I believe there are three types of people in this world – those who enjoy walking outside the law, those who would never dream of it, and people who just need the right set of circumstances to push them over the line.
These true stories are a lot of the first kind and a few of the third, and they’re told by family members who just can’t believe who they’re related to – a recipe for fun!
1. This whole story though.
My friend got blackout d**nk and stole a bulldozer that had the keys left in it.
He turned it on and obviously didn’t know how to drive it so he just ended up making the scoopy part go up and down for a bit before the cops came.
They actually let him go too.
2. Bad genes.
My husband’s dad k**led the guy who his then girlfriend was cheating on him with. He was supposed to serve a life term but got out because of a clerical error. He did manual labor on a local park and apparently the guys who helped were suppose to get a reduced sentence. However he was not suppose to. (I think – my husband talked about it once).
Also, my husband’s half-brother, same m**derous dad, k**led his business partner. He would have gotten away with it however, he moved the body when he found out construction was going to start in that spot. And what were they going to build there? A prison. He’s currently serving a life sentence.
My husband has never met his half-brother. He also has 2 half-sisters from the same dad who are law abiding citizens.
3. As he should.
He’s d**d now. But years ago my relative got in a bar fight and lost so he went to his vehicle to get his rifle.
Fortunately the police arrested him on the way in to the bar so his charges were a lot less. Still did jail time.
4. That’s quite a scam.
I worked at a movie theatre when Back To The Future was originally released.
We used to take the entire movie ticket instead of tearing them and resell them to the next group coming in.
The old theatre was massive. Sat 600 people.
We probably made about $15k between two of us in month or so. Adjusted for inflation, it’s about $37k. We were the richest high school kids in our town.
5. Just some kids messing around?
When I was a young teen, the boys from the neighborhood and I loved playing pinball and video games at our local bowling alley. Problem was we didn’t have enough money to enjoy our new addiction. We decided to do something about that little problem.
We started with a very rudimentary system. We actually scotch taped a piece of thread to a quarter and were able to fish it up and down a couple times before the string would break, or the tape would give out. This worked fairly well, but we wanted and needed more.
Our next plan was a little more professional. We somehow concocted a scheme to “make” quarters. A few lessons in science class had actually stuck, and we realized that we needed something to fool the coin mechanism in the pinball machine into thinking that whatever it was we made our quarters with was an actual quarter. We ended up deciding that lead would be our material of choice. We used lead for a couple of reasons. A couple of the guy’s father was an avid hunter. He even reloaded his own shotgun shells. Because of this he had a burner setup in his shop to melt down lead. Another reason is that lead is not magnetic (science!). We made a mold out of plaster and used the burner to melt lead to make our quarters. But where to get more lead??
One of us came up with the brilliant thought that tire weights were made of lead! Carrying screwdrivers and pliers we scoured the parking lots of shopping centers. We would wander through and drop down out of sight between cars. Using the tools we had brought we would manage to get the tire weights off with little trouble. We were in business!
Our production line was soon up and running. We would melt lead, pour it into our mold, cool it and then move on to finishing our new “quarter”. The finishing process was crude, but effective. We would snip off the burr where the lead was poured. We would then file down the edge, making sure it stayed mostly round. Using steel wool and a polishing cloth we would then shine the quarters. Now came the trial run.
We went to the bowling alley with a few quarters to see if our harebrained scheme would actually work. In they went, and the pinball machine lit up and was ready to be played. Success! We intensified our production and soon we had bunches of quarters. We were thrilled! We could play video games any time we wanted! Every day after school you’d find us at the bowling alley, happily playing our games. But our downfall was soon to come.
