They don’t give judges awards for creativity—but maybe they should. Do these guys deserve a prize? You be the judge.
THE DEFENDANT: Edward Bello, 60, a vending machine repairman and small-time crook
THE CRIME: Conspiracy to use stolen credit cards, with which he racked up more than $26,000 in charges
THE PUNISHMENT: Federal District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein sentenced Bello to 10 months of home detention...with no TV. The tube-free environment would “create a condition of silent introspection that I consider necessary to induce the defendant to change his behavior.” Despite a 30-year history of committing petty crimes, Bello has never spent a day in prison and says he’s grateful to the judge for sparing him from the slammer one more time. But he’s appealing the no-TV sentence anyway, claiming that it’s a form of censorship and violates his First Amendment rights. “Let’s face it,” he says, “a television is sort of like your umbilical cord to life.”
THE DEFENDANT: Albert Brown, a repeat drug offender in San Francisco, California
THE CRIME: Selling drugs to an undercover cop
A NOVEL APPROACH: Rather than decide the sentence himself, Judge James Warren of San Francisco handed Brown one of his judicial robes and told him to put it on. “This is your life,” he told Brown. “You are your own judge. Sentence yourself.”
THE PUNISHMENT: Brown, in tears, gave himself six months in jail. Then, according to news reports, he tacked on a “string of self-imposed conditions such as cleaning himself up for his kids, and steering clear of the neighborhood where he got busted.”
“The Probation Department recommended six months and a good lecturing,” Judge Warren told reporters. “But I figured, I’m not that good at lecturing. He, on the other hand, was very good at lecturing himself. And maybe this time it will stick. I had the transcript typed up and sent over to him. Just in case he forgets.”
Butch Cassidy’s first offense: Taking a pair of pants and some pie, for which he left an IOU.
THE DEFENDANT: Alan Law, 19, of Derwent, Ohio
THE CRIME: Disturbing the peace by driving through town with his truck windows rolled down and the stereo blasting
THE PUNISHMENT: Municipal Court Judge John Nicholson gave Law a choice: pay a $100 fine or sit and listen to polka music for four hours. Law chose facing the music. A few days later, he reported to the police station and was locked in an interview room, where he listened to the “Blue Skirt Waltz,” “Who Stole the Kishka,” “Too Fat Polka,” and other hits by Cleveland polka artist Frankie Yankovic. Law managed to sit through it and has since abandoned his plans to buy an even louder stereo for his truck.
THE DEFENDANT: A youth in the Wake County, North Carolina, Juvenile Court (names of juvenile offenders are sealed)
THE CRIME: Burglary and theft
THE PUNISHMENT: Judge Don Overby sent the miscreant home to get his most-prized possession. The kid returned with a remote-controlled car, which he handed over to the court. The judge then took a hammer and smashed it to smithereens. Judge Overby has done this with other first time offenders as well. He says he got the idea after someone broke into his house and stole his CD player, his VCR, and $300 in cash. “I remember wishing these folks could feel the same sense of loss as I did,” he says.
* * *
CAUGHT WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN
In January 2004, three men in Spokane, Washington, decided to have a little fun by running through the local Denny’s at dawn, wearing just their shoes and hats. Their only mistake: leaving the car engine running. While they were streaking through the restaurant, someone stole their car and their clothes. The three naked pranksters had to hide behind parked cars until police arrived to take them to jail.
Most commonly requested item for death-row inmates’ “last meals”: French fries.
LAWYERS ON LAWYERS
Believe it or not, some lawyers are actually quite clever. Here are some quotes from the world’s most famous lawyers.
“I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.”
—Roy Cohn
“The court of last resort is no longer the Supreme Court. It’s Nightline.”
—Alan Dershowitz
“We lawyers shake papers at each other the way primitive tribes shake spears.”
—John Jay Osborn, Jr.
“The ideal client is the very wealthy man in very great trouble.”
—John Sterling
“An incompetent lawyer can delay a trial for months or years. A competent lawyer can delay one even longer.”
—Evelle Younger
“I’ve never met a litigator who didn’t think he was winning... right up until the moment the guillotine dropped.”
—William F. Baxter
“I’m not an ambulance chaser. I’m usually there before the ambulance.”
—Melvin Belli
“This is New York, and there’s no law against being annoying.”
—William Kunstler
“I get paid for seeing that my clients have every break the law allows. I have knowingly defended a number of guilty men. But the guilty never escape unscathed. My fees are sufficient punishment for anyone.”
—F. Lee Bailey
“I don’t want to know what the law is, I want to know who the judge is.”
—Roy Cohn
“The ‘adversary system’ is based on the notion that if one side overstates his idea of the truth and the other side overstates his idea of the truth, then the truth will come out....Why can’t we all just tell the truth?”
—David Zapp
The CIA developed a listening device for use in Vietnam, disguised to look like tiger droppings.
GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL
Four stories of dumb crooks who saved us all a lot of trouble.
