Fill
in the gaps with the correct tense
It's a weird world
out there. Here are a few stories about burglars that would be difficult
to believe if they weren't true...
A burglar in the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel in New York had some rather unexpected help when he 
his getaway. While he was coolly making his exit with a suitcase full of
stolen jewels he
down the staircase. The suitcase
open and the thief watched open-mouthed as his glittering hoard spilled
out. A porter and a house detective
over and helped him put the $5,000,000 worth of jewels back in his case.
Then they kindly
him to a cab and waved as he
off.
The owner of a drugstore
in suburban Boston showed great calm and cunning when he
by two young men with shotguns. They took all the occupants hostage and
demanded drugs. Henry Harmer, the owner, stayed calm and agreeably
some drugs for the gunmen. He even got some water for them to wash them
down! Then he watched with great satisfaction as the gunmen slowly crumpled.
One of them
some tranquillizers, the other some sleeping pills and a small amount of
rat poison. Police came and
the gunmen away as they slumbered.
Weiner Bryan of Rochester,
New York was unable to immediately open a safe he
, so he hopped in a cab and ordered the driver
around town while he tried to open the safe. After
up $31 in cab fares during a futile effort
it open, he finally gave up and dumped it in a river. Weiner was later
arrested and sentenced to twenty years in jail. His reaction when he
that the safe contained only forty four pencils and some postage stamps
was not recorded.
A young thief came
across a Polaroid camera when he
a house in Memphis, Tennessee. He
it up and while examining it, accidently
his own picture. Without
, the batty burglar left the photo on the floor and departed from the house.
When the owner home
and found a photo of the startled-looking youth on the floor, he
it to the police. They had no trouble in
and apprehending him.
In 1933, a French burglar
attempted
a house while wearing a full suit of armour. Not surprisingly he made so
much noise that the owner woke up and tackled him by
a heavy sideboard over him. The move not only ensured his capture, but
damaged the armour so badly that it proved impossible
off. For the first day in custody the man had to be fed through his visor
while waiting for a blacksmith
him out.
A man robbed a supermarket
in New York and was successful until he
the store and made his way down the street. It
long for the police to pick him up. He failed to make good his escape partly
because his stolen haul was an enormous, heavy bag filled with $5,000 in
coins, and partly because he
his gorilla mask.
Two men
six sheep from a farm at Mundford, Norfolk in the UK but found that they
could only get five of them in the back of their van. They decided
the odd sheep between them in the front of the van. The men had
through a town on their way home and feared the sheep
in the front with them would look conspicuous, so they disguised it by
a trilby hat on its head.
A burglar in Chattanooga,
Tennessee came up with the bright idea of
his socks off and putting them over his hands
leaving fingerprints at the scene of the crime. But it didn't pull the
wool over the eyes of the local police department. The burglar
when police identified him by his footprints.
One morning a woman
in a London suburb
up to a very alarming sight. There was the dead body of a man half in and
half out of her bedroom window. The police pondered on this unusual spectacle
and eventually
that he was a burglar who
stuck and suffered a fatal heart attack in trying
himself.
At a bank robbery in
London two men
a jewellery shop manager's briefcase and made off. They were unlucky, as
all the brief case
was the manager's lunch.
