More Stupid Criminals/Stories

Bad joke gets better for police
A man walked into a La Vista gas station Sunday and joked that he had a gun - but what happened next left the police laughing.
La Vista Police Chief Bob Lausten said the man, 22, entered the Sinclair gas station at 84th Street and Park View Boulevard about 6:15 p.m.
The man's joke didn't alarm the clerk. She was his mother. However, another customer was alarmed. He called police.
Officers sped to the scene and found the suspected robber and a friend outside their car in the station parking lot.
Officers detected the smell of marijuana coming from the car. A search turned up a quarter pound of marijuana and $603. The men were arrested for drug possession.
Jailed in Sarpy County, the two men, both on parole, realized a conviction would land them back in prison.
So they used a jail telephone to call a girlfriend and persuaded her to claim the marijuana was hers. She had no criminal record, and the men assured her she would, at most, stay in jail overnight.
The woman went to the police station and told her tale. Police knew immediately the story was false because inmate phone calls are recorded at the Sarpy County Jail.
She was arrested for false reporting.

Lotto con-man hits legitimate jackpot
IN an ironic twist of fortune, a former lottery con-man who served time for once claiming his winning million dollar ticket was stolen, hit the jackpot in one of Romania's biggest pay outs ever, officials said.Stelian Ogica, who was sentenced in 2001 to three years imprisonment by a Bucharest court for attempted swindle, won one billion leis ($42,172), lottery officials aid.
When Ogica was released from prison in early 2003 he continued to play the lottery.
His persistence paid off.
"This time I wrote my name and address on the tickets so there would be no confusion," said Ogica. "I knew I was going to win."

Merry Chrismukkah: Cards Combine Holidays
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Every December, Zack Rudman and his wife send out cards with winterscapes and generic holiday greetings.
Finally, though, the Kansas City lawyer found a variety that seemed to better suit a Jewish man and an Episcopal woman with two young children as familiar with the menorah as mistletoe. It screams "Merry Chrismukkah!"
Across the country, two holidays that once seemed to share little more than a calendar page are increasingly being melded on greeting cards aimed at the country's estimated 2.5 million families with both Jewish and Christian members.

You're Drunk...who You Gonna Call?
CANBERRA (Reuters) - An Australian phone company is offering customers the chance to blacklist numbers before heading out for a night on the town so they can reduce the risk of making any embarrassing, incoherent late-night calls.
A survey of 409 people by Virgin Mobile, a joint venture of The Virgin Group and Optus, found 95 percent made drunk calls.
Of those calls, 30 percent were to ex-partners, 19 percent to current partners, and 36 percent to other people, including their bosses.
The company also found that 55 percent of those polled would grab for their phone first the next morning to check who they had drunkenly dialed, compared with just eight percent who went for the headache pills first.