SELF HELP
“A 22-year-old Green Bay man led police on a chase that moved as slowly as 20 mph and ended in the Brown County Jail’s parking lot. The man parked his pickup in the jail’s lot, smoked a cigarette, got out of the truck, and lay face-down on the ground to be arrested, police said. He told the officers he knew he was drunk and was going to be sent to jail, so he just drove himself there.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS
“Sylvain Boucher of Quebec was spotted by prison guards standing between the prison wall and an outer fence. Assuming he was trying to escape, they grabbed him, but soon discovered he was not an inmate...and he was carrying a large amount of illegal drugs. Boucher was trying to break in, thinking the prison would be a good market for his drugs. He’ll get to find out. Before he had the supply, but no market. Now he has the market, but no supply.”
—Moreland’s Bozo of the Day
IS THIS WHY THEY CALL IT “DOPE”?
“Philomena A. Palestini, 18, of Portland, Maine, walked into Salem District Court to face one criminal charge, but walked out in handcuffs with two. Court Security Officer Ronald Lesperance found a hypodermic needle and two small bags of what police believe is heroin in her purse as she walked through the security checkpoint. ‘This doesn’t happen very often,’ said Lesperance.”
—Eagle Tribune
THE “IN” CROWD
“A man who tried to break into a Rideau correctional center with drugs and tobacco was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday. Shane Walker, 23, was believed to be bringing drugs to a jailed friend last week when he was foiled by corrections workers who heard bolt-cutters snapping the wire fence and apprehended him.”
—The National Post
Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty, was based on real-life criminal Adam Worth.
THE GREAT DIAMOND HOAX OF 1872, PART I
Most stories have the moral at the end. But we’ll put it right up front: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
NIGHT DEPOSIT
One evening in February 1871, George Roberts, a prominent San Francisco businessman, was working in his
office when two men came to his door. One of them, Philip Arnold, had once worked for Roberts; the other was named John Slack. Arnold produced a small leather bag and explained that it contained something very valuable; as soon as the Bank of California opened in the morning, he was going to have them lock it in the vault for safekeeping.
Arnold and Slack made a show of not wanting to reveal what was in the bag, but eventually told Roberts that it contained “rough diamonds” they’d found while prospecting on a mesa somewhere in the West. They wouldn’t say where the mesa was, but they did say it was the richest mineral deposit they’d ever seen in their lives: The site was rich not only in diamonds, but also in sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and other precious stones.
The story sounded too good to be true, but when Arnold dumped the contents of the bag onto Roberts’s desk, out spilled dozens of uncut diamonds and other gems.
PAY DIRT
If somebody were to make such a claim today, they’d probably get laughed out of the room. But things were different in 1871. Only 20 years had passed since the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California sparked the greatest gold rush in American history. Since then other huge gold deposits had been discovered in Colorado, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. A giant vein of silver had been found in the famous Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, and diamonds had been discovered in South Africa in 1867—just four years earlier. Gems and precious metals might be anywhere, lying just below the earth’s surface, waiting to be discovered. People who’d missed out on the earlier bonanzas were hungry for word of new discoveries, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 opened up the West and created the expectation that more valuable strikes were just around the corner. When Arnold and Slack rolled into town with their tale of gems on a mesa and a bag of precious stones to back it up, people were ready to believe them.
About 1,500 New York residents are bitten every year...by other New Yorkers.
OPEN SECRET
The next morning the two men went to the Bank of California and deposited their bag in the bank’s vault. They made another big show of not wanting anyone to know what was in the bag, and again they let some of the bank employees have a peek. Soon everyone in the bank knew what was in it, including the president and founder, William Ralston. He had made a fortune off the Comstock Lode, and had his eye out for the next big find. Ralston didn’t keep the men’s secret, and neither did George Roberts: Soon all of San Francisco, the city built by the Gold Rush of 1849, was buzzing with the tale of the two miners and their discovery.
Arnold and Slack left town for a few weeks, and when they returned, they claimed they’d made another trip to their diamond field. And they had another big bag of gems to prove it. Ralston knew a good thing when he saw it and immediately began lining up the cream of San Francisco’s investment community to buy the mining claim outright. While Arnold played hard to get, Slack agreed to sell his share of the diamond field for $100,000, the equivalent of several million dollars today. Slack received $50,000 up front and was promised another $50,000 when he brought more gems back from the field.
Arnold and Slack left town again, and several weeks later returned with yet another bulging sack of precious stones. Ralston immediately paid Slack the remaining $50,000.
BIG TIME
Ralston didn’t know it, but he was being had. The uncut gems were real enough, but the story of the diamond field was a lie. Arnold and Slack had created a fake mining claim in Colorado by sprinkling, or “salting,” it with diamonds and other gems where miners would be able to find them. It was a common trick designed to make otherwise worthless land appear valuable. What made this deception different was its scale and the caliber of the people who were taken in by it. Ralston was a prominent and successful banker; he and his associates were supposed to be shrewd investors.
CSI effect? A juror in a trial once complained that investigators had not dusted the lawn for fingerprints.
