truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

At the Amoco station on Route 59 In Spring Valley, N.Y., on June 22, an unidentified man twice jumped on the counter and shouted, demanding that the clerk to hand over the money, but twice the clerk pushed him off, and the man finally gave up and left. And in August in Delray Beach, Fla., a man tried to carjack Larry Klein, 53, who is disabled, but Klein repeatedly jabbed at the man out the window with one of his crutches, and he finally ran away.

In Tampa, Fla., in August, one man was arrested and several others sought in a labor-intensive burglary of a Sports Authority store; police estimate that the crew spent a week digging an elaborate 40-foot-long tunnel underneath the store, and once they finally surfaced inside, they apparently got only about $3,500 in athletic shoes and Tampa Bay Bucs jerseys before an early-arriving employee called police.

William Penny was arrested in Greenwood, Ind., in August, putting a halt to his alleged identity-theft business. He was caught because, three times in a three-day period, he had aroused suspicion of several people in a neighborhood by approaching a certain ATM machine on foot, carrying a motorcycle helmet, donning the helmet as he neared the ATM's camera, making a withdrawal (with someone else's ID, allegedly), walking away, and then removing the helmet.

Give Them Points for "Style": In Edmonton, Alberta, in July, Anthony Alan Burton pleaded guilty to a 2002 robbery that went down this way: He had wrapped his head in gauze, covered his face with silicon putty and rouge (and oversized glasses), grabbed a Samurai sword, walked into a Jehovah's Witnesses hall, and screamed, "I am the evil that you have read about! This is the face of evil!" He was in the middle of collecting cash and credit cards from everyone when the police arrived. (A psychiatrist had testified that Burton had run out of medication several days before.)

In Tulsa, Okla., in July, suspected shoplifter Jacob Wise, 18, had cleverly removed security tags from clothes he was allegedly walking out of a store with, but the alarm went off anyway because he had merely put the removed tags in his pocket.

The Virtues of Patience: Recently, police, faced with thieves who they suspected had swallowed their contraband in order to avoid detection, had to wait and let nature take its course in order to recover the incriminating evidence. Carpet cleaner Daniel Dyament, 19, finally expelled (after 72 hours) the $3,000 ring he allegedly stole from a customer's home in Bloomfield Township, Mich. (June). And in March, Chicago police reportedly used White Castle "sliders" to coax suspect Peter J. Mannix to yield (after 96 hours) a stolen, $37,000 diamond. But in Santa Cruz, Calif., jeweler Joy Kilner concluded in June after days of waiting that the $1,800 diamond that her pet basset hound swallowed was not coming out and was probably stuck in the dog's intestines.