Stuff You Should KnowSometimes you just have to turn it off for a while – all the thinking, and overthinking, analyzing, and figuring out. Sometimes it’s nice to just breathe through your mouth and talk about dumb things criminals do for an episode.
Hey, everybody, we are coming to a town ostensibly near you, so putatively see us.
That's right, May twenty ninth. We'll be in Boston, really Medford, Massachusetts. The next night we're gonna go down to Washington, DC, and then scooch back up to New York City at Town Hall on May thirty first.
Yeah, and if you're one of those people who likes to plan way far in advance, then you can go ahead and get tickets for our shows in August. We're gonna start out where Chuck.
We're gonna be in Chicago August seventh, Minneapolis August eighth, then Indianapolis for the very first time on August ninth, and then we're gonna wrap it up in Durham, North Carolina, and right here in Atlanta on September fifth and September seventh.
Yep. So you can get all the info you need and all the ticket links you need by going to stuff youshould Know dot com and hitting that tour button, or you can also go to linktree slash SYSK Live. We'll see you guys this year.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we'd like to welcome you to what will certainly be the greatest episode of thought you should know ever produced.
Oh boy, this one, I love it. Let's do it. This one harkens back to the old days when I feel like we weren't very good at this.
Yeah, I mean it really does. Yeah. Yeah, I had nothing to add because it does. Dude, I can't make heads or tails of this. I'm like, what what bothers me about this, this episode, this topic. I even selected it, and it still bothers me. And so I started doing like a search to try to be like, Okay, maybe there is something like inherently wrong with lists of dumb criminals. And I looked up, I searched every way I could to try to find even just the dumbest think piece on what's wrong with dumb criminal lists. No one and the history of the Internet has apparently ever even had that thought. So I finally just decided to mellow out and go with the flow and just share some dumb criminal stories for face value.
Basically, yeah, I'm fine with that. I think we both had a tough week. So let's Uh, let's just make fun of ourselves.
Okay, and some criminals.
Hey you hey, dummy, that's right, all right, So this is a top ten. It's on the other side we usually do like eight. You actually have eleven.
I know, well one of them is zero. I started counting as a mayan.
Would I know. I was like, what are you doing?
I didn't want to go back and renumber everything else. That's fine, so I just added zero. I thought it was rather clever.
All right, let's just breeze through these in eh oh, yeah, there's not a seven though. This is like the blotder episode of stuff you should know.
Yeah, So first up on our police blotter, we've got the story of Maganga. Maganga out of Omaha, Nebraska. Mcganga was a seventeen year old boy who back in twenty fourteen, attempted a carjacking, which seemed to be a step up from his usualm which was to rob stores with a knife. This time he carjacked a woman in a car with a gun, and.
He thought making her kid to school, right, yes, reprehensible.
Yeah, it was like seven am. I saw something like that. It's a seven am carjacking. Either, you got up way too early, or you never went to bed. Seven am is too early for a carjacking, frankly, but he did, and he was it started out kind of successfully for him.
Well, yeah, because mom did what mom should do, which is get out of that car, I assume grabbed her son, and dude jumps in and realizes it's a stick shift, a manual transmission could not drive a stick shift. And for evidently about seven minutes, this nitwit, we can say stuff like that.
Right, I think so. I think this kid definitely proved himself a nitwit, a nitweit who had a lot of stick touitiveness. How about that?
Okay, a nitwit with a spunk. Yeah, about seven minutes of trying to get this car to move just moved a few yards, which I imagine was just lurching forward while he's popping that clutch. Yeah, finally gives up after just a few minutes of that and then leaves on foot and is nabbed by the cops.
Yeah, they said. Some witnesses said that like he turned the lights on, he turned the windshield wipers on, just trying to figure out how to make this thing work, right, And I saw a video of it and he somehow the car ended up on the sidewalk perpendicular to the street. Oh well, I have no idea how he got up there.
Progress.
Yeah, so he he had just gotten out of jail like two weeks earlier from his robbery spree. Before that he'd been caught for. I could not find out what happened to this kid, like I just saw he was charged no sentencing. Usually in stories like this, there's more often than not a follow up story, like two years later about what happened to them when they're finally sentenced or something like that. Couldn't find anything about this kid, but I did find out his name means in Swahili, it means essentially healer or like doctor, like bush doctor, essentially as a maganga okay, and as a last name, it's the sixteen thousand, three hundred and first most common last name in the world. Well, really, that's what I got. Really, that's this kind of episode.
