Modern Criminals are Bad at Crime

I’m a bit worried about the state of modern criminals in this recession.

Seriously, it just seems like everyone and their dog is a “criminal” now, no matter how sloppy or ill-advised they are in their endeavors.

Given the various—ahem—“crimes” I’ve posted about here lately, it’s really, really hard to take criminals seriously anymore. It seems that they’re all complete dumbasses, misunderstood, total beardy kooks, or just overreacting.

Alas, the days of the master criminal appear to be long gone.

The latest example of this comes from a news report by “7 News – Miami” and it is worth a click-through for no better reason than the God-awful opening to the video filled with forced alliteration and holiday puns up the wazoo.

To set the stage for you, Guadalupe Valdes and a friend of hers were just chilling in Sweetwater, Florida, when they decided that it was a good night to wander over to the home of the Alemendarez family and get their thievery on.

What were they looking to steal?

Was it jewels? Was it a car? Was it a big ole pile of cash?

No, no…they wanted to steal the Christmas decorations from the family’s front lawn:

According to police, surveillance cameras captured Guadalupe Valdes and her accomplices as they stole about $500 worth of holiday yard decorations from the front yard of the Alemendarez family’s Sweetwater home on Tuesday.

“This is what we would consider a grand theft,” said a Sweetwater Police detective. “

If that’s where the story ended, it’d be easy to chalk it up the hidden surveillance camera, right?

I mean, even a good criminal is gonna end up on a hidden camera from time-to-time. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, right?!

Well, let’s be honest folks, I wouldn’t be wasting time on this story if it were that simple, you see these gals weren’t caught simply because of the camera, they were caught for a much more un-criminal reason.

You see, after they swiped all these big ole expensive ornaments, they wandered down the street and put them in Valdes’ front yard. It turns out that Guadalupe Valdes leaves less than a block away from the Alemendarez family.

As one might expect, it wasn’t exactly “needle-in-a-haystack” kind of stuff when it came to figuring out where the inflatable Snoopy or the hugging penguins disappeared to. In my head, I’m picturing muddy footprints and long drag marks the entire length of the block back to Valdes’ place.

Heck, she was probably just running a bunch of extension cords back to the Alemendarez place so she didn’t have to pay for electricity either.

My Faithful Readers, these folks thought they could just take a bunch of freakin’ gigantic lawn ornaments and move ‘em down the street three or four houses and no one would notice.

Repeat that last sentence out loud a couple of times and I think we’ll all be on the same page.

It is stuff like this that makes me worry about our modern criminals.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch “Ocean’s 11” and weep for an hour or so while I think about how good we used to have it.