wasn’t carrying that night.)
(you know, I miss the days when ‘are you carrying?’ was likely to mean marijuana – though I suppose that depended on who you hung out with.)
A pity he couldn’t have been prescient enough to say “Milords, I shall gladly affirm the new Queen if you will suffer that I do so in three years time”.