Episode 4 Bizarre Crime

Britain's bobbies see some bizarre things in the line of duty.

They'll think twice about stealing an owl in future.

And for this series, with the help of victims, cops and crooks,

we've unearthed the UK's most audacious...

-Go faster!

-..deviant...

The guy's completely naked in the chimney.

..and downright daft acts of criminality.

Stealing from a CCTV shop. It's not ironic, it's moronic.

These odd offences all prove one thing - crime doesn't pay.

The police won't rest until they get their man.

We had him bang to rights.

So observe your right to remain silent as we sentence you

to 30 minutes of guilty pleasure in the weird world of Bizarre Crime.

Coming up:

An odd airport terror alert sparked not by bombshells but eggshells.

I thought, "Wow. What's this?"

Officers are used to dealing with terrorism.

The last thing we expect is someone trying to do this.

And police are baffled by a bogus blueblood

whose true identity remained a mystery even to his own family.

We asked our mum if Dad was ever a Lord.

I went, "Your dad's no more a Lord than I'm Queen Elizabeth."

For our first case we're heading to the North East of England to sunny South Shields.

Everybody's really surprised when they get here how wonderful it is.

It's home not just to Joe McElderry

but also an odd booze-fuelled boating felony

that must surely rank as one of the most bizarre episodes

in the town's proud sea-faring history.

It hadn't happened before and it hasn't happened since.

I'm Captain Jack Sparrow and I'm going to sail home.

Sunderland lads Alan Ramsey and Sean Johnson

have made a vow not to go drinking together any more.

-Come give us a hug.

-Piss off.

When these two go on the lash, all hell usually breaks loose.

We just enjoy life. Come here!

But the moment that ultimately made the lads make their pact

came in June 2007

when Sean and Alan decided to head out of town for a tear-up,

hopping on the Metro and heading seven miles north to South Shields.

We were drinking on the Metro, a bottle of vodka.

-About a bottle each.

-THEY LAUGH

Sozzled by the time they got to South Shields,

the boys tried to pace themselves.

-More beer, more beer, more beer.

-By 3 o'clock we were smashed.

When I came in they were in and they must have had a canny drink

cos it was a canny day, you know. It was nice weather.

They were canny on mortal, like. I mean mortal.

It was non-stop arguing.

They staggered out here, man. Mortal.

After an entire day of drinking, it was time to head home.

But there was one small problem.

They'd missed the last Metro back to Sunderland and they had no money for a taxi.

The choice was a seven-mile hike home or a night on a park bench.

We decided to walk back down through the park.

And that's when they spotted their ride home.

Spotted a pedalo.

Yes, a pedalo, designed for calm, still waters,

not for voyages on the high sea,

but that didn't stop these drunken sailors hatching a plan

to drag it over a main road to the beach

before launching themselves out into the chilly, treacherous North Sea

and, despite darkness, drunkenness and a distinct lack of a map,

gently peddling the seven miles home to Sunderland.

You know, as normal people do, if you miss the train, you just...

-Pinch a pedalo.

-Aye!

Come on. Get it up here, man.

The pedalo was heavier than they bargained for

and 10 yards into their caper they were knackered.

So, displaying more front than South Shields,

the cheeky chappies asked an unsuspecting passer-by for help...

..telling him they were workmen taking the boat for repair.

He helped us cross the road. He done the most carrying.

THEY SNIGGER

He did!

Meanwhile Colin Tron, a security guard at the nearby Sundial pub, did a double take.

I was astonished seeing them drag a peddle boat out of there

half way across the road then stopping, having a rest on it.

They couldn't carry theirselves, let alone drag a boat along the road.

The cars were going round it and everything!

You don't see that every day, do you?

Their antics had also been spotted on CCTV and the police were called.

As I pulled up I remember seeing

a huge white pedalo.

We actually stopped them just before they were about to launch it into the sea.

By the time the police came they were round the side

trying to get it over the bollards. It was that heavy they couldn't.

So I approached them, asked them what they were doing,

and one of them looked me in the eye and said....

