26Carmack's Apple II Caper
At 14 years old, John Carmack, founder of "id Software" and renowned for his contributions to the development of Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein, faced arrest for aiding a group of children in stealing Apple II computers. They accomplished this by melting the windows and breaking into the building using a combination of thermite and Vaseline.
27. Pretty Boy Floyd was an American bank robber who was active in the 1920s. He was infamous for destroying mortgage documents during robberies, freeing many citizens of their debts.
28. The local police in Mumbai, India, force-fed a thief 48 bananas in 2016 to make him excrete a stolen gold chain that he had previously swallowed in an attempt to avoid getting caught.
29. Thieves stole Charlie Chaplin's body in 1978 and held it for ransom. His widow refused to pay ransom demands of £400,000 because "Charlie would have thought it ridiculous." Authorities discovered the body 11 weeks later.
30. Locals are stealing bricks from the Great Wall of China to build houses, while visitors are taking them as souvenirs.
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31King Farouk: The Kleptomaniac Ruler
King Farouk of Egypt, nicknamed the Pickpocket King, was infamous for stealing Winston Churchill's pocket watch. He was a known kleptomaniac and stole from several rulers. Upon escaping from Egypt, authorities found the world's largest porn collection at the time among his belongings.
32. Roadside food stall operators in Kenya during the 2010s purchased transformer oil stolen from transformers by thieves for deep-frying purposes. Reports indicate that transformer oil lasts much longer than regular cooking oil when used for frying.
33. No one knows how the perpetrators of the 2003 Antwerp heist, dubbed the "Diamond Heist of the Century," managed to bypass 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations.
34. In 1987, Brazilian scrap thieves unknowingly stole highly radioactive caesium-137 from a shuttered hospital. People handled the glowing powder, showed it to neighbors as a curiosity, and even dabbed it on their faces like makeup. This event resulted in four deaths, including a toddler who ingested the powder.
35. In 2017, a team of thieves stole $18,000 worth of high-tech equipment from a warehouse. However, their luck turned when the authorities discovered about 100 GPS tracking devices among the stolen items, leading to their capture within hours.
