Crime of the Century (Waste Case Division)

GREELEY, Colo., Sept. 15, 2010 - "If you're trying to escape from police, you might want to take a hint from Adam Segura, who learned an important lesson Thursday: Don't steal a police car, especially if you're drunk."
   This eminently reasonable advice appears in the lede of an non-bylined Sept. 11 story posted on the Web site of the Greeley Tribune, the newspaper of record in Greeley, Colo., a township of 98,596 people located forty-nine miles north-northeast of Denver. (This according to Wikipedia, the site containing the scribblings both of fact-loving obsessives and of, well, liars. The population figure comes from 2006 Census Bureau estimates, so we can assume it is correct. Then again, it appears on Wikipedia, so who knows?)
   It all began last Thursday at one in the afternoon, as so many things do. A Greeley police officer with the likably anonymous name of Craig Miller stopped Mr. Segura, who is thirty-two, for allegedly driving 62 mph in a 55 mph zone. In chatting with Mr. Segura, Officer Miller, as the mysterious Tribune reporter puts it, "noticed signs of drinking including glassy eyes, an odor of alcohol on [Mr.] Segura's breath and slurred speech."
   While these symptoms may indicate drinking to excess, they also could be the result of a love-partner conversation gone wrong. After one of those, any sane man would want to hit the road for a bit and might presently find himself driving as fast as he is thinking. So it's difficult to say whether Mr. Segura was, in fact, drunk, because... oh, wait.
   "'The defendant [Mr. Segura] also admitted to officer Miller that he'd drank alcochol,' according to [an] affadavit," according to the Tribune. Is it nitpicky to point out that the affadavit should read, "admitted to officer Miller that he'd drunk alcohol"? (Emphasis mine.) Perhaps so; often, officers of the law are simply too busy, what with catching criminals and so forth, to toy with the niceties of correct grammar.
   Officer Miller quite sensibly handcuffed Mr. Segura's hands behind his back, and then placed him in the back seat of an unmarked police car. He then buckled Mr. Segura's seat belt. (Safety first, even for miscreants.)

   Mr. Segura, showing the ingenuity that often, oddly, is the hallmark of those in the grip of an alcoholic blackout, managed to maneuver his hands, still locked in the handcuffs, around in front of him. He unbuckled the seat belt and climbed into the front seat of the car, unobserved by Officer Miller, who was busy chatting with (or, in police parlance, "questioning") a woman in Mr. Segura's car.
   To the no doubt great surprise of Officer Miller, a backup officer, and possibly the woman in Mr. Segura's vehicle and Mr. Segura himself, Mr. Segura zoomed off in the cop car. Officers chased him down U.S. 34 for roughly a mile, at which point Mr. Segura inexplicably stopped.
   The Tribune neglects to say whether Mr. Segura activated the car's siren, which would have been, like, totally awesome. The Trib does report that Mr. Segura was stopped near the entrance to the Greeley Mall, so it is possible that Mr. Segura had more important things on his pickled brain than blasting sirens, such as stopping at Hot Topic and buying his girlfriend a Tartan skirt and a skull-embossed black t-shirt.
   Mr. Segura is now in the Weld County jail and faces no fewer than twelve charges, which really kind of puts him in the drunken-police-car-stealing hall of fame. Charges include aggravated motor vehicle theft, escape, vehicular eluding (a lovely locution), speeding, no proof of insurance, resisting arrest, obstruction of a police officer, two counts of driving under the influence (he blew a .26, three times the legal limit), and three counts of being a habitual traffic offender.
   This last suggests that this is not the first time Mr. Segura has engaged in vehicular shenanigans (including eluding?). Some people simply aren't meant to drink; others aren't meant to drive; still others aren't meant to drink and drive, lest they wind up in the clink with the book t'rown at 'em.

Crime of the Century (A Tale of One Nutty Chair Divison)

PROCTOR, Minn. - One day about a year and a half ago, a man named Dennis LeRoy Anderson, of Proctor, demonstrated that he is wildly creative, exceptionally mechanically gifted, and possessed of a perhaps overenthusiastic and potentially detrimental passion for beer. 