"I'm Captain Jack Sparrow and I'm going to sail home."

They said, "No, you're not." I went, "I am."

So immediately both young men were arrested

on suspicion of theft of the pedalo.

The plan to set sail to Sunderland in a stolen pedalo was scuppered.

Bad for the lads in the short term,

but definitely good in the long term.

Had they set sail, I don't think they would have made it to their destination.

The chances of a successful trip is virtually zero.

Pedalo craft are not designed to be at sea even in the calmest of conditions.

They would be in serious difficulties very quickly.

If we weren't stopped getting into the sea,

the waves and that going about, we'd have been dead.

Or in France.

According to Sean, when the court heard he'd claimed to be Captain Jack Sparrow,

the room broke out in laughter.

The judge had to send us out because they were all laughing.

It's not often you can get a judge laughing.

The lads were ordered to pay £200 in compensation

to cover the damage they'd caused and Sean got a 12-month supervision order.

They also learned a lesson any potential pedalo pinchers might want to take note of.

What may be a prank at the time may have serious consequences.

If we hadn't intervened, who knows? There may have been tragic consequences.

Having been saved from the perils of the high sea,

Sean and Alan have cut down on the piracy and the piss-ups.

We've both settled down, you know what I mean?

We've settled down.

For now it looks like the waters of the North East will remain pedalo free.

In Bizarre Crime we're treating you to the most calamitous criminal acts caught on camera.

First up is this feckless felon who was cunning enough

to break his way into a supermarket

but not quite smart enough to figure out how he'd make his getaway.

Surely that mid-air Cossack dance will help him fight the force of gravity.

Alas not.

Undeterred, he's back up the ladder quicker than you can say hairline fracture.

Having seemingly lost the use of his left arm,

he uses his chin to shuffle the ladder to a new spot,

no doubt hoping that changing his location will change his luck.

Oh, dear. It looks like this crocked crook will be bedding down

in the vegetable aisle until the police arrive.

For our next story we're checking into Birmingham Airport, where,

thanks to one keen-eyed cleaner and committed counter-terrorist officers,

one crook's dodgy dealings between Britain and the Middle East

didn't even make it off the runway.

The counter-terrorist officers have taken out one of the biggest criminals, probably internationally,

and certainly as far as the UK's concerned.

In May 2010 one seemingly ordinary traveller arrived at Birmingham Airport

for a flight to South Africa with a stop-over in Dubai.

After checking in, he headed to the business-class lounge

but rather than enjoy a leisurely wait for his flight

some bizarre behaviour began to arouse suspicion.

A gentleman came towards the shower room carrying two bags with him.

After about 20 minutes or so the gentleman came out

and I went to go and clean up after him, realising that in fact

he hadn't used any of the facilities there. I became very suspicious.

John scoured the scene for something out of place

and, sure enough, there in the nappy bin the shifty shower dodger had laid something very odd.

I thought, "Wow. What's this?"

Two egg boxes. In one of the boxes there was actually an egg still inside it.

Automatically I thought it might be something to do with terrorists.

John immediately alerted the police and the counter-terrorism unit moved fast.

They detained him under schedule seven of the Terrorism Act

thinking that this person might be involved in terrorism.

The suspect's name was Jeffrey Lendrum,

a 47-year-old former member of the Rhodesian SAS.

Desperate to prove he wasn't a terror threat,

Lendrum wasted no time in revealing exactly what he was hiding.

Strapped to his belly was a belt made of socks,

housing no less than 14 more eggs.

The officers would be thinking, "Well, what is this? Is this drugs?

"Is this potentially explosives? What is it?"

Lendrum's own explanation was as odd as his body belt.

He said that he had heard that if you strap eggs around your waist it helps with back pain.

Unsurprisingly, the police weren't buying it.

The officer knows straight away that there's something fishy going on.

It may not be terrorism but it's clearly against the law.

Confident Lendrum was packing wildlife, not weaponry.

Police called in the help of animal cop Andy McWilliam

and aptly named Lee Featherstone, an expert bird breeder.

