Canada brings us the dumbest crooks of 2002.

My parents ran a liquor store, which is a moronic criminal magnet, for ten years. Among other things they encountered:

• Two crooks who found the wired-sandwiched glass door too difficult to smash. Not thinking to bring gloves, they pulled the glass out with their bare hands and left perfect bloody hand and fingerprints all over the store as they left.
• A crook who worked for what must have been hours unsuccessfully trying to hacksaw through the $60 hardened-chromium-steel padlock protecting the drive-through window^*, completely ignoring the $12 hasp which held it.
• A dumbass who brought an admittedly impressive (and quite illegal) switchblade in and, while loudly flicking it open and shut, posited that he could probably knife my dad before he could reach the sawed-off double-barrel shotgun (it wasn't the best neighborhood, and this was back in the 1970s when such things were accepted) set up behind the counter.

  Dad said it would be fine with him to try but would he first cut the head off this snake? You see, dad had a very realistic rubber snake under the counter he used to f-k with his buddies when they visited (dad was weird). The door was pushed open so hard and so fast as the idiot left it bent one of the hinges out of true. He left his very impressive, and probably very expensive, knife spinning on the floor.

• A moron who somehow manage to break in the store early one summer morning and escape before the police arrived, only to be busted by a trail of "crumbs". While the police were taking statements, the mail man walked up and asked if the small white object he was holding wasn't one of our store's cash register tapes. Sure enough, it was. He'd found it on the street outside the store. As they looked over they saw another one, and a few dozen feet past that yet another.

  My parents would tightly wind up each day's register tape into a cylinder, then rubber band a week's worth together, then rubber band a month's worth together, getting a group of cylinder-like objects about the size of your fist. All the months went into a paper sack for record keeping. The thief must have thought it was a bag of change, because he stole it as well as some booze. As he was walking back to his hideout, he would pull one out, realize it was not a roll of quarters, then discard it, then pull another out, examine, and discard. The police, the mail man, and my dad slowly followed this trail all the way to his house, where he was discovered passed out on the couch.

• A mouth-breather who simply walked in the door brandishing a .38 special and threatened the elderly semi-retired couple working for us that Saturday night until they gave him the cash register drawer. Instead of running straight out the front door toward freedom, he instead made a sharp left turn, then another sharp left turn, and ran right past the drive through window, on the drive-through window's driveway, apparently because his cousin lived down that road.

  Unfortunately for Mr. Robber, the old man whom he had frightened rather badly while threatening his wife, was a retired security guard from San Quentin's death row. Not realizing the thief was too stupid to be a threat to anyone but himself, the old man thought the robber was coming back. To protect himself and his wife, he pulled out the .44 magnum my dad had borrowed from a friend that afternoon and put a police-special bullet right between the theif's shoulder blades. The impact literally knocked him from his feet, triggering the second of his problems.

  My dad had only ten minutes before taken all the cash and brought a fresh load of change in to accommodate the rush. Our fresh-as-oatmeal-and-only-slightly-dumber criminal had stuffed his pockets full of more than $100 in pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, and this all broke open as he hit the pavement. While the EMTs were loading him onto a gurney (amazingly, he was not killed outright, but only paralyzed) all this change literally started streaming out of his pockets and tinkled its way out the drive-through. The police wanted to know, if he was as innocent as he was quite loudly proclaiming, he needed all this change.

  The answer was not recorded.

There's a reason I think people turn to a life of crime because they're too stupid to do anything else, and it's not just from watching cops.