DUMB CROOKS

Here’s proof that crime doesn’t pay.

 

CAUGHT BROWN-HANDED

On a hot summer day in 2018, Matthew Bloomquist, 29, and a friend drove a pickup truck onto a rural Minnesota farm and stole some lumber. On their way off the property, Bloomquist drove through a big pile of manure…and got stuck. It had been raining that week, making the ground muddier and the manure even smellier. And the more Bloomquist spun the wheels, the deeper his truck sank. The two crooks spent over an hour trying to get unstuck, even using some of the lumber for traction, but the truck wouldn’t budge. Then the farmer showed up. Bloomquist gave up. (The buddy ran away.) When the cops arrived a few minutes later, Bloomquist was standing there—covered in dung—smoking a cigarette. According to the police report, “He was wearing jean shorts over long underwear and no shoes, which the deputies assumed were somewhere in the manure pile.” The report, which was titled “Something Doesn’t Smell Right,” also mentioned that “the trip to the jail was made with the windows open.”

 

SHEAR HORROR

In August 2018, a middle-aged man (unidentified in press reports) burst into a Tokyo convenience store, brandished a pair of nose hair scissors, and demanded all the money in the register. Apparently intimidated by the shears (even though they were less than an inch long), the clerk ran away, leaving the robber in the store alone. But without the clerk, the robber couldn’t get into the register or the safe, so he stood there deliberating his next move. While he was doing that, a police officer walked into the store and arrested the nose hair trimmer bandit.

 

INFAMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES

Here’s a helpful tip from the Lawrenceville (Georgia) Police Department: “When after having robbed several banks and you are at another bank casing the place for an additional robbery and are approached by a news crew in the parking lot…DO NOT stop and agree to an interview with said news crew.” They were referring to Eric Rivers, 24. He had just robbed a Chase Bank (his third robbery of the day) and was walking over to a nearby Fidelity Bank, when a WGCL-TV reporter stopped him in the parking lot and asked if he would answer some questions about public transit. Rivers agreed, then gave his real name and did the interview. Afterward, he went into the bank to case it out. Meanwhile, the police had been told by the Chase Bank manager that the suspect was last seen approaching a news van, so the cops got Rivers’s name from the news crew. When they showed up later at the robber’s house, they said Rivers was “surprised” they’d found him.

Before he discovered spinach, Popeye got his strength by rubbing a magic chicken.

 

FRIED

We love stories of dumb crooks who leave behind a trail of whatever they stole. Here’s a new one: In 2015 a woman in Chickasha, Oklahoma, called police after $4,000 worth of items were stolen from her house—including electronics, golf clubs, and a Fry Daddy deep fryer. By the time police arrived, the woman’s neighbor, Matthew Kennedy, had already cracked the case. “I noticed a trail of oil leading from that backdoor to my other neighbor’s backdoor,” he told reporters. The neighbor, Steven McCarthey, 29, had been drinking with his friend, William Bitsche, 40, when they decided to burgle the woman’s house. But as Kennedy noted, “If you’re going to steal a Fry Daddy, you should probably pour out the oil before you drag it across the street.” Police followed the trail of fryer grease (which is probably still there today) and found all the stolen items in McCarthey’s house. Both men were arrested; the woman who lived across the street reportedly moved away.

 

KEEP YOUR PANTS ON

It was a typical burglary…until the burglar took his clothes off. Baltimore County (Maryland) police had to blur out the man’s naughty bits when they released the surveillance footage to the media in 2016. It shows him rummaging through a Slice Pizza restaurant completely nude. It’s unclear why he’s nude. The owner, Yani Riza, thinks that the criminal may have torn his pants in the small air vent that he’d squeezed through to get in. (That still doesn’t explain why he disrobed completely.) Finding no cash on the premises, the naked thief took a company checkbook. And a water bottle. “Seeing the footage was weird,” Riza told WBAL TV. “Knowing that somebody was naked running around the store, it’s funny.” That aside, Riza wanted justice, so he offered a “lifetime pizza reward” to anyone who turned the nude dude in.

Update: A few days later, the naked thief, 23-year-old Jonathan Newman, was apprehended—not because someone turned him in, but because he tried to cash one of the stolen checks at a local bank. And his tattoos made it pretty easy for the cops to positively ID him. (His clothes were found in a nearby Dumpster.)

Every time Khloé Kardashian plugs a product on Instagram, she makes as much as $13,000.