fact
Eliot Ness, famous for taking down feared gangster and bootlegger Al Capone, died a penniless alcoholic that no one had heard of. His autobiography was published after his death and only then did he become famous with TV shows and movies being made of his exploits.
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It’s been a permanent fixture of film, television, and literature for years. The cunning criminal who is so bright that they routinely outsmart the police and make them look foolish.
But this phenomenon exists in real life too, believe it or not.
AskReddit users shared their stories about especially smart criminals.
Let’s see what they had to say.
“My favorite was the guy who stole a post office mailbox off the street, repainted it, and then put it next to the night deposit box at a bank.
And hung an out-of-order sign on the deposit box. All the businesses came along and dropped off their deposits in the mailbox.”
“I worked crime scenes. This guy had attached GPS to the bottom of peoples cars who owned houses, he wanted to rob.
He did it to ensure they wouldn’t be showing up while he was ransacking the place.”
“I remember an officer telling me about a B&E alarm he and his team responded to. No one was there to report the alarm, it must have been a security monitoring company that called.
When police showed up, everything seemed normal, most lights were off, and there was an employee still working. Explains he was there working late and must have set off an alarm.
They almost believed him until he said “uhh” before saying the name of the company he worked for. After that it was downhill but with a little more research he would have pretty much gotten away with it.”
“There’s one guy I recently dealt with who is on parole. I stopped him in my city after he was looking to buy drugs (usually people come from all over to buy drugs and then leave). I issue him a warning and let him go as it’s pretty common and he sang like a bird regarding the people he was trying to buy from.
Anyway, the next day, I got a call from his parole officer who says he was alerted the guy was pulled over and wanted to verify that It was his guy that I stopped. I’m a little confused at first but he goes on to say that the day before, he was scheduled to meet with him but he had an excuse and bailed.
His excuse was that he was in the hospital. Well when he spoke with him the following day, he was able to provide documentation that he had entered the hospital day 1 and had left day 2. Well I had stopped him at 115 in the morning and after looking at the picture, it was 100% him.
Turns out the guy had checked in then out of the hospital on day 1, then in and out again on day 2. He then re arranged half the paperwork to make it look like he was in the hospital overnight which would make my car stop of him appear like I mixed him up with someone else as well as give him a valid excuse to miss their meeting.
Not sure what’s gonna happen to that guy but I thought it was pretty clever.”
“Worked at a jail. After getting off work, I watched an ex inmate (homeless) being released, he walked over to a patrol car, looked me in the eye, and the elbowed the window in. He was walked back to the entrance and re-booked in. It was middle of January. He didn’t want to get too cold.
To the people talking about “Can’t break car windows.” That’s true. Also depends on the car. The patrol car they used was specifically old model. Used more for the perimeter of the jail unless other patrol cars were in the shop. Those windows had been replaced so many times. Idk if it’s the same material or what.”
“A friend of my brother moved to Israel where for a period of time it was/is acceptable to drive with an American driver’s license.
He was pulled over for speeding, and when asked for his license, gave the officer his Costco card (Costco is a membership-based retail warehouse in the US and a few other countries. The exchange apparently went something like this: Officer: “Costco? What is Costco?”
Friend: “It’s the state I’m from.”
Officer: “That sounds made up.”
Friend: “There are lots of states you probably haven’t heard of. Have you heard of Arkansas? How about Idaho?”
Officer: “I guess not…”
Friend: “Well I’m from the small state of Costco.”
The officer didn’t have a response and wound up writing the ticket to someone with a Costco driver’s license. Friend framed the ticket and still has it hanging on his wall.”
“One guy would print barcodes, bring them into home depot and stick them on merchandise in the $100 range. When scanned the items came up around the $10 range. Putting random barcodes on things isnt really illegal and super hard to notice. Guy two would come in an hour later and buy the underpriced stuff. Complete plausible deniability. They would then sell the stuff on Ebay.
Only reason they got caught is because the guy with the barcode printer/software cut the second guy out of the operation so guy 2 stole a bunch of barcodes, put them on the merchandise and paid for it immediately afterwards. He then proceeded to rat on the first guy and spilled the beans they had been doing this on a weekly basis for over four years.
