Whatever happened to Al Capone?

My 1989 Acura Integra with a busted air conditioner sat in my mechanic’s parking lot for two days last week. It had been broken into.

The thug looked past my new $200 radio, beyond my $500 worth of new speakers, over my extensive CD collection and away from the four checks in my glove compartment waiting to be deposited. Instead he stole my toll tag, my inspection sticker and my license sticker.

Now, the toll tag I can understand, but how low and stupid do you have to be to steal inspection and license stickers?

I laughed as soon as I realized these items had been stolen. It was almost as if this crime was some kind of joke.

It seems the days of smart presidents and smart criminals like John F. Kennedy and Frank Abagnale Jr. are over, and we have now entered into a world of stupid presidents and stupid criminals.

I was watching CourtTV the other day, and they had a case where this guy was on trial for credit card fraud. He worked at a department store and would memorize people’s names and credit card numbers. He’d then go home and search for their addresses and phone numbers on the Internet. He’d order stuff off of the Web and have it sent to a vacant house, where he’d pick up the stuff at 2 a.m. Genius, right?

Well, here’s how he was caught. A couple moved into the vacant house, and at 2 a.m. when he couldn’t find his package, he rang the doorbell and demanded to know where his package was.

At his trial, he asked for a reduced sentence because he claimed he only used Discover cards, so people got some of their money back when he spent it. I think the judge should have given him a harsher sentence for being so stupid!

Come on pal, think we’re going to change for you because you’re stupid? This is America! We don’t change for anybody, unless you’re Hispanic; then we bend over backwards to make it so that you don’t have to learn a word of English.

Where are these stupid criminals coming from? It seems to be a flaw that starts at a young age. One of my fellow teaching assistants was telling me about a time he was proctoring a test and someone came up to him with the previous semester’s test and asked why the questions weren’t the same. Is this the kind of person you want holding you at gunpoint at some future date?

I move that we start educating these stupid people so that if they’re going to be dumb enough to commit crimes, they can at least be adept at what they are doing. I’ll start a school to educate these thugs, fully staffed with former Enron execs.

Maybe we’ll even take some of our graduates to various “‘hoods” around the United States to show those little wannabe-thugs that there’s hope for them.

Maybe they can be mayor of Dallas one day and con the city into building an arena that doesn’t create any new jobs or even stir up any additional funds to the city.

Or, they could be DISD superintendents who embezzle money in the form of furniture.

My goal is to make sure that every criminal knows the value of a $200 radio and the value of an inspection sticker.

To that thug out there who stole my inspection sticker: If your car is so bad that it couldn’t even pass inspection, you’re going to get more hot air than Bush telling America about Saddam’s “nukeular” arsenal.

So to all you kids out there wandering through life, not knowing what major to pick, whether you’re picking the right major, or now realizing you made a mistake with this whole school thing, the Mandyam Institute for Educating Intellectually Challenged Criminals is taking applications for the fall.