DUE DILIGENCE
To the investors’ credit, they did take some precautions that they thought would protect them from fraud: Before any more money changed hands, they insisted on having a sample of the stones appraised by the most respected jeweler in the United States—none other than New York City’s Charles Tiffany. If the appraisal went well, they planned to send a mining engineer out to the diamond field to verify first, that it existed, and second, that it was as rich as Arnold and Slack claimed. These precautions should have been enough, but through a combination of poor judgment and bad luck, both failed completely.
MAKE NO MISTAKE
In October 1871, Ralston brought a sample of the gems to New York so Tiffany could look them over. Ralston was already hard at work drumming up potential investors on the East Coast, and present at the appraisal were one U.S. Congressman and two former Civil War generals, including George McClellan, who’d run for president against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, was there too.
Tiffany’s expertise was actually in cut and polished diamonds—he knew almost nothing about uncut stones, and neither did his assistant. But he didn’t let anyone else in the room know that. Instead, he made a solemn show of studying the gems carefully through an eyepiece, and then announced to the assembled dignitaries, “Gentlemen, these are beyond question precious stones of enormous value.”
The investors accepted the claim at face value—the appraiser, after all, was Charles Tiffany. Two days later, Tiffany’s assistant pegged the value of the sample at $150,000, which, if true (it wasn’t), meant the total value of all of the stones found so far was $1.5 million (in today’s money, $21 million)...or more.
IN THE FIELD
Now that the gems had been verified as authentic, it was time to send an independent expert out to the diamond field to confirm that it was everything Arnold and Slack said it was. As he’d done when he brought the stones to Tiffany, Ralston went with the most qualified expert he could find. He hired a respected mining engineer named Henry Janin to do the job. Janin had inspected more than 600 mines and had never made a mistake. His first goof would prove to be a doozy.
Janin, Arnold, Slack, and three of the investors traveled by train to Wyoming, just over the border from Colorado. Then they made a four-day trek by horseback into the wilderness, crossing back into Colorado. At Arnold and Slack’s insistence, Janin and the investors rode blindfolded to keep them from learning the location of the diamond field.
The men arrived at the mesa on June 4, 1872, and began looking in a location suggested by Arnold. A few minutes was all it took: One of the investors screamed out and held up a raw diamond that he’d discovered digging in some loose dirt. “For more than a hour, diamonds were found in profusion,” one of the investors later wrote, “together with occasional rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Why a few pearls weren’t thrown in for good luck I have never yet been able to tell. Probably it was an oversight.”
SEEING IS BELIEVING
Janin was completely taken in by what he saw. In his report to Ralston, he estimated that a work crew of 20 men could mine $1 million worth of gems a month. He collected a $2,500 fee for his efforts, plus an option to buy 1,000 shares in the planned mining company for $10 a share. He used the $2,500 and somehow came up with another $7,500 to buy all 1,000 shares; then he staked a mining claim on 3,000 acres of surrounding land, just in case it had precious stones too.
One of the secrets of pulling off a scam is knowing when to get out. It was at this point that Arnold and Slack decided to make their exit. Slack had already cashed out for $100,000; Arnold now sold his stake for a reported $550,000, and both men skipped town.
For Part II of the story, turn to page 158.
All five of the biggest diamond heists in history have occurred since 2000.
A GREAT APE
The United States has McGruff the Crime Dog. But what about the rest of the world? Well, South Africa has Max the crime-fighting gorilla—and he’s real, not a cartoon.
PIT STOP
In 1997 an armed criminal named Isaac Mofokeng tried to break into a house near the Johannesburg Zoo. The homeowner caught him in the act and called police. Mofokeng fled into the zoo, jumped down into the gorilla pit and he found himself face to face with two gorillas: a 400-pound male named Max, and a smaller female named Lisa.
Max had lived almost all of his 26 years in the zoo, so he was used to humans, but he’d never been confronted like this before. Sensing that he and his mate were threatened, he grabbed Mofokeng in a giant hug, then bit him on the butt and slammed him against the wall of the enclosure. Terrified for his life, Mofokeng fired three shots from his .38, hitting Max in the neck and chest.
By then Max was pretty agitated. He attacked police officers as they entered the enclosure to arrest Mofokeng, and zoo officials had to subdue him with a tranquilizer dart. Max was rushed to a nearby hospital and registered under the name “Mr. M. Gorilla.” Surgeons successfully removed the bullet from his neck but decided it was safer to leave the one in his shoulder. Luckily Max made a full recovery. A month later he received an apology from Mofokeng. “I wanna say I’m sorry to the gorilla,” the burglar told reporters as he was being led from court. “I was just protecting myself.”
PRIME PRIMATE
Max became the star attraction of the Johannesburg Zoo, as well as a national hero and a symbol of defiance to South Africans frustrated by the country’s high crime rate. For his courage under fire he was awarded a bulletproof vest and named an honorary officer by the Johannesburg police force. Max lived out the rest of his life in peace and quiet, enjoying his favorite snacks of garlic, onions, and the occasional beer before dying in his sleep of old age in May 2004. He was 33.
Who was Samuel R. Caldwell? The first American to be jailed for selling marijuana (1937).
HAMBURGER 911
Uncle John’s True Crime Page 9