Because we could only pin the one case on him, the burglary was dropped down to a pretty theft and he walked away with a few days in county and a small fine. Dude probably took homedepot for tens of thousands over the years.”
“I have a nice story from insurance/debt collectors.
There was this guy who was already in heaps of debt. Like more than a lifetimes worth of debt.
He proceeded to file several policereports for identity theft up to the point that he got protected from financial checkups – It was a temporary measure that were given to repeated identity theft victims. At the same time he had reported fake income to the IRS for the last couple of years to between 40 to 60 millions depending on the year.
So when he applied for credit cards and loans, they were unable to check his financial credit (Due to the identity theft protection) but they checked his tax returns which showed he had a massive income.
Got his loans and credit cards – emptied them out and left the country.”
“A while back, there was a series of thefts along the bus lines in my country. People’s things kept missing from one city to the next, and nobody had any idea what happened as things were presumably safe in the bottom of the bus which nobody except the driver had the access to.
What happened?
Apparently there were two guys, one of whom was really small. You get where this is going. The big guy would put the little guy in a suitcase, buy a ticket to somewhere, load him up with the rest of the luggage, and enjoy the ride, while the little guy went out, stole people’s electronics, jewelry, cameras and whatnot, then returned to his suitcase until the ride was over.
Not really sure how they caught them, but it was pretty amusing to read about, and i found the whole thing clever enough.”
“There was an incident in Fargo ND where a guy wanted to steal electronics equipment. The store had plenty of alarms on it and generally cutting an alarm triggers an alarm so instead he cut ALL the alarms. This was before cellphones were really widespread and alarms were usually just connected to the phone line.
He found an access point to one of the phone companies big trunk lines (correction: 9 access points). Massive thick copper cables with tens of thousands of lines running through them. He cut through the whole thing with a circular saw, knocked out phone service to most of the town and robbed an audio store during the ensuing chaos.
There were no leads until a tip came in from another town where he’d pulled something similar. They hadn’t been able to pin that to him but had strong suspicions and he’d relocated to Fargo. So the cops pay him a visit. He refused to let them in because they didn’t have a warrant so the cops left to get one without leaving anyone to watch him and he split. When they came back they found the saw coated in copper dust and a lot of the stolen stuff.
He was in the wind for a while but even after he got caught he had another card to play. While being transported between prisons he used a key he’d made to unlock his shackles and climbed out the roof vent of the bus.”
“20 years ago a guy on Australia’s Gold Coast got away with a bank robbery in broad daylight.
He cased the bank for a while and discovered a pattern of the bank manager arriving about 30 minutes before anyone else each morning where he would leave the front doors unlocked so staff could help themselves in without a key or needing to wait for the boss to come and let them in.
One morning the crook dressed himself up for a busy day of office work and waited for the bank manager to arrive. As the manager was unlocking the doors he made his move, entering the building and threatening the manager with a gun. He got all the details he’d need to access the vault and so forth and then tied the manager up and stuffed him in his office.
When the staff arrived he told them that the manager had called in sick and that regional office had sent him in to do the open shop thing and no one batted an eyelid. This bank had a small walk in vault that normally only held about 30-50k on any given day but old mate had timed his robbery for the morning after business banking day when all the local small businesses would make their end of week deposits and reportedly got a score of close to 250k.
Once the vault was open he pulled his gun out and invited all the staff to enter the vault and locked them in. By this stage the bank was due to be open so when he went to leave there were a number of customers waiting to get inside to do their banking.
He told them all that there had been an issue with the computers and that the tech team had estimated it would take about 30 minutes before the issue would be resolved and that they couldn’t open until then.
Then he got into his car and drove straight to the airport and flew to Hong Kong and then disappeared.
To my knowledge the cops never caught him and never managed to find the money – they knew he’d have had to leave most of it in Australia somewhere because you can only take 10k aud in cash in any currency out of the country before customs pulls you into their interview rooms so the assumption was that he had to have an accomplice here who would funnel the money to him slowly over time.”