  Mr. Anderson, who runs a professional auto shop at his home, designed and outfitted a recliner - the type of comfy chair you see in front of televisions in better homes and trailers - with a converted lawnmower motor, headlights, a steering wheel, a stereo, cup holders and a National Hot Road Association sticker on its headrest. The chair could travel as fast as twenty miles per hour. 

  That accounts for Mr. Anderson's creative and mechanical gifts. His love of beer manifested, or perhaps over-manifested, on the day and evening of August. 31, 2008. 

  After enjoying a number of beers at home - the exact tally is left unstated in an October 30, 2009 Minneapolis Star-Tribune report - Mr. Anderson drove his chair to a bar called the Keyboard Lounge, located at 224 North 3rd Avenue, in Proctor. (View the bar's exterior here.)  

  There he consumed more beer. His total, he later told police, was "eight or nine" that day. His blood alcohol content, police would learn, after administering a field sobriety test, was .29. That's more than three times the legal limit for driving in Minnesota. 
  Mr. Anderson was blissfully unaware of this fact - or, evidently, of any others - when, presently, he left the Keyboard Lounge and settled into his motorized chair. Presumably, the goal of puttering home somewhere floated in his be-fogged noggin. 
  Alas, things don't always turn out as we might hope. Mr. Anderson promptly crashed the chair into a Dodge Intrepid parked nearby. 

   When police arrived, Mr. Anderson was treated for minor injuries and given the sobriety test, during which, Deputy Police Chief Troy Foucault told the Star-Trib, he "failed everything." To add insult to intoxication, it turned out that Mr. Anderson's driver's license had already been revoked for a prior drunk-driving conviction. 

  Police took Mr. Anderson, who is sixty-one, to the station and threw him in the pokey. At trial he was sentenced to one hundred and eighty days in jail and fined $2,000. The jail time and half the fine were stayed contingent on his serving a two-year probation with various conditions.

  Here now we leave the tale of Mr. Anderson in order to follow the captivatingly byzantine one of the chair. Proctor police impounded it when they arrested Mr. Anderson. It was then to be sold at a police auction, the proceeds from which would benefit the department.

  Foucault, the deputy police chief, characterized the chair to the Star-Tribune as being "quite decked out," and said "quite a few people" had called about it. He joked that he even might bid on it, except for the fact that "I have kids who would take it out and drive it on the street." 
  This seems just the kind of things kids should be encouraged to do, providing that the cups in the chair's holders contain, say, Coca-Cola or, at the extreme, Red Bull rather than beer, because beer can so fully harsh a magic mushroom high. 

  It is not tangential to point out that, in its lede, the Star-Trib called the chair a La-Z-Boy. This is important because, as the paper reported in a November 3, 2009 followup, a five-day eBay auction, undertaken by the Proctor police force, pushed the asking price of the chair, listed as a La-Z-Boy, to roughly $40,000, and drew national media attention.

  A mere eleven hours before the auction's deadline, the La-Z-Boy company faxed a complaint to the Proctor police chief, a man charmingly named Walter Wobig. The company, citing copyright concerns, protested the use of the its name in the eBay listing, inasmuch as the chair that Mr. Anderson had modified was not, in fact, a La-Z-Boy recliner. 

  Chief Wobig is to be forgiven for having listed the motorized chair as a La-Z-Boy. The brand is so well known that it has come to stand for all recliners, much as "Xerox" has for copiers and "Kleenex" for tissues. 
  In addition, the chief had been unduly influenced by the incorrect use of that brand name in the rash of media reports on the auction. This shows that the only people less adept at fact checking than police chiefs are reporters, an observation that does nothing to inspire a great deal of confidence in the condition of the ailing Fourth Estate. 
  In time, Chief Wobig had a cordial telephone conversation with a La-Z-Boy representative. That person asked the chief to ensure that the eventual buyer refrain from referring to the chair as a La-Z-Boy, and then wished him luck with the sale. 