All right, Let's move on to number nine. Okay, with mister Derreck Moseley. This is a Sean Connery kind of crime because that great line from The Untouchables, you brought a knife to a gunfight. Dereck Moseley brought a baseball bat and a knife to the robbery of a gun store, right, and this was discount gun sales in Washington County, Oregon, near Portland. He is, I guess smart enough to go in and at least smash a display case and get a gun. But because it's a gun store, I would say ninety nine out of one hundred gun shops, the owner has a gun on their person with actual bullets in it.
Right. That seems to be his failing that he assumed that the guns were going to be loaded. He didn't account for the people having their own personal loaded guns on them.
One was loaded, But that seems.
To have been Like the whole reason he attacked the gun store was to get a gun. Yeah, like that was the purpose. But yeah, it didn't go very well. The manager pulled his gun and said get on the ground, and he got on the ground until the police came, and that was that. He got five years probation for it and had to pay three hundred and fifty dollars to fix the display case.
That's right.
Yeah, Wow, we're really cruising through these, aren't we.
We're cruising through Hey, we get off early today.
Yeah, that's right. Okay, Chuck, Well it's two number eight. I guess number eight A and B because it's this is two guys and I sent you the photo. You saw the photo, right.
I did. That was very kind of you. Don't glue that because it really paints a picture.
I would like very much for everybody to look up the photo of Joey Miller and Matthew McNelly and while we talk about them, how about that.
Yeah, and maybe we could throw this on the Instagram page too. This was from a crime in October two thousand and nine, or I guess a sort of a near crime. And these guys put on their hoodies. They went to break into a guy's house in Carol, Iowa because one of the guys suspected that his girlfriend was cheating on him, basically with a guy who lived there. But their disguise was their hoodie sweatshirts and then what can only be described as toddler esque scribbling of sharpie on their face.
You totally nailed it. It is like a Toddler did it. Like the lines aren't filled in, like it's just terrible.
It doesn't disguise them at all. And ironically it's sharpie or some kind of permanent marker. I don't want to, you know, necessarily say that they were using the name brand, but what it ended up doing was like it made them obviously prime suspects for the cop who pulled them over.
Yeah, because permanent marker is pretty permanent. I mean, I'm sure they're still not walking around. This is two thousand and nine. I'm sure it's washed off by now, but certainly that same night it hadn't washed off. And so when they were pulled over in their car, which matched the description a witness gave them, they matched the description of the assailants who had permanent marker all.
Over their face to scribbles.
Yeah, I saw the cops described. I'm just stunned when they pulled the car over.
Yeah, it's so interesting when you read about these things and these decisions people make. An interesting you know, I'm filling that word in for a lot of terrible things I could say. But it's almost like they were like, hey, let's think of a way that we'll be sure to get caught right when they thought it was a disguise.
In fact, I saw a reference in more than one place that they may have been drunk when they did this better, and at the very least a judge who saw them, I think like less than a week later was like, I'm just dismissing these charges because there's no evidence they actually made it into that man's apartment.
Yeah, they didn't break in, they.
Didn't have a weapon on them, and nobody got hurt. So they're like, these guys their mugshot staying on the internet forever is probably punishment enough.
So yeah, there's no charge for nit Wittery.
No, no, So that's Joey Miller and Matthew mcnellian. While you're looking at that that photo of them, We're gonna go ahead and take an ad break.
All right, we'll be right back with more than Wittery.
Stuffing the Jaws show.
Stuff.
So check. I want to add this one in because I think it's a good example of like you should be skeptical even when you're sitting back and enjoying reading lists of dumb criminals, right, Okay, Klaus Schmidt is when you might come across fairly frequently. He was on a lot of lists that I saw. Uh and Klaus Schmidt may not have existed as far as I can tell. Oh, I did some research. I won't say it's the deepest research has ever been done to try to find somebody. But I did look extensively when on a newspapers dot com did a few searches. Nothing thing came up about this guy. Yeah, I traveled to Berlin and interviewed some potential family members. No one had ever heard of him, but his story is all over the internet because it's just such a whopper of a story, and it's I just I wanted to include it, but I also think it definitely deserves to be pointed out as probably not true, apocryphal, as they say in the Bible.
Yeah, now that you've mentioned this, it very much smacks of a of an urban legend.
It does. It does because he's described as a man in Berlin who went to rob a bank in August of nineteen ninety five.
That's right, Well, I want you to tell the story, though, why me? Because you picked this stupid topic.