We never thought of the fact that someone might notice a bunch of fake quarters being used in their video games and pinball machines. It literally never crossed our early teenaged minds. We just knew we were having a blast. One fateful day we went to the bowling alley as usual. We started playing games and soon some men approached us. They started questioning us and accusing us. We were scared to d**th! One of the guys yelled “Run!” and we took off as fast as we could. We made it to the doors and down the steps we went. We all lived on the same cul-de-sac and that’s the direction we headed. Running as fast as we could, we briefly split up. The men that were chasing us only followed one of us kids. He made the colossal mistake of running straight to his house and through the front door. From there our crime spree ended.
A few days later I was in class when I was called to the office. When I got there my father was sitting with a man I’d never seen before. He was wearing a black suit with a black tie. I had to go before the principal, my father and a member of the United States Secret Service! Although they take the counterfeiting of US currency very seriously, they understood that it was just a bunch of knucklehead kids making quarters to play video games. He actually told me that he was impressed with the quality of the quarters. He also said that they had recovered over $75 in fake quarters! We had made, and used, over 300 quarters! We had to make restitution for the money and the charge was placed on our juvenile records. It was explained to us that if we kept our noses clean the charge would be expunged. Luckily for me I learned my lesson and stayed on the straight and narrow for the rest of my young adult life.
And that, fellow redditors is how I was charged with counterfeiting US currency. If that doesn’t define the meaning of a crazy crime, I don’t know what would.
6. Bless his heart.
My dad got into a bar fight around 21 or so, hit a guy so hard he k**led him. He went to prison of course but while working along the road he stopped another prisoner that attacked a guard and tried to escape. My dad was released for that.
He never drank after that and if he got angry he just walked out of the house to cool off. He turned 81 a week ago and he’s the nicest, easiest going guy you would ever meet. He never judges anyone. He once said to me, we all make mistakes.
*for the record I only heard the story about 10 ys ago from my brother. He told him during a road trip. He lived in a small town and I have no idea what prison he was at or the official reason he was released but considering it was probably around ‘61/‘62 – they probably used whatever reason they wanted to for his release.
7. So much information.
My uncle sold Tim Allen the cocaine that got him sent to prison in the late 70’s.
Then my uncle ratted out others. I honestly don’t know much about it beyond that, don’t have much contact with that part of the family.
My uncle was a pathological liar and a very troubled guy. He d**d by s**cide about 10 yrs ago.
8. What did I just read?
This was a couple of generations back (early 20th century) but there was this guy who was constantly getting d**nk and harassing my great aunt.
So, one of her male friends dressed up in an Easter Bunny outfit, put a bat in its giant fake carrot and beat the dude with it.
He got away with it but I’m sure it helped that half the community was waiting for the day the guy’s liver finally gave out.
9. A little hero.
My grandfather’s father was a mean, a**sive, hateful d**nk, who would come home from working in the mines long enough to terrorize his children and impregnate his wife and then leave again for mine work.
He tried to set the house on fire, with wife and kids (13 of them) inside…twice.
One day my grandfather and a couple of his siblings were picking berries across the road from the house and his d**nk father started taking potshots at them with a rifle. My grandpa, one brother, and his oldest sister took off running for the house with the agreement that the first one there would k**l him (their father).
My grandpa’s sister got there first and shot him to d**th. She was never charged with a crime, due to her age and the fact that everyone knew my great grandfather was a mean son of a b**ch and had it coming.
10. My cousin.
My cousin got busted robbing a bank.
Got sentenced to jail. Proceeded to break out of jail with his cell mate and went on the run. Fast forward a few months and he’s living in a hotel room with his cell mate.
ell mate orders a pizza to the room (bad idea). Delivery guy recognized them and reported them to the police. They get arrested again and shortly after my cousin k**led himself in prison.
My cousin had a wife and a kid and got into a nasty coke habit. We don’t bring him up anymore.
11. That was close.
I used to drive for my weed dealer. I was a new buyer but I never asked questions and was cool with him. His car broke down and asked if anyone could drive him. I said I would, and he liked that. I have my back windows tinted but not my front windows.
I’d pick him up and we’d drive almost all day. It was pretty chill. He’s give me free weed and pay me $250 a day. I still worked my part time delivery job so I was very happy.
