Josh Monson was facing trial for murder and drug charges in 2011 in Everett, Washington. Apparently unsatisfied with his defense attorney, Monson stabbed him in the neck with a pencil. That lawyer was excused from the case, and a second one was assigned. Three days later, Monson stabbed his second attorney with a pencil. This... Continue Reading →
Herbie Goes Bananas, the 1980 film about a Volkswagen Beetle that is seemingly alive, is widely regarded as the worst of the Herbie movies. Some might even call it a disaster. Few could have guessed, however, that it would play a part in one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. When the private radiotherapy... Continue Reading →
British Member of Parliament Horatio Bottomley made a lot of money through fraud. He also lost a lot of money the same way. In a classic case of karma, in 1914 Bottomley bought all the horses that would run a race. He paid the jockeys to finish in a certain order and bet large sums... Continue Reading →
Benjamin Herman Siegel of southern Florida was arrested in January, 2015 and charged with battery and cruelty to animals after allegedly striking employees with a bearded dragon and putting the bearded dragon in his mouth. According to police reports, Seigel was videotaped throwing the animal in the air multiple times before hitting employees more than... Continue Reading →
When Tristan Ellis, a notorious burglar, showed up in front of Australian Judge Dean Mildren on March 29, 2004, it was the third time that year he had been arrested. The judge was amazed that Ellis had been released on bail for the third time in a year, even after flagrantly ignoring a court-imposed curfew.... Continue Reading →
Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava (1912-2009), also known as "Natwarlal," was a noted Indian con man who repeatedly sold the Taj Mahal; the Red Fort; the Indian presidential residence, Rashtrapati Bhavan; and the Parliament House of India along with its 545 sitting members. Wanted in over 100 cases at the time of his death, he had been... Continue Reading →
The most shoplifted book in the United States is the Bible. Nationwide, bookstores net about $16 billion in sales every year, according to the American Booksellers Association. Stores estimated that they lose anywhere from 1 percent to 5 percent to theft, some hundreds of millions a year, and much of it during the frenzied activity... Continue Reading →
In the late 1880s, Lester Moore worked as a Wells Fargo Station Agent in the Mexico-United States border town of Naco, Arizona. One day a man named Hank Dunstan arrived at the Wells Fargo station to pick up a package he was expecting. When Moore handed him a badly-battered and mangled package, Dunstan became enraged... Continue Reading →
The longest U.S. jury deliberation in a civil lawsuit took place in a 1992 California trial in which a woman and her son sued the City of Long Beach for preventing the opening of a chain of residential homes for Alzheimer's patients. The case had a long tail, taking eleven years to get to trial. The... Continue Reading →
Convicted murderer James W. Rodgers was put in front of a firing squad in Utah in 1960. When asked if he had a last request, he replied, “Bring me a bullet-proof vest.”
Convicted murderer George Appel's final words before being executed in the electric chair in New York in 1928 were - "Well, gentlemen, you are about to see a baked Appel."
In Vermont, a wife must obtain written permission from her husband before wearing false teeth. source
Victor Lustig was one of the most successful con men of all time. His first con was to show people a device that could print $100 bills. The only problem, he would tell them, is that it only prints one bill every six hours. Many people paid him enormous amounts of money (usually over... Continue Reading →
Grigori Rasputin, the Mad Monk, was poisoned, but he didn’t die. So he went after the guys who poisoned him, and they stabbed him. He still didn’t die and kept going after the assassins, so they shot him and thought they had finished him. His eyes opened and he lunged for one of the assassins... Continue Reading →
In 1876 a handful of mobsters botched a morbid plan to kidnap the body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it ransom. The hapless grave robbers were arrested just a few days later. Fearing another attempt, the government secretly hid the body of the sixteenth president in an unmarked grave for 25 years. Then in 1901,... Continue Reading →
