truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Least Competent Criminals: Edgar A. Brown, 27, was arrested in Worthington, Ohio, in January and charged with robbing the First Merit Bank; police were tipped off after Brown paid his electric bill at a Columbus store using red-stained $50 bills.

Timothy Baker was back in jail in Waco, Tex., in January, hours after he had escaped while being held for aggravated robbery. His getaway had taken him to Baylor University, where he broke into a building in order to find a change of clothes from his orange jumpsuit. The building was the Fine Arts Center, where Baker raided a costume closet. He apparently thought he would be inconspicuous if he changed into a 19th-century green wool costume (with rubber galoshes) that made him look like a "leprechaun," said the sheriff later, after Baker was spotted on the street and re-arrested. Said the chairman of the theater department, "He just really stood out."

Michael Brown, 33, was arrested in Marked Tree, Ark., in January and charged with burglarizing the lobby of the Marked Tree Bank after security cameras caught him hauling away a clock radio, a CD player, and a handful of Dum-Dum suckers, which the bank has on hand for customers' children. The next morning, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, police followed a trail of Dum-Dum wrappers down Frisco Street, across the railroad tracks, and into the mobile home park where Brown lives.

In January, a judge at London's Old Bailey released 31-time recidivist Mark Patterson, 42, after his 32nd conviction, for burglary, because Patterson claimed that he needed drug rehabilitation so he could fulfill his calling as a poet. (His subsequent ode to the judge, in part: "I've now been set free / in a blaze of publicity / so that everyone can see / my great ability.")

Police in Overland Park, Kan., arrested a 29-year-old man from Virginia on New Year's Eve (but his partner escaped) and charged him with defrauding the Embassy Suites Hotel by using two stolen $500 money orders to obtain cash. By the time the hotel discovered that the money orders were bogus, the two men had checked out of their rooms, but fortunately, the 29-year-old man had just returned to the hotel because he had decided to return and get his $20 room deposit back. He was arrested without incident.