6 Perfect Crimes That Got Foiled By Stupid Accidents

Their plan involved an inside man in the bank's security team, who disabled security cameras and smuggled in a team of crack Belgian hackers, all while telling co-workers he was organizing a late-night poker game. Once inside, the hackers installed keylogging software, which recorded account details and passwords. A few days later, they went back in and transferred 229 million pounds to a series of shell accounts around the world, which would have been the biggest heist in British history. After probably standing in front of the Bellagio fountains for a bit, everyone involved made a clean getaway and waited for the money to roll in.

To the thieves' shock, the money never came through, for reasons that should be familiar to anyone who has ever used a bank. It turned out that the hackers had made a tiny error in a single field on the electronic transfer forms. The form was so confusing that they couldn't even work out where the problem was. Over the next two days, they made 21 increasingly frantic attempts to transfer the money, all of which failed due to that one little mistake. That seemed kind of weird to the bank's employees, and long story short, everyone involved was arrested.

After letting yet another accomplice inside, the thieves disabled the infrared security system and carefully removed 20 pre-selected Van Gogh paintings, including the famous Potato Eaters. They loaded the paintings into a guard's car and sped off to rendezvous with their getaway driver. The plan was to transfer the paintings and vanish into the night to do whatever it is you do with a priceless stolen cultural artifact as gross and ugly as The Potato Eaters.

What could go wrong with such a brilliant plan? The getaway car blew a tire on the way to the meeting point and never showed up. After waiting around, the nervous thieves fled on foot, abandoning the paintings ... because walking around with them would, at the very least, give passersby the impression that they were the kind of weirdos who buy art. Cops found the car and recovered the paintings 35 minutes after they were stolen. A heist for the books, foiled in less time than it takes to watch an episode of The Walking Dead.

It all started when inside men allowed gang member Rawson Watson (yes, that's his name) to sneak into the cargo hold of the Boeing 767 at London's Heathrow Airport. Watson then cut a hole in the lining of the hold, climbed inside, and taped it shut behind him. He hid there while the plane flew to Madrid, where it was loaded with 1.5 million pounds' worth of Spanish pesetas for transport back to London. Once the plane had taken off again, Watson emerged from hiding.

Here's where it gets clever: Watson assembled two flat-pack crates he had been keeping in the lining with him, then hid the money (and himself) inside them. The plan was for baggage handlers to unload the crates, which would be delivered to Watson's accomplices. They would be long gone by the time the real money container reached its destination and was revealed to be empty, leaving its intended recipient to let out a Vaderian "Noooo!"

But, as always, something went wrong: Some clumsy baggage handlers at Heathrow dropped Watson's crate, which promptly broke apart, revealing Watson ... and millions of pesetas. The thief scrambled to his feet and ran for it, although he found time to politely assure the startled handlers, "Don't worry about me, I'll be alright." In the carefree days before 9/11, he was able to make it out of the airport. He was only caught three years later, when the police arrested him for drunk driving and found that his DNA was a match for some blood left in the ruins of his crate. There's a lesson here, kids: Don't drink and drive.

How did Escamilla pull off such a daring scheme? A special fajita tunnel? Condoms and a spice-proof rectum? Actually, he used his job with the department to order the fajitas, which were delivered to his facility. He would then accept the delivery and take them straight back out to his prearranged customers, all of them presumably unaware they were about to serve up illegal meat.

He kept this up for nine years, which is a long time for the government to pay for illicit black market fajitas -- which, again, were seriously a thing. But the Tex-Mex bandit finally slipped up when he decided to take a sick day to go to a doctor. Of course one of his secret deliveries just had to show up that day. Escamilla's confused co-workers insisted that nobody had ordered 800 pounds of fajita packets for a jail with fewer than 100 inmates, and the equally confused driver insisted that he had been delivering fajitas to that address for nine years. The one thing everyone could agree on was this was a very weird point for alternate universes to intersect.

After contemplating the nature of parallel dimensions for a while, the Juvenile Justice Department realized that either Escamilla had a really serious eating disorder, or something shady was going on. After the cops searched his house and found fajitas in the fridge (a suspicious and delicious discovery), Escamilla was arrested on charges of grand theft. Hopefully his prison ordered fajitas in his honor.