Most idiotic crimes of the 20th century

1901. A thief robbed a post train in New Orleans and stole 12,568
Christmas cards.

1910. A man known as John Smith decided to rob a bank. He put on
women's tights and entered the office. All clients and the security
started laughing, but it did not stop Smith from approaching the cash
desk and withdrawing $10,000 from his own account. Laughing police
officers took the bizarre thief away.

1936. A prisoner sentenced to death penalty escaped during his own
execution. He ran away together with the electric chair, to which he
was fixed. The prisoner hoped to cross the Mexican border and sell
the electric chair in Mexico. The police nabbed the fugitive near the
prison gate.

1966. A group of gypsies stole an elephant in the city of
Arkhangelsk, Russia. They failed to sell the animal and had to bring
it back to the zoo.

1975. A married couple of thieves went to court when they could not
agree on how to split what they had stolen before. The court put them
both in jail.

1980. Two perpetrators tried to rob a bank in New York. They disarmed
the security, told them to take all money and other metal things out
of their pockets and stole all that. No one even bothered to catch
them.

1982. A criminal broke into a flat of a Russian elderly lady and
stole a replica of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The lady cut that picture
out from a very old magazine - it was the only thing that the
criminal stole.

1986. A thief broke into a casino in Atlantic City. Yielding a gun,
the man stole a bag of quarters. The thief ran about ten meters away
from the cash desk, sat down at one of the gambling machines and
started playing. Hardly had he lost a half of the money to the
machine, when the police nabbed him.

1998. The largest theft of punched cards took place in the Moscow
region in 1998. Three years later it became known that someone had
stolen about 20 train cars of punched cards. It is still a mystery
who stole the cards, what for and where such a large number of cards
came from. Furthermore, no one even reported the disappearance of 20
cars.

1999. A group of Russian soldiers robbed a beer kiosk not far from
their quarters. A company of soldiers stopped near the kiosk, a
sergeant called three military men from the line and ordered them to
rob it.