Okay, So Klaus Schmidt is said to have gone into a bank pretending like he exists in August of the nineteen ninety five to rob it with a handgun, and he everything's going rather smoothly, like a bank robbery would be if it's it's successful. And apparently one of the tellers asked him like, do you need a bag? And Klaus Schmidt supposedly said, you're damn right, it's a real gun. I don't know how you would say that in German?
Do you uh now?
And the tellers apparently were like, oh, obviously this man is deaf, not that he misheard, not that he's super high, strong and anxious. Right now, because he's robbing a bank, he's clearly deaf. So we're gonna go ahead impress the alarm that everybody else can hear except him.
Right. I think we should write a new version where they're like, do you need a bag? And he says why does this got to do with Schnitzel.
And they're like, oh, he's clearly deaf, right, but.
Yeah, so the alarm he wouldn't have heard is I guess if this story is true. So they're like, hey, this guy can't hear anything, let's just sound this loud alarm.
Yeah, because that's what banks have, or loud alarms that would totally alert any other bank robber. You just have to hope that once in a while somebody who can't hear comes in and robs the bank, and that's exactly what allegedly happened with Klaus Schmidt. But it gets even better, Chuck, because here's a twist that effectively proves that this is an urban legend.
That's right. Apparently, according to internet lore, Klaus Schmidt sued the bank for abusing his disability.
Yeah, because they there's no way this is real. Essentially tricked him by pressing an alarm that he couldn't hear, which led to him being caught by the police. Yeah, I'm glad we see owait it, But it was kind of fun to pick apart. It's so it's great because you go on the internet and you read stuff like this, and if you're not like looking out for it, you could just be like, wow, I got to tell you this story of this Klaus Schmidt. It's amazing.
Yeah.
They used to call it, Hey, Martha's Stories, I think in the you know, the Inquire of the World Weekly News. Oh really, yep, because you wanted the whoever was reading the paper, like the husband, to be like, hey, Martha, get a load of this one like that?
Yeah, all right. We'll go on to number five here with James Blankenship in Willoughby, Ohio. This in June twenty thirteen. James was trying to rob his own mother's house during the day and this very key it was in broad daylight. Apparently, got a little rattled and went and hid in a cross space nearby. The police got there, they caught him, and he his big sort of problem with getting arrested was you can't get arrested for burglary during the day.
That's what he thought.
Burglary is a nighttime crime. You cannot take me away.
Yeah, Essentially, when the cops grabbed him and they were they're like, what do you mean you can't with burglary? It's daytime, and everybody's like, that guy's the dumbest criminal of all time. He thought that you couldn't get arrested for burglary because it was daylight out. And here's the great twist to this, which I found.
This is a good twist.
Apparently, the old common law definition of burglary says that it only occurs during the night time. It's breaking and entering in someone else's dwelling at night with an intent to commit a felony therein, and that if you commit the same act during the daytime, it's a lesser crime of presspass So it seems that James Blankenship, had he been living in the eighteenth century, would have had quite a case for himself.
I have a question for you, what I meant to look this up, But is burglary specifically when there's somebody there or does that matter?
Uh? Oh, I think it definitely matters. I think if somebody's there, it's considered home invasion. It's like a whole other level like you can in some states, you can get life in prison or death penalty for a home invasion, depending on what happens and what your intent was.
The burglary means you have to take something otherwise it could just be b and e, right, because I was just wondering because the nighttime thing, I mean, obviously I knew that wasn't a thing, but whenever I was a kid and I heard cat burglar, you always thought it was something that happened at night while you slept.
Right, Absolutely, yeah, But of course a burglary can happen during the day. But it's just the legal system in the United States said we're going to get rid of that distinction between trespassing burglary and it's all burglary no matter when it happens. Just the mind blowing part is that somewhere along the line James Blankenship that old common law definition was passed along to him and he went with it.
Yeah. Well, actually, here we go. I looked it up. Burglary the official definition is entering entry into a building illegally with the intent to commit a crime, especially theft, but not necessarily.
Theft, gotcha, So especially theft. I wonder what else it could be too.
Well, I mean there's all kinds of crimes. You'd set someone's bathroom on fire and not metaphorically.
So I guess you would be charged with you'd be charged with arson and burglary.
Then in that case, I guess, I don't know, maybe burglar's on of those crimes they can just kind of tack on just because you're in someone's house.
Man, we would make super lawyers, wouldn't we think, So we just hash it out in open court.
Yeah.
The thing I also love most about James Blankenship's story is that his mother's house was the one he was trying to break into. Like you said, I just love that, and apparently she found him and he might Eke and like ran off.
