Stupid Criminal Watch: Courthouse Edition

Joseph President, a 23 year- old from Rozzie resident, pled not guilty on charges of possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute. He showed up to the Suffolk County courthouse on what the Globe reports was "court business." This really could be anything from paying a fine, contesting a traffic ticket, or filing a complaint of some sort. When he passed through the security check at the entrance to the courthouse a court officer inspected the bottle of Pepsi President was carrying. The bottom half of the bottle contained a baggie, which contained 11 smaller bags of a substance a court spokesperson identified as probably crack. President grabbed the baggies, dumped them in a trash can, and fled the scene. He was quickly apprehended by a State Trooper, and the substance in question was collected. Though possession of crack, especially with the intent to sell, is always illegal, bringing it into a courthouse or police station is generally one of the dumber things we can think of.

Update: A kind reader drew our attention out of the city to Lawrence where a rental minivan was returned, but some of the cargo remained. The folks on the car lot called the cops to report suspicious packages (two liquor boxes coated in transmission fluid). The boxes contained about $1 million in cocaine. They followed the trail to a house in Methuen where they found a whole bunch of cash and more cocaine. The rental car had logged around 2,400, enough to get you to Atlanta or Jacksonville, Fl and back, but not all the way to Miami and back. The two arrested in the case were smart enough to mask the scent of the coke with transmission fluid on the boxes, but not with it enough to grab their boxes out of the van before they turned it back in.

We could have had a picture of little baggies, crack cocaine, or crack in baggies (courtesy of many government web pages) but instead we just searched Flickr for crack and landed on user cobalt123's image of some dude's ass hanging out.