He got his car fixed and didn’t need me to drive him around anymore. Which is fine, considering his ex snitched in him and he got busted a couple weeks later.
12. That seems excessive.
My grandfather’s cousin stabbed a waiter to d**th because he wouldn’t let him use the employees-only restroom in his restaurant.
13. Through the mail?
Something similar happened to my uncle, except he wasn’t terminally ill. He was working in China and his longtime partner was trying to poison him (in food/pills she sent him).
Meanwhile at home she got Power of Attorney and put him hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, buying expensive stuff…paying off her kids debt…etc. She went to the bank and got a friend to forge the POA.
He finally realized that he felt sick whenever he took the items she gave him and found out what she was doing. He came home and tried to get her arrested but I don’t think she ended up doing much time at all.
He’s still in huge debt from her and mainly lives in the Philippines.
14. Her poor parents.
Cousin was taking care of a woman in coma. He r**ed her. Little he knew was that her parents had set a webcam to check regularly if she would wake up…
He deserved every single day he spends in prison
15. Unfit, for sure.
It’s not a bad crime or anything, but it was illegal at the time.
So, in Germany, up until a few years ago, we still had a general draft for the army. And a generation ago it was very hard to get out of it.My uncle was a hardcore pacifist, so going to the army wasn’t an option for him. But being accepted as a conscientious objector at that time basically required you to be a devout Christian and use the bible as an argument for why you couldn’t k**l another human. And my uncle was also atheist.
He couldn’t realistically object, didn’t want to go to the army and didn’t want to go to jail, too. So he waited…
He got sent his draft notice, passed the physical and got a letter telling him to report to X company under sergeant Y.
He wrote back a reply, on rose-colored paper, scented with perfume, about how much he was looking forward to serving under the strong leadership of Y, promising to obey every one of his orders, and that he can’t wait to experience life in the barracks together with so many strong and muscular men.
He was declared unfit for service shortly after.
16. What did he do to them?
My dad told me he once snuck into a tire warehouse, he cut the alarm and came in through a window on the roof, and stole a bunch of tires.
17. What is wrong with people?
My mom’s father was a Vietnam vet. He married my grandma he met while in Germany, adopted her oldest son and they had three daughters.
He physically, emotionally, and s**ually a**sed all of them. When they were toddlers, he’d wake them up at 5am for PT (like basic training for adults). When they walked into a room he was in, he’d throw knives at them to “check their reflexes”.
When my Aunt graduated high school, she moved out and he lost his mind. He kept trying to convince her to move back in, and actually convinced her to come home to “talk” about it.
That day she was sitting on the couch and told him she would never come back. So, he pulled a gun shot her three times (once in the hand as she was trying to block her heart, once in the stomach as she stood up, and once in the a** as she turned to run). Then he walked to his back bedroom, and shot himself twice, once in the heart and once in the head.
I wasn’t alive but I read the newspaper article and it was horrible.
Side note, my family is really messed up bc my grandma would take us grandkids to his grave site and tell us what a great man he was….
18. There is nothing I like about this story.
My parents’ horse got loose, and somebody hit and k**led it.
The horse disposal people wanted some relatively reasonable amount of money to come pick up the carcass, but my parents were like “f**k that. Hey, /u/hendergle – load that s**t up on the flatbed and find somewhere to dump it.”
Me: “OK. Sure, pops.”
[calls stoner friend]
Me: “Hey, want to go dump a horse somewhere?”
Stoner Friend: “Sure. I have nachos.”
Me: “Cool”
Stoner Friend: “Cool”
So Stoner Friend and I got even more stoned than usual and took my parents’ flatbed truck out and tried to winch the horse up onto it. Turns out you really can’t winch a d**d horse onto a flatbed. It’s not the winching that’s the problem so much as the 5ft lift up to the edge. We f**ked up a lot of that horse trying, though.