Now I'm just picturing us as attorneys co attorneys in court looking up definitions on our phone. Yeah, and the judge just being like, do you guys have licenses to practice law? I know, no, sir, we don't. But we did a podcast for sixteen years where we dabbled in legally yeah.
And then I'd pipe up and be like, and we stated a holiday and express.
This time, I was like, this sounds like something. That's exactly what I was thinking.
I think I would look a lot like Gil from The Simpsons in court as a lawyer. It was Gil, the guy, like the hard luck guy from Jack Lemon, from Glengarry Glenn Ross.
Oh, but was that he was on the Simpsons.
He was a recurring character.
Yeah, he was Gilnders. Okay, yeah, yah, I see him now, kil I remember Gil?
Now something like look's gotta come for old Gil. Right, that would be me in court as your lawyer.
All right, Esquire, should we take a break or keep going? Let's keep going.
Let's do one more and then we'll take another break.
All right, So let's talk about the story of Darren Kempton. This fellow was in England in twenty thirteen and Abington, England specifically. And this is a pretty interesting one because not only had Darren Kempton already broken into a house earlier that day, so this was Darren's second attempt at a break in that same day, but the house that Darren chose to broke into the second time, it was that house's second break in of the day. Yeah, because when Darren showed up to break in found there was already a window busted out. It was like this is perfect, and went inside. There were police there inside, still dealing with the details of the previous break in case earlier that day.
So that's Gil. Darren Kempton is Gil. He is. He apparently said in court that he was trying to steal so that he could buy presents for his elderly parents Christmas presents. He was apparently also addicted to heroin, and his lawyer described him as clumsy and pathetic.
Yeah, and so obviously, if this guy's got a serious drug addiction, maybe he was buying stuff for his parents. Maybe not. I have a little bit more empathy here and don't want to make too fun of the but he did leave a trail of blood from his first break in leading to the second, so that then connected him to that first crime as well.
Right, So there was just no way that Darren Kimpton was ever going to get away with these crimes either one of them. He'd had a bad day.
Basically he broke into a house full of cops.
Yeah, like, you don't do that very often. I've seen other stories too, I didn't research them, so I'm not sure how true they are of people like holding up. There was one where somebody tried to rob a Walmart during the shop with a cop day for like the local orphanage or something like that. Yeah, and the place was just full of cops. There's plenty of times where it's just been like bad timing or yeah, you just broke into the wrong place at the wrong time or tried to rob the wrong place at the wrong time. So it's not like Darren Kimpton's alone.
Hunter s. Thompson remember when he with a head full of drugs stumbled into the police convention.
That's right, and then he stole the briefcase with the drug samples in him.
Yeah. I want to go back and read some of his I read, you know, Fear and Loathing of course, and which other one did I read Rum Diaries or maybe it was Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail, But there were a couple of more that I always meant to get back to. But I kind of went through my Hunter as Thompson pays and and quit reading him. But he's such a great writer. I mean, I know everyone always just sort of if you weren't a reader, actual reader of his, you might think that he was just that crazy guy that did drugs and you know, made a name doing that. But he was a fantastic writer.
Just absolutely like one of the better journalists who overwalk the earth.
For just amazing stuff.
I think that going back to him might be folly though. I think maybe I think he's like Bukowski, Like there is a specific set of years, yeah, clean, like your early twenties.
You're listening to the doors here.
Yeah, where you're reading Hunter Thompson and reading Bukowski and yeah, yeah, all sorts of other things, and that as you age it that you might find that you don't appreciate him quite as much as you used to.
I have an admission here, since we're just having fun with this episode. In my twenties, I actually bought a one of Jim Morrison's poetry books.
Oh, I used to listen to American Prayer like ceaselessly. That was really good. Yeah, did you like American Prayer?
It's fine. I mean I kind of. I can like there's some real bangers that the Doors did, and I can go back and listen to that now and appreciate some of those songs. But it definitely, for some reason, just feels like a time and place in your life when you thought he was like the most amazing deep soul on the planet Earth. Right now I'm a little older, I'm like Jim Morrison, come on.
Yeah, it's weird. For some reason, that same period with Bukowski and Hunter Thompson and Jim Morrison is also like, upon reflection, very cringey. It seems like a lot of times too.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm cringing right now whatever that means these days?
What cringey?
Did you say? Like me right now?
Yeah, I'm cringing right now just thinking about it, all right, But American Prayer was good. I'll stand by that.
Was that? The the song? The book? What was that?
