Not the brightest bulbs in the box

PETER BUFFA

They never stop coming, do they? The stories about dumb criminals,

that is, and “dumb” is being kind.

The latest saga of a man gone bad and a crime gone worse happened

right here -- on Balboa Peninsula.

Randall Gregory Bigelow is from Vandalia, Ill. I don’t know where

it is either, other than the Illinois part. Last month, Bigelow

decided to visit Newport Beach. If I lived in Vandalia, I’d try to

get to Newport Beach just as often as I could, too.

On Jan. 29, Bigelow did a bad thing. He walked into the Best

Western on Balboa Peninsula, pulled out a gun, and handed the desk

clerk a robbery note.

The clerk, being a smart clerk, emptied the cash drawer and handed

Bigelow $286, which was nothing to write home to Vandalia about.

As Bigelow excused himself, the clerk asked him his name. Bigelow

suspected it was a trick.

“Just give them that paper,” Bigelow said. “That’s all they need

to know about me.”

As Bigelow disappeared down the boulevard of Balboa, the clerk

examined the note more closely and saw that it was scribbled on a

form letter. The letter was from the Illinois DMV, notifying Bigelow

that his license had been suspended. The letter also had his driver’s

license photo on it. Leaving a fingerprint or a hair behind at the

scene of the crime is bad. Leaving a letter from the DMV behind with

your name, address, phone number and photo on it is awful.

But this wasn’t the end of Bigelow’s crime spree. It was just the

beginning.

It’s a long way from Vandalia to Newport Beach, and Bigelow didn’t

come all that way to botch just one crime.

Later that day, “he allegedly made employees at a gas station in

Fontana fill his vehicle at gunpoint. On Jan. 30, he is said to have

robbed a hotel in El Segundo,” said Newport Beach Police Sgt. Steve

Shulman.

So how did Randall Gregory Bigelow reach the end of the line, the

final chapter, the day of reckoning?

Was it a high-speed chase?

Desperate shoot-out?

Hostage drama?

None of the above.

On Jan. 31, Bigelow gets pulled over in Carlsbad and ends up

having his car towed because his registration has expired. Now

lacking both a brain and a car, Bigelow tries to hijack a car in

Encinitas, botches it, is arrested, at which point the warrant for

the Newport Beach robbery pops up.

According to police, Bigelow’s story isn’t odd at all, oddly

enough. The bad guy files are bursting with bungled crimes, including

scribbling stick-up notes on the wrong thing, such as their own

deposit slips, which have been left behind in a long list of bank

jobs.

The Freud fans might chalk all that up to a subliminal desire to

be caught, but the experts say never underestimate the power of a

small brain, especially a small brain on drugs.

According to Gilbert Geis, a criminologist and retired UC Irvine

professor, robbers aren’t the brightest lights.

“If they were clever, they wouldn’t have become robbers in the

first place,” he said.

Even a cursory check of police logs shows that Geis knows his bad

guys and girls.

You wouldn’t expect the Wal-Mart in Haynesville, La., to be open

24 hours, but it is.

A man named James Cotton walked through the door at 4:30 a.m.,

proceeded to the checkout line, which probably wasn’t much of a line

at that hour, and placed the bolt cutter on the counter.

Instinctively, the clerk knew something was not right. Cotton was

polite and looked like just another customer, except for the

handcuffs he was wearing. The handcuffs were a souvenir from the

Haynesville Police Department, which had Cotton under arrest earlier

that night on an assault charge. Somehow, Cotton had slipped out of

the patrol car and disappeared into the Louisiana night.

Back at Wal-Mart, Cotton was having a heck of a time getting his

money out of his pocket with the cuffs on, and had to twist and turn

and hop up and down a few times to do it. The clerk waited patiently,

took his money, handed him the bolt cutter and his change, thanked

him for shopping Wal-Mart, then called the police as Cotton stepped

into the men’s room. The cops showed up in record time and found

James in the john, still struggling with the bolt cutters and the

handcuffs.

Unlike James Cotton, the man who walked into the CVS pharmacy in

Chesnee, N.C., stood out, a lot, even without handcuffs. He walked in

just before 9 p.m. with his face wrapped in white gauze like a mummy

and wearing bright blue pajamas.

One witness said the pajamas had “bright yellow stars and white

moons” on them. The pajama man set a phony bomb on top of the

pharmacy counter with a note demanding all the OxyContin pills in the

store.

OxyContin is a morphine substitute that has become the drug du

jour with heavy-duty abusers. The pharmacist handed over about $4,000

worth of the stuff and the pajama man took off.

A gaggle of witnesses watched the man get into his truck, drive

across the street, then pull over and start popping the pills, which

is exactly where police found him, in the blue pajamas, with the

white gauze still around his head.

All of which proves two things we’ve known all along. Clothes

matter, and it ain’t easy being sleazy.

I gotta go.