Attempt #2: We went home and built a big-a** ramp out of plywood and 4x4s. It took most of a day and half a dime bag of weed. We argued a lot about whether or not we should bevel the part of the 4x4s that touched the ground. Final decision: neither of us knew how to do that, so we opted for no bevel.
Back at the horse, we wrapped the winch line around the head this time. Fun fact: Steel cable looped around a horse head in a slipknot arrangement is a good way to re-enact a famous scene from The Godfather. We didn’t quite decapitate Mr. Gooseberry (long may he gallop in the heavenly fields). But it wasn’t pretty. Nothing about a d**d horse is pretty, but that bit in particular was remarkably not pretty.
We decided to go with our original idea: lash the front hooves together with rope. Small problem: We’d cut the rope at some point. Neither of us could remember why, or who did it. But nothing for it- we had to go home. Finding more rope required smoking half a joint, which I think is quite reasonable given the task we were set to.
Back at the horse again. Our engineering marvel worked. We had some initial worry that we would pull one or both of the horse’s forelegs out of its socket, but apparently d**d horse sinew has quite a bit of tensile strength.
We used tiedown straps to lash the horse and ramp to the flatbed, initiating a discussion about why we hadn’t used those in place of rope, leading to an argument over whether or not that would have worked, leading to an awkward hostile silence as we drove around the a** end of South Dakota looking for a place where we could dump a d**d horse.
I’m sure there were many places one could dump a d**d horse in the middle of rural South Dakota. Strangely enough, though, we were both feeling a little paranoid. Every car that passed us was a plainclothes cop car. Every person standing out in their field was heading straight to their house to report us as soon as we went around the bend.
Finally, we found a field in the Black Hills National Forest that looked like a good spot. It had trees, which we thought the horse would like, and there was a nice parking area next to a snowmobile trailhead. Goose had never liked snowmobiles, so the idea of his skeletal carcass scaring the s**t out of some Ski-dooer coming off the trail seemed like something that would have appealed to the old fella.
We backed the truck a little ways into the ferns next to the trail. Then we used a come-along to pull the d**d horse off the flatbed.
About a mile into the way home, Stoner Friend said “Does your horse have tattoos?”
I was like “it’s a horse, not a f**king chief petty officer in the merchant marine. Why would it have f**king tattoos?”
Well apparently some horses have tattoos, according to Stoner Friend. It’s how they identify them if they’re stolen. (Note: Subsequent research revealed that this was usually only something done with thoroughbreds, which our horse was definitely not.)
Back at the horse again. “I think they put them on the lip, inside,” says Stoner Friend. Have you ever pulled back the lip of a d**d horse to look for tattoos? Worst never-have-I-ever ever. There were no tattoos. But then Stoner Friend says “it’s probably one of those tattoos that only lights up under UV.”
By then, most of the weed had worn off, but there was that tiny bit of paranoia still holding on for dear life. “What if there’s a UV-light lip tattoo on your horse /u/hendergle? They’re going to catch you for sure!”
So there I was, in the early South Dakota summer evening, cutting the lips off of a day-old d**d horse with a dull pocket knife. Bonus: we just threw the lips into the woods a little ways because:
“Nobody’s going to go looking for horse lips in the woods”
-Stoner FriendAnd that’s how “illegally dumping an animal carcass on federal property” is the craziest crime I or anybody in my family have ever committed.
19. A complicated man.
My dads side of the family grew up as New Hampshire hicks.
My grandfather was stabbed in two different bar fights and burned down an entire country club because he thought they were too stuck up.
He was never caught and went on to earn a bronze and silver star in the Korean War, but unfortunately lost his leg too.
20. What a dork.
An uncle robbed a bank (or was an accessory to the robbers, idk).
His brilliant escape when the police showed up was to go to the roof and jump off.
He didn’t do time, just had to go to the hospital for a broken leg.
I’ll have to ask my mom when I get a chance, she knows the story better than I do.