It was? It was essentially like a sonic book of his poetry. At the doors I think put together after his death the years and years later, and it was like they played snippets of some of their other songs. It was like stuff mixed in. Yeah, and the whole thing, from like start to finish is essentially one long thing. There's obviously like discrete like read poems that Jim Morrison's reading, but the whole thing, like as a single package, was really well done if I remember correctly. I don't want to go back and listen to it because I just want to I just want to keep it as is in my memory.
No, totally. I mean, why ruin that for yourself exactly?
That's why I urge you not to go back and read Hunter Thompson.
Ok, okay he's dead to me, Well he really did. Yah. You want to take a break now, Yeah, let's take a break and we'll do are or should we? Now let's take a break. We'll do our top three because they're a little more robust stoffy jaws sh shop.
Soff your shore.
All right? Next up on the list at number three, we have one rubin. I'm gonna say, zaraate.
Yeah, that's how I took it.
Serati, Yeah, this is in two thousand and eight. He was eighteen years old at the time, and he tried to ribe to ribe to rob a muffler shop.
It's like bribing and robbing at the same time.
Yeah, a muffler shop in Chicago. But here's the hook is that when he got there, the person working and this was the manager, jose Ceda sid A. He said, the cash is here, but the cash is actually in a safe and only the opener knows the safe code combination. And he's not going to be here for a few hours. And hey, let's stick it to this guy. You come back. I'll let you know when he's here if you give me your number and you give me a cut of this thing. Brilliant plan to think of on the fly.
It really is. So Zarati is like, oh, okay, well cool, I'm in cahoots with this guy. Here's my number. Call me when the owner comes in, and then I'll come back and rob the muffler shop.
It's amazing.
I'll give you a taste of the money that I take from here, right uh huh. So he did, he laughed, and then jose Ceda called the cops and tell them what was going on. He waited twenty five minutes for some reason. But he did call the cops, and the story starts taking some dark turns around now because the cops are like, this is great. We're going to use you as eight. It's decoy and you call the guy, but let us get there first and hide in the back and like the garage, the workshop of the garage.
He said, it'll be so great, you're gonna love it.
Yeah, it's gonna he's gonna be so surprised.
So he got it like an engine block I can hide behind. Oh yeah, okay, perfect.
He's like, I'm gonna pretend like I'm changing oil. I've always wanted to do that.
Do you have a jumpsuit for me?
So, so Ruben Zarati or Jose sid It calls Rubens variety. He's like, hey, the owner's here, come on back and rob the muffler store that I'm the manager of. And so Rubens Zeroty comes back to rob the store. And apparently, he said because he sued the City of Chicago after this. He said that he got through the door and opened it and before anything, before anyone said anything, the cops just started shooting at him. So he turned and ran. They shot him in the back. It inflicted a life's life threatening injury that apparently only surgery would have would have saved his life with He did have the life saving surgery and then lived to sue the city. I could not find out what happened, but his story was actually backed up by one of the people who worked at the shop too.
Yeah, basically they sort of god always they agreed and said that I was like my porky pig moment that the cops didn't even announce themselves that they were cops before they started shooting, right.
So, yeah, this is a world class Ruben Zerati story. Everybody that you just heard like this was real research. If you read the Ruben Zarati story, all you hear is about a criminal who was dumb enough to leave his number, yeah, so he could be called to come back and rob the place. And now it makes a little more sense and you find out that rubens Arrity was shot in the back by the cops.
It also featured, for my money, one of your best jokes in a long long time that was very under the radar, which one the one he said the guy the cops said, I would have pretend like I'm changing oil wanted to do that.
I'm glad you liked.
Oh that was good.
Oh man, Okay, so that was number three and we're going to one zero. So this is the top four.
I forgot that was a zero.
All right, I'm you really you're mad about the zero, aren't you.
Well, let's just just really threw me.
Hey man, we've gotten twenty eight minutes out of this so far. I'm amazed.
All right, let's talk about Albert Bailey. This was in twenty ten. Bailey and this was had an accomplice, but it was a juvenile, so we don't know the name of the accomplice. Said all right, let's rob this bank. It's Fairfield, Connecticut. It's a good place to rob a bank. And to make this happen quicker, what Bailey did was call the bank ahead of time and said, I'm coming to rob this thing, so get all that money together so it doesn't take us very long while we're in there.
Like this is one of the stories. This is legit like it legitimately happened, just like this CT Insider, which I'm guessing is short for Connecticut Insider.
Yeah, I think so.