The fact he'd strapped them to his abdomen

showed to me that he was trying to keep them warm

and these were going to be live viable eggs.

The description they gave to me that these eggs were a reddish brown,

it sounded to me like they were bird of prey.

Immediately I looked at them and said they're peregrine eggs.

The peregrine falcon can achieve speeds of over 120 mph.

With only 1,400 breeding pairs left in the UK,

the birds receive the highest level of protection.

Because of their rarity and speed they're highly sought-after hunting birds,

especially in the Middle East.

CAMEL HONKS

We believe they were actually destined to somebody

who had their own personal collection.

Falconry, historically, it's been a sport in the Middle East

and certain members of society want valuable birds.

Suddenly it all made sense.

Smuggling rare and endangered breeds is big business,

worth an estimated £6 billion worldwide.

Dropping off his curious cargo during his stop-over in Dubai

would have provided Lendrum with his very own healthy nest egg.

He could have made up to £70,000 on this particular trip.

But instead of cash, Lendrum was landed with cuffs

and sang like a canary.

He admitted that all the eggs had come from four nest sites

in the Rhondda Valley in Wales.

Lendrum revealed how, using his SAS skills, he'd reached a rare nest

by climbing to the top of trees before abseiling down.

It seems he was a dab hand at poaching eggs

and had even scaled cliff faces and dangled from helicopters

during past raids on nests in Canada and Zimbabwe.

The counter-terrorist unit officers have taken out

one of the biggest wildlife criminals probably internationally,

and certainly as far as the UK's concerned.

At Warwick Crown Court the world-class crook was sentenced

to two and a half years for stealing and smuggling the precious peregrine eggs.

It was a great result all round.

A court sending out a clear message

that these offences won't be tolerated

and all in all it was a tremendous job.

As for the little stowaways, bird lover Lee took them under his wing.

But his job as foster father got off to a strange start.

He needed to keep the eggs warm for their journey home

so in a touching twist to this tale,

the very scheme that Lendrum hatched to smuggle the eggs

was used to save their lives.

I literally used the socks and I put them inside my shirt

and done my coat up and drove very, very carefully.

Under Lee's care, 11 of the 14 eggs hatched healthily.

They ate me out of house and home several times.

I now know what it feels like to be a peregrine parent.

The hatchlings couldn't stay in Lee's nest forever.

When they were strong enough they were returned to the wild,

where no doubt they're flying free today.

We all came together to ensure that they're out in the wild where they should be.

Poaching eggs may be peculiar but it's certainly not the most surreal sort of smuggling

and stashed away in this week's Criminal Countdown

are the most bizarre bootleggers from around the world.

Checking in first is the man who,

when asked by officials at Los Angeles airport if he had anything to declare, responded...

I got monkeys in my pants.

Two tiny pygmy monkeys, to be precise.

Officers also found 50 orchids and six birds of paradise in his luggage

while his travelling companion had a couple of Asian leopard cubs in his rucksack.

They claimed they were setting up an animal sanctuary in Costa Rica.

A likely story.

At Melbourne Airport in 2005, officials' suspicions were aroused

when they heard sloshing noises coming from one passenger.

The canny crook had created a plastic apron to wear under their coat...

..complete with water-filled pouches containing 51 tropical fish.

Equally impressive are the uniquely designed budgie smugglers

used by one man on a flight from Vietnam to the States in 2009.

The elaborate custom-made leggings allowed to him to secrete

over a dozen songbirds under his slacks.

But some smugglers don't rely on pernickety pouches or sophisticated socks,

they just slip their contraband cargo into their hand luggage,

even if it is a Chihuahua,

as spotted by Irish inspectors at Dublin Airport in 2009.

Astonishingly some crims have resorted to smuggling people rather than pets.

In Sweden in 2008, police believed that a gang of crooks

were placing dwarves inside bags before stowing them

in the luggage-holds of long distance coaches.

The mini marauders stole valuables from coach trippers

before returning to their hiding places with the loot

and being picked up by their accomplices once the coach arrived.