  By that time, however, the listing had mysteriously disappeared from eBay. Did La-Z-Boy contact the online auction house and threaten it with legal action, such as, for example, sentencing eBay CEO John Donahoe to a forty-day La-Z-Boy recliner confinement and a force-feeding on Pabst Blue Ribbon, Cheetos and "Dog the Bounty Hunter?" Alas, we shall never know.

  Chief Wobig, unsuccessful in contacting eBay about the missing listing, re-listed the chair, once again setting the low bid at $500. The second auction also fell through. (Press reports are sketchy as to why.)

  All of which brings us to this month. An April 21 Associated Press story reported that a Duluth, Minn. resident - one of fifteen people competing for the chair in a Do-Bid.com auction ending April 18 - placed a winning bid of $3,700, an amount markedly lower than the $40,000 being batted about during the first eBay sale. 
  It is conceivable that the price suffered such a monumental drop because the chair is not a La-Z-Boy. It is more likely, however, that the feverish national attention of a year or so ago had so almost wholly waned that no one wanted to buy the goddamned thing. The public is a fickle mistress.

  There are lessons to be learned from this twisted tale, and they are as follows: 
  1. Corporations are psychotically protective of their brands, and woe betide he or she who uses one without permission. 
  2. Kids would not even entertain the idea of driving motorized chairs on the streets if there were a video game - one they could play in the comfort of their rumpus room - that featured such a chair, a totally awesome idea that First of All is, right this minute, in the process of copyrighting.
  3. If you are going get trashed and crash a motorized recliner, at least consider shaving so that you look nice in your mug shot. 

  

  

  

  

Crime of the Century (Outstanding Warrant Division)

ONTARIO and SAN DIEGO, the Northern Hemisphere - It is best to remember that policeman, as a whole, are determined to fulfill their job requirements. This includes making arrests for outstanding warrants, and if those named on the warrants are, well, idiots, it makes things that much easier for the cops. 
  So learned two men recently, one in Ontario, Canada, the other near San Diego. 
  According to an April 25 Canadian Press report, a man named Stephane Reid called police to report the theft of $1,000 worth of tools from a storage locker. 

   Police discovered that Mr. Reid had outstanding warrants for shoplifting charges, and unceremoniously arrested him. 
   Mr. Reid has been charged with theft under $5,000, possession of property obtained by crime and failing to attend court. The items he is alleged to have stolen have yet to be recovered. 
   The case of Mr. Reid confirms two well-worn pieces of folk wisdom: there is no honor among thieves, and what goes around comes around, although some or all items may never find their way back to their rightful owners.
   In Carlsbad, near San Diego, a man named Theodore "Ted" Felicetti was arrested on an outstanding warrant for drunk driving after performing with the Beatles tribute band Help! on a San Diego morning television show, the San Diego Union Tribune reported on April 23.
  Carlsbad police lieutenant Marc Reno told the newspaper that police had been trying to serve Mr. Felicetti with the warrant since December of 2008. A search of various residences proved futile. Then police received a tip that Mr. Felicetti was a member of Help!, playing the part of of Paul McCartney. 

   The Union-Trib neglected to include a photo of Mr. Felicetti, who is fifty-four. Therefore, alas, we shall never know whether he resembles the Paul McCartney of the "Cute Beatle" era or, more likely, the Paul McCartney who has lived past the "When I'm Sixty-Four" era. 

   As it happened, police went to the Help! Facebook page, learned of the then-upcoming television appearance, and showed up to arrest Paul McCartney, er, Mr. Felicetti. (They were kind enough not to interrupt the performance to enact their duty.)
   Lt. Reno told the Union-Trib that the band's having a Facebook page allowed police to locate the faux-Paul bassist "with the click of a mouse."
   This suggests that criminals really ought to think twice about putting their mugs on social networking sites, and also that Beatles cover bands, by virtue of being unnervingly creepy, are karmically doomed.