They did a story on it after I think shortly after it, and that's exactly what happened. Like, Albert Bailey called the bank and said, get the bunny together. He said some other things too that made the bank really worry. He's like, we're not afraid to take hostages and turn the place into a blood bath. So the bank's like, okay, well, we're just going to hang up now and call the cops.
Well also said this is key, don't call the cops because we're going to be monitoring the police scanner.
Yeah, typically banks don't listen to you when you call them ahead of time, but also tell them not to call the cops. So they did. They called the cops immediately, and as they were calling the cops, they went to go lock the doors, which is another thing that you would do as a bank. But Albert Bailey was one step ahead of them because his unnamed juvenile accomplice, who turned out to be his sixteen year old cousin, was already in the bank and happened to be carrying a briefcase. And when they locked the doors, he said, do you see my little accomplice over there, Give him the money. So it kind of takes a turn. Yeah, this guy's calling the bank ahead of time, but he's he's thought a little further along than you might give him credit for initial totally.
Yeah. When I got to that point in the story, I was like, okay, all right.
All right, I may have misjudged you over Bailey.
Yeah, a little bit. So the cousin's already in there, because immediately when the bank was like, well, let's just go lock the door. But like that kind of solves the problem right there.
But now they've locked themselves in with the bank robber.
Yeah. Yeah, So the bank robber's in there, which is the sixteen year o or the accomplish or whatever is in there? I guess bank robber. Sure, And the teller actually puts money in the briefcase and the kid left the bank. The sixteen year on left with this money because I guess it just it still took the cops a little bit of time to get there. Police said that they when they got there, he was walking out to the car outside to where Bailey was waiting in his car in a nearby apartment or kind of minim complex. But they really did have a police scanner. They surrendered, but they had walkie talkies, They had a robbery list of things to do, and they had a working police scanner tuned into that frequency, so that was not a bluff.
There was something else that stood out to me. The CT Insider story says that the sixteen year old cousin wordlessly put the briefcase on the teller's counter, and I suspect it is weird. I'll bet it was creepy, but I suspect that. I guess Albert Bailey was maybe looking out for his cousin, because first of all, he's a juvenile, so he's underage.
So don't say anything yes.
Don't say put the money in the bank, don't say I'm Robin the bank, don't say anything. And essentially, as far as a judge is concerned, this kid was basically a tool and extension of Albert Bailey, who you could argue is being used against his own will. That stood out to me. I'm supposing here, but it seems like that might have been the idea behind his cousin not saying anything in the bank.
I wonder if they said do you want large bills and he said, damn right, it's a gun.
And they're like, oh, let's press the alarm. They're like this seems uncannily familiar to a story I've heard around the campfire making s'mores on.
So there was one more little point to this one that you found though, that was pretty good. First of all, Bailey had just gotten out of prison seven year stint for robbing another people's bank in Bridgeport, Connecticut. But the Bailey said this time, he said, you know, I was kidnapped earlier, and some guy kidnapped me and he put a bomb in my pocket. Yeah, and said that he was unless I robbed this bank for him, he was going to blow me.
Up, which sounds very strangely familiar compared to remember the Brian Wells story the pizza man, the pizza delivery man who really did have a collar bomb put around him and forced to rob a bank.
Yeah, the collar bomb heighst episode exactly.
That happened the same year that Ronald Bailey said it happened to him. That was not a widely known story, I think at the time, was it?
It sort of was. I mean, I don't know if it was national. Where was that? Do you remember Eerie Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, same side of the country.
Yeah, I guess so people talk between those two states, right, sure, Okay, but I just thought that was very odd, same year, so I guess he was either inspired by the story or it's just coincidence he came up with the same idea.
Yeah, that man, that was a good one.
It was poor Brian wells Man, good lord, like the whole thing, that whole if I remember correctly, that whole story, the way it's going, it's just so mad cap and nuts that there's no ways actually gonna die. And then he dies. Yeah, it's just so said. He's just such a hapless dude. That just that that happened to Gil. He is very much so. And then did you see I think it was called Mastermind, the Netflix special on the woman who devised that plan.
Yeah, I saw it back then, I think, yeah, when we recorded.
It, that was good. And while we're talking about I just want to shout out, I don't remember the director's name well enough to try to pronounce it, but the guy who directed The.
Lobster, Oh yeah, sure.
I finally saw The Lobster, Chuck, And I asked you about it, and you're like, yeah, like eight years ago, but you did agree it's a good movie.
Right, Yeah, it's Yorgis Lanthemos.
I think, I think so, Yes, that sounds right.
He's great, Yeah, he is.
