The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : When Crooks Are Robbed of Common Sense

Crooks are not the smartest bears in the woods. At least not the crooks who get caught, and they tend to be the ones we hear about.

A few weeks back, a story played on the radio news about a burglar who left his tax returns behind after a “job,” and subsequently was identified and arrested. Nice going, Einstein. You’ll probably get audited, too.

It got us to thinking.

The San Fernando and Antelope valleys have had their share of stupid criminal antics lately. Consider the following:

In North Hollywood a couple of weeks ago, three guys who allegedly were running a chop shop drew heat from police when they inadvertently set the place on fire. Busted.

In January, one Steven Charles Brigida, 25, and serving a life term for shooting a California Highway Patrol officer, tried to escape from the new state prison in Lancaster by stowing away in a garbage truck. He got compacted and dumped in a landfill before being sent back to prison.

Then there was the tragic tale of KRASH, a tagger with some real artistic talent who was crushed by an Amtrak train last June as he and friends stopped to admire their handiwork. KRASH and his friends, police said, were taking photos of his freshly painted “tag” on the side of a hopper car when he stepped into the path of an oncoming Coast Starlight passenger train.

Similar accidents have inspired a long-standing oral tradition among the men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department. Like most oral histories, their stupid crook stories are often long on embellishment and short on verifiable fact.

Sgt. John Herkowitz, assistant day watch commander at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys station, is highly regarded among his peers as a consummate storyteller. During his 14 years with the LAPD, spent working in 11 divisions, he has seen, or heard, it all.

Herkowitz, a pleasant fellow with a wry smile, is a cop for the ‘90s. He doesn’t watch television crime shows or haunt cop bars. He gets his stupid criminal stories on the golf course. Recently, he took a few minutes to recite a couple.

He started with a disclaimer. “I know these stories are based on fact. Whether or not all the facts are straight is a different story.”

He continued, “The stupidest criminals are bank robbers. For example, one group of bank robbers made masks out of paper bags, but failed to cut the eyeholes large enough. When they ran out the door of the bank, one ran into a telephone pole and knocked himself out cold. When he came to, he was under arrest.

“We’ve had several bank robbery suspects who used their own deposit slips” for demand notes, Herkowitz said. Detectives didn’t have to work too hard to develop leads in these cases since the suspects’ names and addresses are printed on the other side of the note. Another would-be holdup artist dropped his wallet.

Exploding dye packs used to trace cash stolen in bank robberies have left their mark--in more ways than one. Dye packs have inflicted painful burns on the private parts of several robbers who made the tactical error of stuffing the cash in their underwear, Herkowitz said.

Stickup artists who stuff sawed-off shotguns into their pants also often come to regret it. But Herkowitz has a favorite stupid robber story, about a suspect who entered a liquor store and, with dramatic flourish, jumped up on the counter and brandished his newly sawed-off shotgun. Startled by his own reflection in the mirror behind the counter, he blasted away, knocking himself unconscious as the weapon recoiled. He was still out cold when police arrived.

In Van Nuys, Herkowitz said, a drive-by shooter leaned so far out of a car that he was decapitated by the mirror of an oncoming truck. “In the process of killing somebody else, the idiot did die,” he reported.

More recently, several Van Nuys gang members allegedly committed a series of robberies while covering their faces with one hand. “Most of the people in the neighborhood knew them. One of them tried to rob one lady and she kept pulling his hand down. They got caught,” Herkowitz said.

“You hear the things that people do and you just shake your head,” Herkowitz said. “People who aren’t exposed to this stuff all the time don’t believe me. They don’t believe that people are all that stupid.”

We believe.