“Several years ago in Cape Coral FL, a man waited on a sidewalk in front of a Publix grocery store and used a taser on an armored car guard carrying too bags of money.
A get away driver in a car with stolen tags pulled up, taser guy and money bags get in and they took off. Never caught.”
“Probably one of the smartest robberies in my small city.
One of the main streets is cut into a hillside and, as a result, there is a very steep and quite tall concrete-covered bank immediately behind the buildings. Between two buildings there is a gap that was filled at the street-end by an ATM.
To access it for filling, the security staff went through the next door building, out a side door and into the gap, which had the ATM at one end and the steep bank at the other. On the Friday before Christmas, when the ATM was to be filled to the brim, one of the robbers abseiled down the bank at night into the gap and waited for the guys to arrive to fill the ATM (they came early in the morning).
As they came through the door into the gap, he held them up, took the money, and took off through the building to an accomplice waiting in a van on the main street. Then the van took off on the main road out of the city and vanished.
After a big search, the police finally found the burnt-out van. Turned out the gang had driven it up a gorge road and had two other accomplices in cars at the top and bottom of the gorge who simultaneously drove really slowly into the gorge and held up the traffic so that no one was there to see them when they turned off down an access road into some bush.
They ended up being caught, because one of the gang was a former employee of the security company.”
“I worked with this one guy who had a lengthy record. He had a system for getting released if he got caught. After committing a crime, if the police were in pursuit and he knew he was about to be cornered, he would act insane.
His girl would play along with it telling the police that he was off his medication. The police would arrest him but then send him to a mental ward with papers instructing the ward to release to police once he was cleared. Once he was in the mental ward, he would cause a distraction that would make the person attending the desk with the file cabinet to leave said cabinet.
He would then crawl to the file cabinet, look for his “release to police” papers, and then would literally eat the papers. When the psych evaluators decided that he was stable enough to be released, there would be no instructions to send him to the police, and he would be released to the general public.
He did this about 10 times until police officers noticed him back on the streets. This stunt forced the state to change their procedure for detaining mentally unstable suspects.”
As someone who is pretty obsessed with crime, these stories were very interesting to me.
Now we want to hear from you!
Have you run across any wily criminals in your day?
Maybe as a cop, a lawyer, or in some other capacity?
Tell us about them in the comments!
The post Police Officers Talk About the Smartest Criminals They’ve Ever Encountered appeared first on UberFacts.
This can safely be filed under: Nightmare Fuel.
Apparently, corpses don’t stop moving for up to a year after death, due to the various decomposition processes they go through.
Which makes me wonder how many of those bells rang at Victorian gravesides even though the people in the coffins were, in fact, dead.
Yikes.
The research that brought you this lovely tidbit of macabre information comes from an Australian body farm (a place where scientists study how bodies decompose in order to improve forensic techniques.
In a time-lapse video containing images taken every 30 minutes over a period of 17 months, researchers saw movement for far longer than they expected to – over a year and a half in some cases. In an interview with ABC News Australia, the authors said they believe the movements were mostly the result of drying ligaments.
“What we found was that the arms were significantly moving, so that arms that started off down beside the body ended up out to the side of the body.”
They’ve yet to publish their study, but hope their findings will continue to add to a body of research that helps police solve murders, among other things.
“This research is very important to help law enforcement to solve crime and it also assists in disaster investigations. It’s important for victims and victims’ families, and in a lot of cases it gives the victim a voice to tell their last story.”
Just an FYI: Body farms exist all over the world, and they depend on body donations from people looking to assist science after they’ve expired.
I say you might as well be helpful. Either way, you’re just going to be decomposing.
The post A Corpse on a Body Farm Was Caught Moving appeared first on UberFacts.
Did you know that the FBI wasn’t the first major law enforcement arm of the federal government, nor was it always the most important? In fact, the Postal Inspection Service is the oldest American federal law enforcement agency; it can trace its roots back to 1772.
The FBI didn’t bust onto the scene until 1908 (back then it was just the “Bureau of Investigation”), and it didn’t really come into it’s own until the 48-year tenure of its infamous director J. Edgar Hoover, which ran from 1924 until 1972.
