Here are the top four ways to get in trouble lately, beginning with the most popular and moving to the most fascinating, the most predictable and the most troubling:
Rob a bank
The troubled economy has led to an upsurge in bank robberies in the Chicago area, the FBI reports.
Apparently, the minute those criminals saw their 401k’s and other retirement accounts collapsing, they came up with aggressive withdrawal plans to make up the difference.
This certainly puts the financial shoe on the other foot.
In most cases over the past couple of years, it has been investors who were getting robbed as the market collapsed. No one seemed to care about that very much since it was defined as the downside of risk. But just let one character with a sawed-off shotgun walk in and take some cash from a bank and Katie bar the door, all heck breaks loose.
Pretty Boy Floyd, Midwestern thug and historical income supplementer from the Dust Bowl days, must be twisting in his grave.
For the record, bank robbery is not a good thing.
The six-county area recorded 186 bank robberies in 2002, up 22 percent from 2001 and just seven robberies short of the 1995 record.
No one keeps accurate records on the looting of investors, and, unfortunately, this particular cost of doing business probably will get passed on to bank customers.
Rob a town
It’s time to take felonious theft of, say, $12 million from your employer off the list of potential ways to supplement your income, unless, of course, you consider that fair pay for spending eight years and a month in the clutches of the federal government.
Betty Loren-Maltese last week was sentenced for that long in federal prison after a judge said her thieving ways ($12 million over a couple of years in an insurance scam) amounted to “a wholesale betrayal” of the folks of Cicero.
The judge couldn’t say enough bad stuff about the former Cicero town boss, who became something of a legend because of her persistent, determined gambling, her interest in golf courses and her seamy buddies. In her defense, supporters say she is salt of the earth and big-hearted, characterizations U.S. District Senior Judge John Grady wasn’t buying.
After slapping her with the sentence, the judge said he was sorry prosecutors didn’t ask for more because he would happily have stuck two more years on top. So far, Cicero’s felonious schemers in the Loren-Maltese circle have been sentenced to a grand total of about 42 years in prison, and it’s not over yet.
Break a commandment
Matthew Hale, head of the World Church of the Creator, is one white supremacist whose long-term behavior disproves his argument that white folks are superior to pink, black, yellow, or brown folks, mixtures of any of those, or what-else-have-you folks.
Hale dropped by the Dirksen Federal Building on Wednesday for what he thought was going to be a hearing in a civil lawsuit, shot his mouth off to the media for a while and then walked straight into the arms of a determined federal government, which says Hale solicited the murder of a federal judge.
Federal agents, a little army of them, grabbed him and stuck him right in the hoosegow.
He could get 30 years if convicted of the charge.
Hale, 31, of East Peoria, was indicted on two counts of soliciting an individual to assault and murder Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow and with obstructing justice by trying to influence a judge in a legal fight over the church’s name.
Feds said Hale was upset because the judge was trying to uphold an appeals court order requiring Hale’s church to give up its name.
Bite the hand that feeds you
This one’s unbelievable, even if true.
Marcellius Bradford was arrested at a fast food restaurant at the beginning of the week after he secretly tape-recorded a conversation with an attorney who had helped clear him in a rape and murder case and then tried to shake her down for $3,000. He was charged with attempted theft by deception, which could carry a 3- to 5-year prison sentence.
On the tape, lawyer Kathleen Zellner tells Bradford and two other men that they would be fools to fire her as an attorney in their multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit because she is familiar with the case.
Somehow, this information was perceived by Bradford as embarrassing and of value in the shakedown attempt.
Whoops!
Zellner said she reported the threat to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, then wore a wire so police and prosecutors could listen in as she had another conversation with Bradford.
Zellner said it was appalling that Bradford would try to extort money from her after she had worked to exonerate the men who had been convicted of the rape and murder of medical student Lori Roscetti. She not only got them out of prison after they served more than 10 years but helped them get apartments and ease back into life on the outside.