But for sheer audacity, this week's top spot must go to the devoted wife

who was stopped by guards at a prison in Mexico in 2011

after she was spotted acting nervously and struggling with a suitcase.

Inside, wearing only pants and socks,

they found her husband, whom she'd been trying to smuggle out of jail.

I don't know how he got there.

Time now for some more dim crims caught on camera

and from the word go

this heister's attempt to hold up a London bank is hopeless.

The second he hands over his demand note the security shutters fly up.

But his next blunder really is priceless.

He's frantically pushing the door he's convinced is locked...

..when all he needs to do is pull.

As he gives up and resigns himself to waiting for the police,

a little old lady toddles in with ease.

The dopy door basher finally realises his mistake,

grabs his coat...and pulls.

For Bizarre Crime we've turned the spotlight on the cops,

asking serving and retired officers from across the country

to recount the funniest and freakiest things they've encountered.

What you're about to hear might sound far-fetched

but it's the truth,

the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Welcome to Bizarre Crime's Police Confessional.

Exhibit I - the river.

We decided to take a burglary suspect down to the River Tees

to point some houses and premises out that he'd burgled.

We hadn't put any handcuffs on him and he decided

that he was going to make his great escape by swimming across the Tees.

But he didn't realise that the tide was out

and he ended up up to his waist in mud

and we actually had to get the air sea rescue out to pull him out of the River Tees mud.

He'd got up to about his neck by then.

Never again did we allow anybody to go out without being handcuffed.

He got charged with trying to escape and all the burglaries.

Our final case tonight takes us into the rarefied world of the aristocracy,

where to be a Lord you either have to be born into it

or work for it. Or you could just fake it

like this bogus blueblood who, for over 20 years,

weaved such a complex web of lies that even his own family didn't know who he really was.

In January 2005, immigration officials at Dover detained a man

by the name of Christopher Edward Buckingham.

His passport had aroused suspicion when a routine check revealed

an exact match between his details and those on the Register of Deaths.

DC David Sprigg took him in for questioning.

He was very nicely dressed and very nicely spoken

and he did look like a country gent.

It wasn't until we got into the interview stage

and I started asking him questions about himself

that the alarm bells started ringing.

The mystery man surprised Sprigg by telling him

he wasn't just any old Christopher Buckingham but the ever so grand Lord Buckingham.

We did do a Google search and the only Lord Buckingham we could find

was a very expensive pedigree cat.

I asked him if anybody could verify that he was Lord Buckingham

and he told me to ring his ex-wife.

He said, "Do you know a Christopher Edward Buckingham?" I said I'd been married to him.

The course of the conversation went,

"We have reason to believe that he isn't who he says he is."

She said, "Well, I don't think he is Christopher Edward Buckingham

"but I'd love to know who he is," which absolutely astounded me.

Amazingly, even though she'd been married to him for 12 years,

Jody wasn't sure who the man in Sprigg's office really was.

She'd met Buckingham in 1984 in Germany, where she was...

# Working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. #

..and he was doing the washing-up.

They enjoyed a whirlwind romance and were married within six months.

The couple then settled in England and had two kids,

but as the years went by Jody began to suspect...

..something wasn't quite right.

I'd accused him a number of times of just being secretive.

Other than claiming he'd had a diplomat for a dad

and a top-notch education, Buckingham's past was a mystery.

There were very few pictures of his background.

I had a picture of his so-called parents and that was it.

He was secretive about everything he did.

We had computers in the house.

He had them all passworded so I couldn't get into them.

I was increasingly thinking, "This isn't right."

Buckingham's bizarre behaviour put a strain on the marriage

and in 1996 the couple separated and Jody began to do some digging.

I very quickly rumbled that he hadn't been to Harrow school or Cambridge University.

And as the kids got older they began to ask questions too.

They'd been out shopping with Dad in the West End of London

and Ed said, "Did you know Dad was a Lord?" And I laughed.

He flipped out a credit card

and it said Lord Christopher E Buckingham on it.

We were both like, "What the hell? What is this?"