Unlike most law enforcement, the FBI has extremely broad jurisdiction, which allows it to be effective across state lines and in investigating complex financial and delicate political crimes. Of course most of us know this because the FBI is very much in the news these days, and has been ever since the 2016 election.
But let’s talk about some less well known FBI investigations, shall we?
Photo Credit: Public Domain
After Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech, the FBI considered him the most dangerous and effective leader of the civil rights movement. The FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover in particular, made it their mission to ‘deal’ with King, so they tapped his phones, and painted him as a Communist and a sexual deviant. Hoover hated King so much that he tried to convince King to commit suicide.
Photo Credit: lettersofnote.com
In 1964, one year after King’s famous speech, he received an anonymous threatening letter in the mail (it came from the FBI) along with a cassette tape of allegedly incriminating recordings of Dr. King in hotel rooms with various women. The cassette was the fruit of nearly a year of surveillance, and the note intimated, in terms that a 1976 congressional investigation found to be not uncertain, that King should commit suicide.
Here is a selection:
King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is…You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.
The cult was called “The Church of the Hammer”, supposedly founded by a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church. The FBI started its investigation into the organization in 2005.
The investigation didn’t have much to go off of at the beginning – the whole thing was based off of an interaction a goth person had online with the groups Yahoo Group, “GodHatesGoths”. The goth was arguing with the group, trying to convince them that the goth subculture was unfairly maligned, and did not actually necessarily worship Satan.
Photo Credit: Muckrock.com
But the group was apparently unpersuaded, and in the postings they had made some pretty significant threats:
Photo Credit: Muckrock.com
The FBI was worried, and so they started to contact law enforcement and witnesses from the various incidents the group had allegedly been involved in, according to their postings – but investigators couldn’t find anything.
Finally, over two years later, they went to the actual website, godhatesgoths.com. There, they found…
Photo Credit: Muckrock.com
And the investigation was closed.
Photo Credit: FreeJeremy.net, CC BY-SA 3.0
Jeremy Hammond was perched atop the FBI’s list.
He was an excellent black hat hacker, and, as he said,
“From the start, I always wanted to target government websites, but also police and corporations that profit off government contracts…I hacked lots of dot-govs.”
He worked as a hacktivist with Anonymous, and he successfully hacked a number of different corporations and government websites. Then, one day, his luck ran out.
In 2012 he was arrested, and 2014 he copped to a plea deal for 10 years in jail.
When his house was raided, Hammond’s first thought was to close his computer, so it would be password protected. But the government cracked it. Again, in Hammond’s own words,
“My password was really weak…[my cat’s name] Chewy. Chewy 123.”
In 2003, only 2 years after 9/11, a 727 airplane took off from the capital of Angola, Luanda.
Only two men are known to have been on the plane (a 727 usually takes 3 people to fly), and while one was a trained pilot, he was licensed only for much smaller private craft.
The type of aircraft stolen
Photo Credit: RuthAS, CC BY 3.0
Ben Charles Padilla and his recently hired helper, John Mikel Mutantu, did not communicate with the tower while taxiing jerkily onto a runway, and taking off.
Though there was a frantic search for the plane, involving the FBI and investigative agencies both American and from around the world, it was never seen again, nor were its occupants.
The FBI quietly closed its investigation two years later, in 2005, and there has been no significant public comment on the case since then.
The post 4 Strange and Thought-Provoking FBI Investigations appeared first on UberFacts.
If you’re looking for some free legal advice, this is a good place to start. It’s unfortunate that so many people don’t know their rights in a sticky situation, but that can often make the difference in your case.
A Tumblr user who happens to be married to an ex-cop offered these words of advice.
Photo Credit: Tumblr
And other people weighed in with their own words of wisdom.
Photo Credit: Tumblr
And the advice kept coming.
Photo Credit: Tumblr
Hopefully, you’ll never even have to consider these scenarios, but it’s probably a good idea to look into this kind of information just in case.
The post An Ex-Cop’s Wife Shares What NOT to Do If You Get Arrested appeared first on UberFacts.
Day after day, police officers put their lives on the line to protect citizens.
In this AskReddit article, police officers share their most hair-raising “calling all units” stories, so buckle up.
