Fakes

Do you ever wonder, when you hear about these nutty schemes that people come up with, what people were thinking, or drinking, or whatever, when they came up with the ideas?

"Jed? I got it! We'll fix up a chain to the back bumper of your pickup and wrap the other end of it around that ATM thing down at the bowling alley, and pull it out of the wall? We'll live like kings, soon's we count all the money!"

or

"Don't worry, kids! We'll get you into USC! It's just a matter of knowing the right people!"

or

"Here's what we do, honey! I'll just get a uniform and pretend to be a deputy sheriff and walk you right on out of this jail!"

Well, all three of these plans have been tried and found lacking now. Say hello to Maxine Feldstein and her boyfriend, Nicholas Lowe.

Handsome, well-groomed, smiling Nick was cooling his heels in jail in Washington County, Arkansas, when his main squeeze Maxine posed as deputy "L. Kershaw," with the Ventura County Sheriff's Office, and handed over forged documents to trick real deputies at the jail into freeing him.

They don't mess around down there! Max entered a guilty plea to several charges, including criminal impersonation, and was handed a term of 30 years in prison, with half her sentence suspended.

Nick apparently found time to steal away from grooming his eyebrows to tell Max she should use a story involving jail overcrowding and low-priority extraditions being suspended to sell the story. 

And so it wasn't until a real Ventura County deputy called to say he was enroute to give Nick a ride back to the jail where he belonged that alert Washington County deputies realized they had been hornswoggled, which is a felony down there.

It took a month to find the happy twosome and bring them both to justice.


And what crime was Lowe guilty of in the first place?

Criminal impersonation!

Maybe these two need to go back and find another line of work. Impersonations should be left to professionals like Frank Caliendo.