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.