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By Andrew Blankstein and Richard Winton
For the “Rico Suave” bandit, the weapons of choice are charm, disguise and the power of persuasion.
In August, the man slicked back his hair and pretended to be a member of a salsa band playing the Greek Theatre. He talked a clerk at the Wilshire Grand hotel into giving him the keys to the band’s room and made off with $9,000. On his way out, he gave the clerk the band’s CD.
A few weeks later, he donned a Chivas soccer jersey and hugged members of the Mexican team as they left another downtown L.A. hotel, the Marriott, on a team bus. Then, posing as a member of the team’s entourage, he persuaded a hotel clerk to give him the team’s room keys, making off with $10,000.
Now, detectives are investigating whether the bandit has made his biggest score yet, at the Four Seasons Hotel on Oscar weekend.
from The San Jose Mercury News
A Vallejo teenager allegedly shot himself in the testicles Thursday afternoon, police said.
Police said the 17-year-old, whose name is being withheld because he’s a minor, walked into Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center at about 5:45 p.m. with a gunshot wound.
The gun is still outstanding, police said, and the teen has not been cooperative.
SOUTH BRUNSWICK — They never touched the floor — that would have set off an alarm.
They didn’t appear on store security cameras. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners.
And they left with some $26,000 in laptop computers, departing the same way they came in — down a 3-inch gas pipe that runs from the roof to the ground outside the store.
Police believe that’s how some brazen bandits managed to swipe 20 Apple notebooks early this morning at a Best Buy on Route 1 in South Brunswick without detection.
“High level of sophistication,” said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman. “They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out.”
WERNERSVILLE, Pa. — Authorities say an eastern Pennsylvania man was killed when he was attacked by a bull he kept as a pet.
The Berks County coroner’s office says 52-year-old Ricky Weinhold died Saturday after being attacked by the bull on a farm where he leased barn space in Wernersville. That’s about 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Chief Deputy Coroner Charles E. Sweitzer Jr. says Weinhold’s injuries appear to have been inflicted by a bull’s head and hooves.
Deputy Coroner Terri Straka says the man was injured previously by one of his bulls.
from Agence-France Press via Google News
Gamers more scary than bikers, says Australian minister
SYDNEY — An Australian politician who opposes the lifting of a censorship ban on adults-only computer games has said he feels more threatened by gamers than outlawed motorcycle gangs.
“The outlaw motorcycle gangs haven’t been hanging around my doorstep at 2:00 am, a gamer has.”
Ted Bundy’s VW goes on display at D.C. crime museum, but should it?
By Philip Kennicott
Friday, February 19, 2010; C03
Even under a thin, black shroud, the lines of a vintage ‘68 Volkswagen Beetle were unmistakable.
And when the cloth came off, at a bizarre unveiling ceremony Thursday at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, it took work to be surprised by what was underneath it: an unprepossessing tan Beetle, with a sunroof, looking a little worse for wear with touches of rust, fading paint and a few missing pieces of metal trim.
The tires looked as if they still had a few thousand good miles in them. Inside the cab, the interior had that quintessential old Bug smell — like burning latex — as if the rubber flooring was always smoking a little from the heat underneath.
But this wasn’t any Beetle. This was Ted Bundy’s Beetle, the car into which he lured his victims and in which he killed many of them during a terrifying serial killing spree in the 1970s.
“This was kind of like a death wagon,” said Wyndell C. Watkins Sr., a retired D.C. police deputy chief, who was on hand to help introduce the latest iconic celebrity murder object joining Washington’s museum collections.
The car has been stored in a private collection owned by New York-based Arthur Nash, who owns many of the most grisly objects on display in the museum’s main exhibition. Also from the Nash collection: clown and serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s painter’s box, on display in a room dealing with the unseemly “murderabilia” trade.
Bundy’s VW replaces the 1933 Essex-Terraplane car used as a getaway vehicle by John Dillinger. With Dillinger’s car shipped off to the Southwest terminal of Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, where it will help present the capital region’s best face to visitors, the crime museum needed a marquee object to grace its front lobby.
Of all of the notorious cars in the world — the white Ford Bronco that O.J. Simpson rode in, the D.C. snipers’ shabby Chevy Caprice retrofitted with gun placements — Bundy’s Bug may be the most notorious because it was so intimately connected to its owner’s crimes. Bundy killed in this car is the frisson you’re supposed to feel when looking at something that was not just a tool, but a container for death.
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian police said on Tuesday they had arrested a prankster who hacked into a computer system to show a pornographic movie on a giant advertising screen, causing havoc on a busy Moscow thoroughfare.
The two-minute clip, displayed on a video screen above a main road south of the Kremlin, caused midnight traffic jams and a frenzy of excitement across the Russian blogosphere.
Police said the hacker gained control of the screen by breaking into an online company’s server in the volatile southern region of Chechnya as “he didn’t think the police would go looking for him there.”
“(The hacker) is a highly-educated, temporarily unemployed and extremely advanced Internet user,” police said.
Tue Jan 12, 1:52 pm ET
WASHINGTON – A mystery object from space is about to whizz close by Earth on Wednesday. It won’t hit our planet, but scientists are stumped by what exactly it is.
Astronomers say it may be space junk or it could be a tiny asteroid, too small to cause damage even if it hit. It’s 33 to 50 feet wide at most.
NASA says that on Wednesday at 7:47 a.m. EST, it will streak by, missing Earth by about 80,000 miles. In the western United States it may be bright enough to be seen with a good amateur telescope.
Jennifer Villavert lives in the Rad-ican City.
Submitted by Tom Burns as Andy Warhol.
Jennifer Villavert is so cozy with Sarkozy.
Woman Eventually Pleads Guilty To 37 Counts Of Child Endangerment
A driver is heading to jail after she was drunk behind the wheel with more than three dozen kids aboard.
And as a surveillance video shows, the children were screaming for her to stop.
The video shows the dangerous school bus ride last May in the Alfred-Almond school district in Allegany County. Martha Thompson, 55, had a blood alcohol content of .15. At the time, she thought the children were over-reacting.
Students can be heard screaming, “Put on the break!”
Driver: “Will you guys stop?”
Student: “Well you’re not okay, and I know it.”
The bus hit high speeds, ran over a mailbox and started rolling backwards downhill.
Student: “Turn the bus off!”
Driver: “No.”
Student: “You’re backing into the freaking ditch; you’re making the little kids cry. Stop!”
Finally, the children opened the emergency door in the back of the bus to get out, despite Thompson pleading against it.
Driver: “You can’t get off the bus!”
by seanbaby
The Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast on TV in 1978 as a fine-print stipulation to the fiddle contest that George Lucas lost to the devil. It was terrible in every possible direction. If Hitler forced aliens to put on a variety show at gunpoint, you’d feel more comfortable watching it. To this day, parts of George Lucas sizzle and fall off if you mention it near him. Famous little person Warwick Davis actually started as a section of George Lucas that screamed and detached itself when the special first aired. And since that day, it has never been shown or legally distributed.
