Evilio waltzed into a stop-and-rob convenience store without a second glance at cars parked outside, never checked the clothing of customers inside, and stuck a gun in the clerk’s face.
Had he looked, he might have noticed Wilbur Fernander standing by a cooler, wearing a black T-shirt with bold yellow letters reading Hollywood Police. He might also have noticed the gun on his hip, maybe the badge on his belt. But he got a chance to see them later.
Fernander, assigned to a street crimes unit, was conducting a routine business check while his partner waited in their unit outside. He only hesitated a second, surprised at Evilio The Oblivious pulling a heist with an officer in attendance, then alerted his partner by radio, stepped up behind Palau, and played a brief version of my-gun’s-bigger-than-your-gun.
“When he finally looked at me, his eyes got really big,” Fernander later told reporters. Yeah, we bet. And that sucking sound you heard, that was, well, never mind.
Palau, already wanted for parole violation, took the semi-smart option and dropped his .357 Magnum revolver on the counter. He was charged with armed robbery, possession of a firearm by a violent career criminal, and not-looking-around-real-good-before-pulling-a-stickup.
He might go into stand-up comedy. His story got a lot of laughs from other inmates at Broward County Jail.
Pause That Refreshes
It wasn’t his pistol that foiled Thomas Springer’s crime, but what done him in did begin — or you could say it ended — with a “P.” The former congressional press secretary had successfully held up the Crestar Bank in Vienna, Va., and was making good on his escape from the scene when he paused in mid-hotfoot to attend a call of nature.
About to jump into his getaway wheels, Tom stopped to take a public leak a short distance from the bank, and when he unzipped, a local dowager flipped.
When the masked robber revealed The Masked Avenger, the outraged citizen copied down the license number of the degenerate’s car and called the police. After a brief — very brief — series of remarks along the lines of, “Hey, this dude fits the description of …” the police had their suspect in hand.
Not the way he had just had himself in hand, see, but … you know what we mean.
Computer News
The Silver Bullet Award, given anonymously on the Internet, recently went to a poacher who took a shot at a buck standing on an overhanging ledge just above him. The deer was killed and — you guessed it — fell on the poacher, killing him.
Now we can say there are three types of justice left in America: Street, Poetic, and Occasionally-In-The-Woods.
And in other computer news, let’s hear it for Sebastian Strzalkowski, a 14-year-old lad living in Antigua, Guatemala, who helped the FBI land a most-wanted crook after the crook helped Sebastian identify him.
“Mr. Young,” Sebastian’s friendly neighbor, helped wire up the kid’s computer for Internet access. Sebastian then fired up the FBI’s homepage and found a photo of, yup, good ol’ Mr. Young, a most-wanted dude fleeing from a series of bank robberies in the U.S.
Leslie Isben Rogge, aka Mr. Young, had been languishing on the list for six years, but he became the FBI’s first Internet hit with an assist from Sebastian — and himself.