Crime of the Century (Wagging the Dog Division)

ABERDEEN, Scotland, March 17 -- A twenty-eight-year old man has been fined nine hundred dollars for attempting to "assault" a female Scottish police officer with a dangerous weapon: his penis.
   Various British news outlets - the Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror and BBC News, but not the Times, because that august broadsheet dasn't touch news of the common willie - reported today that the man, named Marium Varinauskas (photo, below), was arguing with his girlfriend when police were called to his Aberdeen apartment.
   When officers showed up, a Huffington Post roundup of the British press stories noted, he was "drunk and in his underpants." Colloquially, this means he was entirely shitfaced and nearly bare-assed nekkid.
   The HuffPo did not say, however -  nor, apparently, did the British press - what kind of "underpants" Mr. Varinauskas was wearing, so readers learned news neither of style, color, brand nor type: thong, bikini, briefs, boxer briefs, boxers, or other. This cannot be seen as anything other than an appalling oversight.
   An official told the court that Mr. V. (honestly, how many times does one need to type out "Varinauskas" in his ever-shortening lifetime?) stood over the police officer "exposing his penis and thrusting it in her face, forcing her to take evasive action to avoid getting struck." 
   It is unclear what "stood over" actually means. Mr. V. was, when deputies arrived, sitting on a couch. Presumably, as they were standing, they loomed  over him. When he stood, he'd have been eye-to-eye with them. 
   For him to have "stood over" the female officer, then, suggests that she was somehow below him, perhaps in a kneeling position, which would further explain why the potted Mr. V., who later confessed to having been in an alcoholic blackout, might have mistakenly thought it entirely correct and context appropriate  to "thrust" his member "in her face." 
   Alas, we will never know. 
   With classic Scottish understatement, a police department spokesman said, "This was a distasteful experience for the officer." 
    

Crime of the Century (Friends with Johnny Law Division)

   Mark E. Blaylock, forty-nine, of Manheim Township, PA (pop. roughly 35,000) had a very busy day Wednesday, and most of it involved interacting with police. 
   At 11 a.m., according to a March 3 Associated Press story, Blaylock was charged with theft of services after bailing on a sixty-nine dollar cab fare. The surprisingly uninformative AP story does not say why Blaylock owed such a large amount of money to a cabbie. Either he was driven many, many, many miles across hill and dale; was driven around in circles for an hour or two; or was provided sexual favors by the driver. A clue might be found in the amount owed.
   A clue also might be found in the fact that, a mere hour later, Mr. Blaylock was found lying drunk on a road near his house. Again, the AP shirks its duty to carry the facts, the facts and nothing but the facts - all of them. 
   Yes, Blaylock was drunk. But is it possible that, as far as the lying-in-the-road business goes,  Blaylock was simply sunbathing? Or, if the weather was inclement, might he have been creating snow angels? We will never know; given the generally devolving fiscal state of journalism these days, it appears the AP has not only cut staff from its masthead but also facts from its stories. 

   (The photo above shows a snow angel enthusiast who is, alas, not Mark E. Blaylock.)
   Police charged Blaylock with public drunkenness. The message was: snow angels or no, you simply do not laze around on a public road, soused to the gills, in Manheim Township. It's just not that kind of place.
   It appears that Mr. Blaylock roused himself, for it was but a scant hour later that, showing a resourcefulness of which taxpayers of all ages should take note, he dialed 911 to request police assistance - to fill a prescription. 
   Police, however, failed to see either the humor in or ingenuity of Blaylock's call. They charged him with reporting a medical emergency without good cause. ("Good cause" would include having, say, a ruptured spleen, a twisted ankle, or a broken heart.) 
   Blaylock faces a misdemeanor charge and a pair of summary offenses. 
   Cementing the dismal reality that, in the case of this report at least, the AP simply seems to have given up the ghost, the story concludes, "A phone number for Blaylock could not immediately be located Wednesday." 
   Even taking into account the kinds of monstrous deadlines AP writers face, not being able to find a number for a man who, plainly, has a phone - he dialed 911 to request police assistance - suggests a sort of institutionalized psychological depression troubling to contemplate for those who, in addition to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, still believe in the Fourth Estate in all its (fading) glory. 