And the thing that turned me on to him was I just took a chance and watch the Killing of a Sacred Deer Boy and it is just really good. It's it's definitely different than The Lobster. But Colin Ferrell is just perfect as this just dead pan, bone dry character that he plays in both those.
Yeah, he's great. He also did the favorite in the Academy Award winning Poor Things from last year.
Oh I didn't see that. I didn't know about that.
Oh, hang on to your hats and watch Poor Things.
Okay, great, Yeah, I want everything that guy's doing.
Yea, yea. I wouldn't even tell anything about it. But you should also go back and watch his early foreign language film out Dog Dog Tooth.
Okay, I started Alps, which is another one.
I have not seen Alps, but from his early work, the only one I've seen his Dog Tooth, which was also disturbing. And he's great, like he's one of the sort of brilliant directors working today. I think.
I think brilliant is an excellent word to describe him.
And you were kind of bagging on Colin Ferrell Colin Farrell a little bit, and I think he's he's great. You need to see some more of his good stuff.
What's his good stuff?
Well? Did you see in Bruges or.
I couldn't make it too in Bruges?
Oh wow? Yeah, Well then you probably didn't watch the recent one, the with Brendan Gleason, the same one, the same guy he was in Bruges with the Bansheese of Inna Sharon.
No, but I saw that served up to me on whatever streaming service I was watching it on. No.
I mean, I think it's great and it's actually got Berry. I don't know you pronounce name Keegan, I guess or Cogan.
That kid is good. He's in killing of his Sacred deer.
Yeah. Yeah, so you'd probably you'd probably like this, I.
Think, Okay, all right, well I'll give it a shot.
Great quirk, quirky Irish movie. Yeah.
And then I also went back and watched Black Swan again last night, and.
Oh boy, that is such a good movie.
It's crazy.
I saw that in the theater and I haven't seen it since.
I saw it because you me and I went to go see Swan Lake at Kennedy Center in Stree. It was amazing. We stayed at the Watergate and then walked over to the Kennedy Center and watched Swan Lake. It was I was like, this is probably the most cultured thing I've ever done in my entire life. It was great, great well.
Also staying at the Watergate and going to see Swan Lake. That was the very seventies esque experience.
Super for sure. But I like having seen it now and then watching Black Swan it just makes you appreciate it that much more. It's a good movie.
All right, here's what I say we do. I'm gonna have a quick recommendation of something I've been watching. Okay, and I say that in that time, you pick one of these two to do.
Ah, it's like picking between my two children.
Do we have to do them both?
No, we can just do one. I already I already know which child I'm going with.
I know. But before we get to that, since this is just a sort of a free wheeling episode, I'm going to recommend the great great show Ripley. Oh really that is on Netflix.
Right now, The Tom Ripley stuff.
Yeah, it's the talented mister Ripley. The Tom Ripley story, but it is told over eight episodes. It is in the most gorgeous black and white that I may have ever seen. And I want to show out the DP the cinematographer Brendan Gleeson. That's very funny, but no, it was the legendary cinematographer Robert Elswit, who besides shooting all of pt Anderson's movies, he's shot another forty other like major movies you've heard of. But he did the great black and white work in good Night and good Luck.
Ah. Yeah, that was good black and white stuff.
And it's just stunning photography. And the guy who plays Ripley, Oh, what's his name? He was in he was in Fleabag what's his name? Emily has a real crush on him.
Brendan Gleeson.
No, it's a good one though. Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott's in it, and Dakota Fanning is in it, and it's just really, really, really well done. And I think fans of the book or maybe more than one book. Is it more than one book?
Yeah, it's a series.
Yeah, I think fans of the book series are I think it's a lot more true to that. So they seem to be pretty happy about it. Yeah. But the other guy that's in it is Sting's son, Jeff Ellie No Elliott Sumner sting son. This guy he plays Freddy, And I was like, who is this guy? Where have I seen him? I was like, Oh, it's young Sting basically.
Oh cool, They're good.
Huh yeah, nice, pretty good and looks like young Sting.
Okay, well I will check it out. I do have a question though, did you watch all eight episodes yet? No?
I'm on. I think we finished six last night, so I got a couple more.
So that's my problem with a like limited series as they start out like like like Gangbusters basically, and then they just peter out like a episode four or five, six sometimes, and I like, it's just almost all of them. Do they're so rare that they make it through all eight episodes or ten episodes or whatever where you're not like, yep, didn't need two of those episodes easily.
This is doesn't feel padded to me. It's it's really really good so far, and I don't think it'll peter out because it's just getting sort of climaxy in the here toward the end.