“An armed robbery at the government’s financial institution.
But, unlike the stuff they show in movies, we went in silent, spread around without approaching the premises too close and got all four of them by intercepting their car later on. One of our detectives came in an unmarked car and parked a few cars behind the vehicle with the engine running and the nervous driver behind the wheel and followed them.
We learned about the car thanks to the off-duty officer who was in the right place at the right time to notice the suspicious behavior (the car was parked in an unusual way among everything else that indicated to him that something fishy is going on).
Although, we were lucky in some sense because it took them ages to do what they came to do. Regardless, it all went smoothly and with no casualties.”
“I’ve served as both a probation officer and police officer. There was a natural disaster in the area on a weekend. I got a call from the chief probation officer telling me that we were designated as disaster workers and we were to report for duty. I was an armed field unit officer at the time and when we got into work all the armed officers were told we were going to patrol the disaster area. We were ordered to put on all of our marked clothes and report to an area for patrol.
It was a bit weird as all our cars were unmarked and had no lights. We had radios and cages in the cars but not the other equipment as we normally didn’t need it. The patrolling was fairly uneventful and we didn’t encounter any looters but we put in a number of 13-hour days. The community needed every armed LEO they could get and we did our part.”
“It’s happened three times that I’ve been on duty that I can recall. The first time was a riot at a local theme park, some idiot kids put out that there was going to be a fight in the parking lot and for some reason that meant several hundred high school age kids all gathered in the lot and got into a huge brawl. The first few officers responding got surrounded in the chaos and they put out an officer in trouble, and because of the size of the crowd, they asked for officers from all over the county.
The others were officer down calls where the gunman was still at large.”
“A police officer here, I’ve heard it over the radio many times but never used it my self. We are issued with a button on our radios that causes all radios to beep and vibrate, so it is instantly noticed by every officer in the area. Most memorable was a regular DUI stop that turned south resulting in the officer being attacked and having his leg broken.
It was towards the end of the shift and most of the officers were finishing up on paperwork at the station. As soon as it went off every officer in the station left within 10 seconds of hearing it. The suspect was quickly detained and arrested soon after.”
“Former cop here. The all-units call was basically a riot at a large nightclub in a very rough area of the neighboring city. Once things were finally calmed down and the dozen or so people were taken away, my boss wanted us all back in our city. I was amazed at not only how many cops showed up but from where….counties and towns I had never heard of before. I looked up a few at the end of shift and some came from an hour plus away.”
“We had an all-units call to one of our own stabbed. Everyone went hell for leather to get there, to find one of our guys on the floor with a stab wound to the stomach. We searched everywhere for the suspects and anyone matching the descriptions was arrested. So, it turns out the officer did it to himself.
He’d heard you couldn’t be fired from work if you were injured in the line of duty (he was under investigation for a minor issue, not anything involving the public. Just breach of procedure.) I don’t think I’ve ever been so disgusted with a colleague in my life. All the other “all units” calls I’ve been to have been genuine and luckily my colleagues unhurt.
I almost called one myself when someone pulled out a sawn-off shotgun at me. Luckily that panned out OK!”
“A large wedding in Brooklyn—it was at midnight, so there weren’t that many units, to begin with. The families started warring with each other and when we arrived they, of course, turned on us. Everyone, I mean EVERYONE, was brawling and we felt like Custer at Little Big Horn.
We turned out three cars that night and one of them was out on a homicide so we’re just yelling “Keep ’em coming, Central!” The duty captain (the supervisory officer for the patrol boro) shows up, looks around, sees that this is quickly becoming a riot and calls a citywide 10-13, which means a designated number of cars from every borough task force in the city.”
“When I was working for a small town police department I received a phone call from our chief of police, who was off that day. He said a woman showed up on his front lawn saying she had just escaped from her kidnappers. Long story short she said something about him (her kidnapper) having a gun and threatening to use it if she tried to escape.
Me, being young (20 at the time) and oblivious to what I was actually putting out on the radio, called out to the on-duty officer about the situation. My wording must have been terrible because I received radio messages from county and state police stating they were en route to the chief’s residence. They thought someone had come to our chief of polices home with a gun and was holding him hostage. The best part of this story is I gave the wrong address and all these cop cars from city county and state were blocking off the street one block over.”