Crime of the Century (Armed, Spiritual and Drunk Division)

   The God-fearing people of a Kentucky town got the fear of God put into them on Sunday when a man disgruntled by family problems - and, to put it colloquially, drunk as a skunk - rode his horse to church with a gun holstered at his side. 
   The Danville (Ky.) Advocate-Messenger reported yesterday that Donald Howard Goode, forty-three, of 3295 Ky. 78, in Casey County (pop. roughly 16,000), entered the Ellisburg Baptist church bearing a grievance against a congregation member. Pastor Jerry Adams' wife, Cathy, said that the manner in which Goode was talking about his grievance "didn't make any sense. It was real frightening for us as a church." 
   Some men from the church led Goode outside and convinced him to surrender his pistol and a rifle he'd brought. The news report said nothing about the men's tactics, so there is no way to know if they simply spoke with Goode or if they furiously beat him about the head with, say, a stuffed rabbit or, for example, a cucumber. 
   Pastor Adams told Goode he could stay for the service if he behaved. In general terms, this likely meant no vomiting, self-pleasuring or texting. 
   When Casey Sheriff's Deputy Chad Weddle arrived, church members said they didn't want Goode arrested. 
   "He was having some family issues," Weddle said. "He was inside (the church), crying, weeping." 

   Along with Casey County police, state troopers also responded to the call of a man with a gun. 
   "Any time we hear that, obviously that gives us cause for concern," Trooper William Gregory said, sensibly enough. But, he added, Goode "was at church with a gun in a holster at his side, which is not illegal." So there's not much troopers could have done, short of using Goode for target practice if he so much as lifted a pinkie. 
   After Goode left the church, he went to a neighbor's house and created a "disturbance." News reports did not elaborate. We will never know, then, whether the soused Goode was a.) offering an ear-splitting a capella reading of Lady GaGa's "Poker Face;" b.) shooting at non-existent flying monkeys, or c.) alternately pleasuring himself and texting.
   Goode was arrested on a charge of alcohol intoxication. He was released later that evening from the Casey County Jail on his own recognizance, although there's no evidence that he recognized himself at that or any other time. 
   On an amusing side note, when the second Goode-related call came, Weddel, the Casey Sheriff's Deputy, was in a nearby area called Dry Fork Creek. He was attempting to locate a meth lab. Apparently, the good people of Casey County, Ky., really know how to party.

   

Crazy Art

   A friend and I saw Crazy Heart last night, and if there is a God, Jeff Bridges will win the Best Actor Oscar.
   Not that those stupid awards mean anything. But still. Bridges, playing an alcoholic country singer, is mesmerizing, and he deserves the nod. A gifted actor with an astonishing range, he is a five-time nominee. He has never won.
   One nomination was for the 1984 film Starman, in which he played an alien come to earth in the form of a young widow's husband. In that film, Bridges' character is a non-human learning to be human. It sounds awful, but the film is touching, and Bridges, as usual, is luminous.
   In Crazy Heart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, another actor with awesome range, serves up a superb performance as a young single mother burned by past relationships. It's markedly different from her witty walk-on in Away We Go, in which she played  a professor and wife/mom cauterized by self-righteous New Age delusions.
   Crazy Heart is not an unusually inventive movie. The story line (which, out of deference to those who've yet to see it, I'll not outline) is predictable. It's the performances by Bridges, Gyllenhaal and, in lesser roles, Robert Duvall and Colin Ferrel that keep the movie from sinking into down-and-out-man-finds-redemption cliches.
   It would be fine to watch it on DVD when it's released later this year. But it's worth seeing in a theater. There's nothing like losing yourself in a Bridges performance, and this is one of his best.