Folly of the DayFour Californians Put a Man in a Bear Suit, Filmed Him Mauling a Rolls-Royce, and Submitted the Footage to the Insurance Company as Evidence
Every fraud is a theory about the intelligence of the person being defrauded, and this one held that an adjuster confronted with a bear would stop thinking about bears. The plan required no accomplice more sceptical than a man in a costume and no expert more specialised than someone who has seen an animal. They did not merely commit the fraud; they shot it, edited it and mailed it in — which is to say they generated, unprompted, the single piece of evidence the state would need. The confidence is the whole crime. A doubter would have claimed a hailstorm.
Source: California Department of Insurance
The WireVicenza Man Built a Roman Amphitheatre Out of Fibreglass and Papier-Mache, Charged Tourists 40 Euros to See It, and Kept It Up for Two Decades
Note what he could not leave alone. A fake amphitheatre is a forgery; a fake amphitheatre that Caesar visited on his way back from Cleopatra, adjoining the house of a fictional teenager invented by an Englishman in the 1590s, is a confession. The forger's besetting vice is not greed but authorship — having built the thing, he could not resist furnishing it, and the furniture is what convicts him. Twenty years of paying customers stood in front of plaster and were told a story so overstuffed that only a man who had never once doubted himself would have dared tell it twice.
Source: Il Giornale dell'Arte, via BroadwayWorld
The WireSolicitor Told a Family Court Judge Four Times That He Was at the Office in Ealing. He Was in Munich.
The lie itself was worthless — nobody was going to strike him off for being abroad — which is precisely what makes it instructive. He was not protecting an interest; he was protecting an image, and he was prepared to spend a practising certificate to keep it intact for forty-five minutes. Observe also that he had to keep going. Four times is not a slip, it is a policy, and each repetition was a fresh opportunity to notice that the court was ringing an empty room. A career ended not by temptation but by an unwillingness to be seen slightly diminished.
Source: Legal Futures
The WireCyclist Valued His Fractured Kneecap at 320,000 Pounds, Was Filmed Pulling Wheelies, and Told the Court the Man in the Footage Was Somebody Else
A knee worth three months was invoiced at a third of a million pounds, and the arithmetic of that gap is the whole man. What finished him was not the wheelies but the rescue: shown film of a cyclist entering his own driveway, he recruited a friend to swear he had never been to the house. He believed the difficulty was evidential rather than factual, and that any hole could be filled if he simply kept producing men willing to say things. It is the characteristic error of the confident liar — the conviction that reality is merely a shortage of statements.
Source: Insurance Business UK
The Wire'Superstar Head Teacher' With an 'Impeccable Record' Loses Appeal Over His Sacking, Having Told a Tribunal Something the Judge Found Was Not True
'Impeccable record' is a phrase nobody applies to himself while he still has one. It is the vocabulary of a man who has begun to argue with the evidence, and who has concluded that his reputation is a fact about the world rather than an opinion the world is presently revising. The tribunal's reply — that the picture is probably more complex — is the driest sentence written in England this year. He arrived with a title he had awarded himself and left with a finding that he had lied about a contract, and the distance between those two things is the entire subject of this newspaper.
Source: Inside Croydon
The WireCare Company Fined After Eleven Years of Failing to Supply Soap and Warm Water
Eleven years is not an oversight; it is a settled position, defended annually. Somebody looked at the price of soap and concluded it was a matter on which reasonable people might differ, then went on concluding it through two general elections. The remarkable thing about institutional laziness is its stamina — the effort of continuing not to do something for a decade, absorbing the inspections and the reminders and the thickening file, vastly exceeds the effort of buying the soap. Sloth is not the absence of exertion. It is exertion pointed the wrong way.
Source: HSE Media Centre
The WireHaulier's Lorry Stopped Displaying Two Operator Licence Discs Belonging to a Completely Different Company
Seven hundred and six days is not a lapse in record-keeping; it is a sustained refusal to learn something about oneself. The download takes minutes. The excuse — that another firm's paperwork simply came with the lorry, like a floor mat — took two years of not looking at the windscreen to become necessary. Every regulated trade contains men who have decided that compliance is a weather system rather than a task, something that happens to the unlucky. The tachograph is unusual among instruments in that it goes on working while you ignore it, and files a complete account of the period during which you did.
Source: trans.info
Black-Robed Egomania'You're in My Courtroom. Not Your Courtroom.' — Los Angeles Judge Publicly Admonished Over His Treatment of Small Claims Litigants
Small claims is the one room in the system built for people who have no lawyer, which makes 'are you a lawyer, yes or no' less a question than a boundary marker. The robe was issued to settle disputes between citizens; he appears to have received it as a deed of title. Note the escalation after the recess — he left the bench, had time to reflect, came back and reached for the possessive. Judicial temperament is not a matter of manners. It is the daily discipline of remembering that the courtroom is not furniture you own but a public utility you have been lent.
Source: California Commission on Judicial Performance
LazyTownBuckinghamshire Haulier Loses Its Licence Without Turning Up to the Hearing at Which It Might Have Kept It
There is a species of laziness that has passed through avoidance and out the other side into something nearly theological — the belief that a proceeding one declines to attend is not fully happening. The remedy on offer was a train fare and an afternoon in a room, in exchange for a business. He kept the afternoon.
Source: Motor Transport