I have to say, Chuck, it just struck me as ridiculously audacious for me to be complaining about people patting their series in the middle of this episode. That's pretty pretty rich.
All right, So we'll finish up. But I also should recommend Fallout, the TV show about the video game Fallout, one of the video games I played on Amazon Prime with the great, great great Walton Goggins, one of my favorites.
Yeah, got you snuck one more in? Huh, well, that means we're doing the last two of these.
Now, No, no, don't punish me. Let's talk about Dennis Hawkins. Hey, nope, Oh you want to do the last guy?
Yeah, you didn't like the last guy?
Oh okay, I thought you were gonna go with Dennis Hawkins.
No, I thought the last guy had a great twist to it. But all right, let's.
Let's do it. James Washington. Everyone can look up Dennis Hawkins if they want to know about him.
Yeah, there you go, great idea. Look up Dennis Hawkins and you'll pretty much get the whole the whole thing, just from looking at a picture of them. All right, me, So, James Washington, is this guy who was doing fifteen in a Clink in Nashville back in two thousand and nine. I don't know how far he was into his fifteen year sentence, but he was definitely in there for attempted murder. And he was pretty young, age forty seven when he suffered a heart attack in prison and was taken to the hospital and he was like, I don't think I'm going to make it. And I guess his conscience was bothering him because he had to get something off of his chest.
He decided that's right, as happened. Sometimes you hear about this in prison, when someone is dying or something in jail or in prison, they will admit to other crimes. And that's exactly what happened in this case. When he told the prison guard, Hey, come over here, and the guy came over there and he was like, I actually murdered Joyce Goodner back in nineteen ninety five. I'm dying and I just had to get this off my chest.
Yeah, he said, I killed somebody. I beat her to death. The guard said that was James Tomlinson, who was the guard. He just happened to be the closest person and that would have probably been that had James Washington died, but he actually took a turn for the better and recovered. And when it became clear to him that he wasn't going to die, he said, you remember that thing that I confessed to you. I want to go ahead and recant that.
Yeah, And they said, no, takes these back siaes. No, we suspected you to begin with. Apparently this was in Nashville, and they knew that he had met with Goodner on the day of her murder. He was a person of interest in the case, but they just didn't have enough to press charges against and it was an unsolved case. But he confessed and they said, all right, I'm glad you're feeling better. Let's just add a life sentence to your already long sentence.
Yeah. So he got convicted of it for his own confession that he couldn't take back, and he didn't die. So yeah, it's pretty ironic. He didn't die, So got life in prison. That's right, You got anything else? We want to do it? Three or four more of these.
You know what's funny is when we were about a third of the way through and it was not much was happening, I was like, oh, you know what we'll do maybe at the end, we'll just do some recommendations, like so many podcasts do that, like what they've been reading or watching. Yeah, I said, maybe we'll just throw that in there for fun, and then we ended up organically doing it kind of in the last third.
Yeah, if you introduce the thought of doing recommendations in the first act, you have to shoot it all in. That's what they said.
Well done, Thanks well.
Chuck said, well done everybody, And that means I want to finish on a high note, which means it's time for listener mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this I don't know. This is just sort of a funny email from one of our listeners about the white dog poop. Hey, guys, my son is a regular listener. He tells me about your podcast, and he thinks I would like NICs And what guy do you know that doesn't like to joke about poop?
But not many, not many.
I never thought about the change and the color of dog poop and the hardness until you pointed it out. But I do remember when I was in the fifth grade in nineteen fifty five. This is one of our elder states persons getting in a white dog poop fight with one of our neighbors, Jerry. He had a big black dog and his next door neighbors had a big boxer, so there were massive amounts of white dog poop in both yards. I had an advantage because I wasn't wearing oh, because I was wearing gloves, and Cherry wasn't. The dog poop we were throwing was white and hard. I don't remember who won. It stopped when we ran out of white poop. The fight probably resulted in a tie. Laughing crying emoji. And that is from dear listener Alan White and Alan, this just struck me as very cute and funny and kind of perfect for this episode.
That is a great, great, great email. Thank you very much. Who was it that was, Alan, Alan, that's a great one. Alan. That's the great thing about growing up at that age.
That's right.
You used to be able to throw poop at one another, and some kids wouldn't even wear gloves when they did it like that. It was just that kind of lucy, goosey time, you know.
Yeah, not like these coddle kids these days with their poop gloves.
Now they wear two pairs of gloves when they throw poop. Well, thanks a lot. If you want to be like Alan and reminisce with us, we love that kind of stuff. You can do it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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