21. That took a turn.
My cousin in Youngstown, Oh used to rob people selling goods on facebook.
Got caught after him and accomplice m**dered a man over a PS3.
Good times.
22. Freaking hero.
My aunt had a boyfriend – let’s call him Mike, cuz that was his name. He was always the life of the party, everyone loved him. Always holding my aunt from behind and kissing her neck. A little too much PDA but hey, they were happy.
Turns out Mike was a**sive. Like, very a**sive. Physically and mentally. The neck kissing was him whispering in her ear, berating my aunt for making a fool of herself dancing. My grandfather found out about the a**se.
Went over to Mike’s place, knocked on the door. When Mike answered, my grandfather put a gun to his head and said “if I find out you ever touch my daughter again I’ll f**king k**l you.”
Welp, a few weeks later my aunt shows up with a black eye and a sling. Mike.
He was found d**d on the roof of his apartment building the following weekend. We all have zero doubt it was my grandfather’s doing. As a successful lawyer I am sure he had connections who could help.
23. Kids, man.
My Dad (when he was much younger and infinitely more stupid) regularly used to drink drive with his friends. It was the early 70’s, and no-one really cared. To hear him speak about it now, he can’t believe how stupid he was.
One night, he and his friend were out drinking. They heard there was a party going on at a pub across town and decided to head over. On the way they go past a large club with a queue of people waiting to go in. My dad decides to show off a bit and pull a skid. He miscalculated, hit a curb and flipped the car, sliding down the road on his roof. The car stops, they get out and leg it, to the cheers of the people in the queue! They get the bus back home and immediately call the police to report the car as stolen.
The police knew what had happened, but couldn’t prove anything.
24. Who could prove it?
Not sure if it should be considered a crime, but one of my great aunts was in an a**sive marriage with a war vet who took to beating her and forcing her to play Russian roulette when he drank.
One night she managed to rig the gun so when he took his turn he blew his brains out.
She wasn’t charged.
25. The dregs.
My uncle was a small drug lord in Northern California in the 90s. He had a compound out in gold country, had to drive through 3 gates with guards to get to his house. I like never questioned it as a kid, just enjoyed heading up so I could fish in the stocked bass pond (which also had snapping turtles (as a line of defense)). He’d take me out shopping at the mall with a film canister full of coke that he’d take hits off of occasionally, shadowed by some bodyguards. One time we were out for a ride in his corvette going well over a hundred and got tagged by highway patrol. He talked his way out of the ticket (told the officer he was showing off for his nephew and got carried away, the officer thought it was hilarious), and told me it was lucky since he had a ton of illegal guns and drugs in the trunk and would have made a run for it.
He got arrested when I was 15. It was a full blown; Feds descended upon the compound in helicopters and swung through the windows with flashbangs. The whole nine. He was arrested, and since if he snitched on anyone above him he was, very bluntly, a d**d man, he took the rap, was extradited to Lee in VA to serve a bit over 10 years. All he asked for while he was there was protein powder, he got prison ripped, and apparently beat someone near to d**th with a sock full of quarters for cutting in front of him at the payphone.
At some point in my life all 4 of my uncles on both sides (+ my dad) have spent time in prison for drug related offenses, but this particular uncle takes the cake
26. That’s definitely terrible.
My uncle went to prison for chaining a cop to the back of his bike and driving down the highway
I feel like an edit is needed here because I want to say I am not glorifying what my uncle did, I simply answered the question asked.
This happened in the 1960s before I was born, so I do not have many details due to the timing and fact he married into the family (and that side of my family is not very close at all).
What I do know is my uncle was apart of a very violent gang, I know nothing about what led to the attempted m**der (yes, the cop survived somehow), so I do not know if the cop was good or bad.
But, I do not believe very many people, if any, deserve to be tortured in such a manner (or any manner).
I’m glad I don’t have (t00 m)any stories like these to share about my family.
If you’ve got one to tell, our comments are open!
