What could be easier than robbing a family restaurant and bar on bingo night? Just make sure you read the entire schedule and not do it the night of the monthly biker’s meeting.
Heh. Watching several videos gives a comparison of dry news vs. descriptive (linked above): In the former, one robber was caught and “held until police arrived”; in the latter, he was “brought down and hogtied”.
Story from my days prosecuting. I don’t think I’ve posted this story here before, but I may have. If so, forgive me.
The hero is a bad villain. He was a drug dealer, and used to like punishing his debtors with the old trick of putting a thickish pen between their fingers, then using large pliers on the ends of the fingers to force them together, breaking the fingers around the pen. Just setting the stage here that he is nasty.
So he gets caught selling, and gets bail.
Shortly afterwards, he has a meeting in a main street in a local tourist city (a bit like Florida) where he lives and operates. His distinctive car is parked nose to nose in the middle of the street with that of bloke he is meeting. Suddenly, Our Hero goes back to his car, gets a gun and starts blazing away at the other bloke. Hero then gets in his car and drives off.
Unbeknownst to Hero is that there is a nondescript van parked next to where the shootout happened. Entirely co-incidentally, the van is full of police officers who are staking out a nearby shop watching for dodgy customers. When the gunplay starts, they have to break cover and chase him through the streets, easily catching him.
So he tells them some story about how he can lead them to some uber-crim, and he gets bail.
Whereupon he starts returning to the gym where he is a regular (the gym-junkie thing rears its ugly head again later. And I know that you will not forgive me for the “ugly head” metaphor by the end of the story. I regret nothing.)
He takes a shine to a hot blonde who also works out there and starts chatting her up. Ditzy blonde is apparently easily impressed by his tales of what a Big Man in the underworld he is, and is flattered when he says she would be a good person to do sales work for him in nightclubs peddling powder. She giggles, says she’ll think about it, and then goes straight back to the police station where she works as a police officer, drops the smiles and the giggles, and tells them this bloke was trying to hit on her and how. When they figure out who he was, they send her back with a wire, and he is caught again.
Totally random that his recruitment technique should be so gormless as to involve an approach to an off-duty police officer.
This time, no bail.
So he decides he is going to try to set up the arresting officer. His girlfriend comes into the prison to visit him, and he tells her that his plan is that he will tell her where he has hidden a stash of weed. She is to go to where he knows the arresting officer regularly parks his car at the station, pop the boot, put the weed in it, and ring the local anti-corruption authorities, who will then crawl up the arresting officer’s fundament, and Hero will tell them a story that will take the heat off him and put it on the arresting officer.
So the girlfriend leaves the prison, walks over to the waiting police where she removes the wire she had been wearing and hands it to them.
And he still wanted to go to trial rather than plead guilty. So trial day comes.
Remember the gym thing? He was a big steroid user. He used to inject them directly into his penis, which was this large knobbly misshapen thing as a result…hideous. Now it will occur to you to wonder how I know this.
Gather round.
The police had raided a storage unit where they had found large quantities of drugs, and the unit manager had been able to identify Our Hero as the bloke who had hired the unit, notwithstanding his attempts to use false names. But this sort of evidence can be contested with some potential for success - mistaken identification, that sort of thing.
It turns out that in the unit was found a VHS homemade video tape with Our Hero on it. Nude. Filming himself in the mirrored wardrobe of a residential unit where he once lived. Flapping his ghastly appendage from thigh to thigh as he filmed. He seemed soooo impressed with himself.
You will notice that it was a mirrored wardrobe. In the background could be seen a whole bunch of stuff in his unit - furniture, table lamps, bedspreads, that sort of thing. All of which had also been put into storage by Our Hero and found in the storage unit with the drugs and the video. So we now had a very strong case to link him to the storage unit and confirm the identification made by the storage unit manager.
His counsel tried to object to the video on the basis that it was prejudicial, but when I explained the significance of all the items that could be seen in the background, the judge let it in. Whereupon Hero pleaded guilty, perhaps to avoid the humiliation of the video being seen in public.
He got a nice stretch.
And I got a good laugh. Fair exchange, all round.
And does everyone remember the bagel-dog our good Doctor Mercotan told us about?
And now we know…the rest of the story. 