“I recently had an “all available units respond” call for an unresponsive child.
My partner and I have never driven so fast. When we got there, all you could smell was brakes and exhaust fumes from our cruisers.
We entered the house and found the child: a one-year-old boy. We performed CPR. He was transported. He didn’t make it.
It’s hard to be criticized by the media and the general public when these are the things we deal with.”
“I’m an officer in a courtroom, so our all-units calls are usually for disruptive spectators (victim and defendant families fighting out arguing) or defendants acting up in front of a judge or whole being taken back to jail. Another courthouse nearby had an incident where a defendant produced a blade from his rectum and tried to slash his lawyer’s throat while in the courtroom. One I was involved in, a guy was a known problem in corrections custody but somehow he got free of them and fought his way into the courtroom I was working in.
It’s the most comforting sight when you make that 10-13 call and in the midst of the fight, you see the small army of uniforms come running in to help.”
“Had an all units call, it was horrifying, turned out an off-duty cop was drinking and driving and hit three cars on a bridge. It was chaos, many things flew out of the car, belongings scattered everywhere. He did time, lost his job obviously, stained the department.”
“Retired cop here. I have more than a few ‘Everyone get here now’ calls in my time. Most stemmed from a large gathering that was starting to turn not so peaceful.
My last major one, we had a bomb that was planted in a car in a parking lot. I needed to clear the lot and the adjacent building. And then it became an attempt to keep folks out of the area. That was a tense 12-hours until the device was blown up.”
“A few weeks ago we had an all-units call because an idiot on drugs decided to call 911 and say someone was someone had been shot. As he was on the phone with a dispatcher, someone else calls in that her home is being broken into. Guess who broke into her home while he’s ‘still’ on the phone with 911 saying someone’s been shot.
So an officer arrives and goes in to search for the suspect not knowing at the time it was the guy on the phone with 911. Well, dude runs out, hops in the cop car and tears out! All officers are dispatched along with state police officers. He had a nice joyride and led them on a good chase with a buddy behind him for almost an hour until some state troopers did a maneuver to wreck him when he got on the interstate.”
“I spent 13 months as an officer.
One was during a patrol in the ghetto section, and I spot a car speeding down the street. As soon as I hit my lights, the driver jumps out of the car while it’s in motion and runs into the woods losing a sandal. The car stopped right before hitting a house and figured that another passenger stopped the vehicle, so called for immediate backup and secured it. Turned out to be a notorious dealer with priors, and his ladies snitched when he bailed on them.”
“We had a shooter trying to kill cops. He had several guns on him and he managed to take out a few cops. He ran and hid in the woods traveling around town behind people’s houses for days. Businesses and roads were shut down people were told to stay inside. It was pretty intense.”
The post 12+ Police Officers Tell Their ‘Calling All Units’ Stories appeared first on UberFacts.
Prisoners on Greenland are allowed to leave their cells between 06.30am-09.30pm, work, visit relatives, have their own cell key, and use firearms.
A man was given a 13 year sentence for armed robbery in the year 2000, but the state of Missouri forgot to put him in prison. They only noticed in 2013, 13 years later, when it came time for his ‘release’.
Due to a clerical error, the state of Missouri assumed that a man named Mike Anderson was in prison, serving his 13-year sentence for armed robbery. It’s only when they began preparing for his release did they realize that law-enforcement had forgotten to take him to jail.
Stingrays, or fake cell towers are used by law enforcement to trick cell phones into giving GPS and identifying info. When used to track a suspect, it also gathers information of all cellphones nearby.
Australia 
Netherlands 
Canada 
and now ……….. the UK! 
Rumour has it that a taphonomic facility is in the works to add to global research (@nature.research) #bodyfarm #taphonomy #taphonomic #skeleton #bones #science #forensicscience #anthropology #bioarchaeology
) #humanremains #decomposition #remains2beseen #ediblebodyfarm #decay #deliciousdecay #taphonomy #bodyfarm #anthroplogy