Then when we got home we asked my mum, "Was Dad ever a Lord?"

I went, "Your dad's no more a Lord than I'm Queen Elizabeth."

The title of Duke of Buckingham had actually died out nearly 300 years ago

when the bloke who built Buckingham Palace perished without an heir.

People called Lord Buckingham

don't necessarily have the surname of Buckingham.

There have been Dukes of Buckingham whose surname was Stafford

and whose surname was Temple-Nugent- Brydges-Chandos-Grenville.

There's not been a Duke of Buckingham or Lord Buckingham whose surname was Buckingham.

I don't think there's a single person alive today

who can legitimately call themselves Lord Buckingham.

Not only was he definitely not a Lord,

DC Sprigg was soon able to confirm that he wasn't Christopher Edward Buckingham either.

He'd discovered that Christopher Edward Buckingham had died in 1963 aged just eight months.

He suspected the imposter had used the dead child's birth certificate to somehow get himself a passport.

I showed to him in interview a copy of the birth certificate

and the death certificate of Christopher Edward Buckingham eight months later,

and I believe he said that it wasn't the same person.

Convinced the man they'd detained had a fake identity,

police charged him and he was bailed until his trial.

I then made it my job to try and find out exactly who he was

and why he'd got a false identity.

The police searched the fake Lord's luggage

and found a letterhead that said "from the Office of Lord Buckingham"

and gave an address in Northampton.

Instead of being a country estate, the address turned out to be a house on an estate.

# Oh, he lives in a house, a very big house in the country. #

When the case finally went to court, the lying Lord pleaded guilty

to giving false information to obtain a passport

and was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

Even then he refused to reveal exactly who he was.

He was asked by a High Court judge directly,

"Are you ever going to tell us what your true identity is?"

And he replied in open court, "No."

What did annoy me was the fact that he was going to prison

and I still didn't know who he was.

# That's not my name That's not my name... #

While the man with no name was doing time,

DC Sprigg uncovered evidence suggesting that

as well as posing as an English Lord,

Buckingham had pretended to be Alexi Romanov, a Russian royal,

a German called Hans Peter Schmidt,

plus Richard James Thomas, David Alan Thomas,

and David Robert Allen.

But of course none of these was his true identity.

So just who exactly was he?

It looked like the riddle would remain unsolved

until out of the blue Jody received an e-mail from a man in America.

He'd spotted coverage of the case online

and recognised Buckingham as his brother.

It turns out that the dodgy duke was actually Charles Stopford,

one of nine children who'd grown up in Orlando, Florida.

Seemingly he'd always been obsessed with Britain

and had even perfected an English accent by watching Monty Python.

He pulls off an English accent really well, obviously.

But why would he go to all the trouble

of adopting a completely new identity?

For a man like this I would hypothesise that he isn't

excited by it, that it's more psychologically necessary for him,

something that he used right from a child, I think,

to try and manage probably some internal difficulties he had in being who he was.

People are always going to want an escape somehow.

I'm guessing this is how my dad decided he wanted to escape his home life and reality.

On his release from prison

officials refused to issue Charles Stopford with a British passport

and he was deported in 2006.

He now lives in Switzerland and, although he's stopped pretending to be a Peer,

he's formally changed his name to, yes, Christopher Edward Buckingham.

Whatever he's calling himself, he's lucky to have two kids who want to stay in touch

who have also formed a forgiving take on all that's happened.

No one's perfect, basically.

Yes, this is pretty big

but everyone makes mistakes in their lives.

Next time on Bizarre Crime,

police unmask the master of daft disguises

behind a dodgy driving-test scam.

He would be paid about £3,000 a time

to take both the theory and the practical test.

A nightmare neighbour launches a weird criminal campaign.

He used to stand behind the hedge

when it was absolutely teeming it down with rain, whistling.

And a family man turns urban terrorist

with his botched and bizarre attempt to dodge a speeding ticket.

Solution was to try and destroy the camera.

You'd think it was hit by a rocket launcher. It was a real mess.

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