"theft" news and stories

You know you've been tempted. Perhaps you've even offended. However, All You Can Eat Buffet prices are per person, y'all, no cheating.

Seriously. Just ask 40-year-old Dan Linscomb of Texas City, Texas, who was arrested last week for letting his girlfriend share his buffet plate and then refusing to pay.

Linscomb's brazen attempt to save $7 cost taxpayers many times that, as he was escorted from Iron Skillet in Atlanta to the cooler. The big cooler. The cooler with bars. The slammer. The iron bar motel. The joint. The clink. The pen. The pokey. Jail.

Linscomb served two days in the Fulton County Jail and was released after pleading guilty not to "theft of service," but the the lesser charge of "disorderly conduct."

[via San Francisco Chronicle]

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It looks like the news is already out that vegetarians are smarter than the average omnivore because those with higher IQs are more likely to choose to follow the lifestyle. But will switching to a vegetarian diet improve your IQ, as well? This seems unlikely, but if all it takes is gradually increasing your vegetable intake (since some of the "vegetarians" in the study still ate meat), it could be worth a try. Not content to wait for gradual results, it looks like one person took matters into his own hands. He (or she) stole a refrigerated semi-truck filled with $50,000 worth of broccoli. The trucking company seems to think that the truck itself - and not the broccoli - might have been the target for the theft, but if this turns into a trend and trucks full of spinach, squash and other veggies turn up missing, maybe the IQ-theory won't seem so far fetched.

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While one would expect that diamonds are a big draw for thieves, wines seem like a much less likely target. Luxist reports that one of the top restaurants in Sweden had its entire collection of French Bordeaux wines stolen - over 600 bottles of wine. The reason that this particular collection is so significant is that it holds the Guinness World Record for the most unique wine collection in the world. It included bottles from the six Grand Cru vineyards: Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Margaux, Chateau Haut Brion, Chateau d'Yquem and Chateau Latour. All totaled, the value of the stolen bottles is around $500,000.

It seems likely that the bottles will be resold gradually over time and because a bottle of Mouton Rothschild is probably more difficult to track than diamonds are, the restaurant may not be able to recover its collection.

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Three people were charged yesterday by federal prosecutors for stealing confidential information from the Coca-Cola Company's Atlanta Headquarters. Joya Williams, administrative assistant to a top executive, Ibrahim Dimson and Edmund Duhaney "were arrested on charges of wire fraud and unlawfully stealing and selling Coke trade secrets," federal prosecutors said. Specifically, they stole insider documents and a bottled sample of one of Coke's newest, unreleased products and were planning to sell them to Coke rival, PepsiCo.

Dimson contacted Pepsi via a letter, mailed in an official Coca-Cola envelope, and asked for more than $80,000 for the stolen documents and drink sample. Pepsi contacted Coke and the authorities were brought in. The investigation culminated when an undercover FBI agent offered to pay $1.5 million for other trade secrets from Coke.

Both Coke and Pepsi complied with and assisted the FBI and other authorities during their investigation. Coke says that it will be difficult to overcome this "breach of trust" from Williams, who "[rifled] through corporate files and [stuffed] documents and a new Coca-Cola product into a personal bag" - actions which were caught on the company surveillance videos - and that they will review its "review its information protection policies, procedures and practices."

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A few weeks ago, we heard about a child being disciplined for eating lunch with a spoon, instead of a fork and knife. Continuing the trend of what seems to be huge overreactions, a student in a Virginia school was suspended for taking a cookie. Jeremy Maitland, an 8th grader, was filling up a water cooler after his team's baseball practice and saw that someone had knocked over a container of cookies near the fountain. He picked them up, putting them back into their container, and ate one as he did so (the 5 second rule in action!). The cookies, as it turned out, belonged to a teacher and the boy was suspended for violating the school's no-theft policy. He was also kicked off the baseball team.

Making the situation even stranger is the fact that another child was suspended, as well. Convicted of cookie conspiracy? It doesn't appear that anyone else consumed any cookies, though a superintendent said that the punishment was reasonable under the circumstances.

One would assume that if there was a valid reason for this boy's suspension, like a fight or the theft of a non-baked good, that it would have been cited as the reason for the discipline, not eating a cookie.

 

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