7 'Whaaat' Crimes You Won't Believe Are True

7

The IRA Made A Gerry Adams Lookalike Switch Places Him In Prison

In addition to all the bombing they're known for, the Irish Republican Army would dabble in kidnapping. In the 1970s, leader Gerry Adams was arrested by the British. Pretty standard in the ongoing Troubles. Then the IRA found a guy in Belfast who looked exactly like Adams and decided to smuggle him into Northern Ireland's most impregnable jail, ominously called The Maze. There they'd make a swap and get their hero back.

Not thinking entirely stupidly, they did inform the real Adams about the plot. In preparation, he transformed his neatly groomed visage into shaggy hair and an unkempt beard. Other prisoners helped him out by constructing a similar-looking fake beard that they'd slap on the double upon the switch. There's something of a lack of creative crafting opportunities in prison.

Domer48/Wikimedia Commons"Could you add a handlebar mustache? I've always thought I'd look good in one."

Why would they need a fake beard if Adams was very real-bearded? Well, that's where it gets complicated. The plan was for Adams to secretly shave on the morning of the escape and then walk into a meeting room wearing the fake beard. He and the doppelganger would then switch beards and clothes, and Adams would walk out disguised as a lawyer. The plan went south because Gerry Adams' "Gerry Adams" disguise wasn't convincing enough.

While entering the meeting room, a guard noticed that Adams had a fake beard hooked over his ears. Sensing that this wasn't a sudden attack of alopecia, he raised the alarm, and the real Adams was nabbed in the parking lot. It must have been an awkward day on the yard when Adams surely confronted his fellow inmates with a sarcastic, "Sure, Gerry, we can totally make a realistic fake beard, Gerry," and possibly for the first time, a bunch of hardened felons had to feel bad about their thread skills.

6

A Secret Society Staged A Bloody Campaign To Force Brazil To Pretend Japan Didn't Lose World War II

If you were a Japanese-Brazilian, 1946 was a hell of a year. The Allies had surrendered unconditionally after a secret Japanese super-bomb wiped out 100,000 American soldiers in an instant, General MacArthur was on trial for war crimes, and Japanese troops were marching unopposed from San Francisco to Washington. Brazil had surrendered too, and a prince was on his way to take control of the government.

At least 16 Japanese-Brazilians were murdered by secret assassination squads for suggesting that this was anything other than fact. Over 30 others were injured, while numerous farms and businesses were torched. And that's just the stuff that was reported to the police; the real numbers are believed to be much higher.

5

A Guy Killed His Business Partner, Then Spent Six Months Impersonating Him

Most of your upper tier of annoying friends on social media and at dinner parties love to throw around the idea that technology is making us dumber, less connected, whatever. Fine. They can go live in a cave while the rest of us play Untitled Goose Game. But that disconnect has tragically resulted in the opportunity to do a digital Weekend At Bernie's.

Chris Smith was a talented guy who moved to California and built a successful advertising business, but he had always dreamed of dropping out of the rat race and travelling the world. In 2010, he reached a deal to sell his half of the company to his partner for a cool $1 million. So his family and friends weren't surprised when they received an email from Chris saying he was using the money to achieve his dream.

For the next six months, they regularly chatted with Chris through email. He sent updates on his incredible travels -- sandboarding in the Sahara, sailing in Tahiti, hunting for diamonds in the Congo -- with pictures of interesting sights and his new girlfriend, a Playboy Playmate. Weirdly, he wasn't in any of the pictures, but there was no reason to suspect anything was off just yet. Over time, however, the emails started to mention suicidal thoughts and drug use, neither of which Chris had ever previously struggled with. When the emails suddenly stopped coming, the family went to the cops, fearing the worst, or at least a possible freak boogie-boarding accident.

4

A Public School Cafeteria Chef Impressed Everyone As A Tyrannical Genius While Robbing The Place Blind

It's one thing to admire guys like the Soup Nazi, but it's difficult to actually be the Soup Nazi when you rely on making and serving food for a living. Well, Bruce Gluck thought he was on that same level, except that he wasn't running some fancy restaurant -- just public school cafeterias in New Canaan, Connecticut. Like something out of Michelle Obama's most pleasant dreams, Gluck refused to serve traditional slop. Instead he dished up seasonal, farm-to-table dishes: roast duck with quinoa tabbouleh, buffalo and ostrich filets, hand-whipped cream on every dessert. How very Connecticut of him.

Behind the scenes, Gluck similarly played the part. People signed up for a shitty cafeteria job and suddenly found themselves working for Gordon Ramsay's crueler and less hot brother. But parents and the school board were always willing to defend him. Surely a few line cooks being publicly executed for dropping a quail egg was a small price to pay for flax seed pizza. It turns out, however, that they were paying a much bigger price.

3

A Canadian Car Dealer Committed Massive Fraud To Fund Curling's Super Team

As a sport where you aggressively clean ice, curling might be the most Canadian thing in the world. Sadly, it's never really caught on in countries where people don't have to hide on ice to avoid being taken by the Wendigo. That's why, back in the '90s, a Canadian businessman and curling super-fan named Merv Bodnarchuk was determined to get America to fall in love with the sport. He paid some of Canada's best curlers top dollar to play on his "super team," which he named the Anaheim Earthquake, even though A) there was no curling rink in Anaheim, and B) nobody on the team had ever set foot in the United States. At the time, most curling events had a prize fund of "whatever's in the lost-and-found box," so Merv's cash was a huge shock. There was just one catch: Merv insisted on playing himself.

It's weird enough that the lead spot on the best curling team ever assembled had to be reserved for a middle-aged businessman who cost them game after game thanks to his fatal flaw of *checks notes* not being a professional athlete. (Yeah, we said it, curlers are athletes.) The real twist came after the Earthquake somehow managed to qualify for the end-of-season championships and Merv achieved his dream of curling on national TV. It was discovered that Merv had financed his dream team by defrauding investors in his car rental business. His teammates had noticed some troubling signs for a while, like how people kept coming to games and screaming that Merv owed them money. He was punched in the face before one game, and another time, a curler came outside to find his boss being beaten in the parking lot by a man demanding the $50,000 he was owed.

2

A Man Was Driven To Madness By A Powerful Meteor

On Thanksgiving Day 2002, a spectacular meteor illuminated the sky above Montrose, Colorado. Naturally, residents turned out to comb the hills above the small town for any chunks of rock that made it to the ground, which can be very valuable. The most determined was a beloved and quiet retiree named Steve Curry, who became increasingly obsessed with meteorites. He became a self-taught expert, and even gave lectures. He also started finding hundreds of the rocks. In fact, according to Curry, Montrose was sitting on top of a giant deposit of ultra-rare meteorites. Virtually every rock in his yard was a meteorite, and if some of them contained the wrong mixture of metals, they were just a new type of meteorite. If some actually contained fossils, well, that was just proof of life in space.

Curry Family"If you look closely, you'll see that this one has some extremely fine layered strata."
"Mr. Curry, I'm pretty sure that's a phone book."

1

The Confederacy's Submarine Inventor Blew Himself Up In A Psychic's Death Ray Scam, Then Reappeared To Defraud British Spies

The H.L. Hunley was the first submarine to sink a ship. It was also a nightmarish deathtrap that killed everyone who ever sailed in it, but you can't have everything. The mobile suicide booth was designed for the Confederate States of America by James McClintock, a grifter who had previously tried to hawk them obviously fake plans for a machine that pumped out 1.2 million rifle bullets per week. McClintock survived the war, largely by being sensible enough to stay well away from his own submarine, and found himself at a sort of crossroads. At the crossroads was his next brilliant idea: a death ray.