From the Telegraph, London (
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/28/nthief28.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/08/28/ixhome.html):
As thick as thievesBy Andrew Alderson
(Filed: 28/08/2005)
As slick armed robberies go, it left a lot to be desired. The would-be raider produced a gun and a note demanding money but fled from the Halifax building society when a cashier hit a panic alarm.
Any self-respecting thief always turns his thoughts to the getaway - just in case things do not go according to plan. And when iron shutters came crashing down between him and the cashier, Simon Jones knew that the robbery was not going at all well.
Unfortunately, for Jones, as he ran into the street there was no accomplice waiting outside to speed him away from the scene of the crime in Whitby, North Yorkshire. Nor was a car of his own parked outside - or so much as a bicycle.
So Jones, who had not bothered to wear a mask or any disguise, went to the town's coach terminal and calmly boarded a bus to Scarborough, 19 miles away. Police, alerted by a passer-by who had seen what had happened, followed the bus and when Jones, 39, stepped off it he was arrested. Last week at York Crown Court he was given a five-year jail sentence after he admitted attempted robbery and possessing an imitation firearm.
The behaviour of Jones and other criminals in recent weeks has given a new meaning to the phrase "as thick as thieves". Whether it is because they have had too much sun or possess too little common sense, criminals up and down the country seem on a mission to buy a one-way ticket to their nearest prison.
News of Jones's stupidity comes just days after a thief stole a laptop computer worth £700 from a shop in Manchester. The name of the shop - CCTV Surveillance Solutions - should have served as a deterrent but, undaunted, Michael Adams went in to the premises. With his face fully visible, he was filmed from almost every possible angle while he posed as a customer and asked to look at some cameras before snatching the laptop from the counter and fleeing into the street.
His robbery was caught on eight cameras. He was even pictured "casing" the shop half an hour before he went in, jumping up to peer through a window - and looking directly into a camera. Inside, he seemed oblivious to the signs warning that the building was monitored by CCTV.
After seizing the laptop, he was filmed making his escape, with David Arathoon, the shop owner, in pursuit. Mr Arathoon, 54, said last week: ''I've got to see the funny side of it, even though I'm annoyed to have lost my laptop. Frame by frame, our cameras filmed him all around the shop. The stupidity of the guy to think that stealing from a CCTV shop of all places would be a good idea is quite astonishing, really."
Adams, 20, was quickly identified and arrested. On Thursday, he appeared before city magistrates and was given a community order with supervision for 12 months and ordered to pay £720 compensation and costs.
If the thieves in Manchester are a dozy bunch, then the ones in Carmarthen, south Wales, are just plain daft. Last week a burglar appeared in court after he was caught by police because he bit into a pear while raiding a home as the family slept upstairs. Gavin Edwards, 21, had picked the piece of fruit up from the kitchen table, taken a chunk out of it and left it - and his DNA - on the worktop as he carried out the raid with a friend after a night of heavy drinking. At Cardiff Crown Court last week, Edwards was sentenced to a year in jail, suspended for two years, and was ordered to do 100 hours' community work.
In Lancashire, either poor eyesight or sheer panic ended an attempted burglary by two men last week. One of them, apparently making his getaway after burgling a house, was arrested after he crashed headfirst through the window of a police Land Rover. The man, in his 20s, was arrested after being released from Royal Oldham Hospital.
Michael Levi, the professor of criminology at Cardiff University, compared many modern-day criminals to the character from the first - and many argue funniest - comedy film that Woody Allen directed. Take the Money and Run, made in 1969, is presented as a documentary on the life of an incompetent, petty criminal called Virgil Starkwell, whose bank robbery goes wrong when the cashier questions the spelling and grammar in his stick-up note which begins "I have a gub..."
"Criminality, like other areas of life, covers a wide spectrum," said Prof Levi. "People tend to think of those who break the law for financial gain as having a great game plan but the reality is that criminals often act on impulse and, as a result, they do some very stupid things."
However, fact is often stranger than fiction, when it comes to bungled hold ups and criminal acts. In their book The World's Dumbest Criminals, Daniel Butler and Alan Ray have gathered 100 real-life examples of incompetent crimes. In one, a German makes some of the bungling British thieves look positively cunning. The man, supposedly a tourist on a golf holiday, showed up at customs with his golf bag as he was leaving Britain. A customs officer making idle conversation about golf realised that the supposed golfer did not know what a "handicap" was and had no idea what to do when asked to demonstrate his swing. The customs official eventually found a large stash of drugs hidden in the golf bag and the man was arrested.
There was disappointment, too, for the 47-year-old American woman who wanted her husband murdered and rang up a company in Arizona called Guns for Hire, which stages gunfights for Westerns and other films. Once the company realised that she was serious about wanting a contract killer, it called the police and the woman received a four-and-a-half-year jail sentence.
Meanwhile, the saying that "crime doesn't pay" was proved wrong last week as a result of the theft of the laptop from the CCTV shop in Manchester. David Arathoon said that the story which went around the world had led to thousands of pounds worth of extra business for his store.
"Business people and shopkeepers have seen the quality of the images [of the burglar] and they are saying to me, 'I want some of that'," Mr Arathoon said. "I have had the last laugh on the thief because he's given us publicity that we could never have dreamed of. He's been the biggest boost to business imaginable."
