A man who robbed a bank in Kansas City told a federal judge at his sentencing on Tuesday that he had committed the crime in order to research the criminal mind.
John Stanley has a fair amount of research put together on that already, since he's already spent many years in prison for a variety of crimes beginning in the 1960s. And Stanley has in fact written and lectured about his criminal exploits, worked as a "crime consultant" to insurance companies, written a travel book based on living as a fugitive in Mexico, and hosted a radio show dealing with crime. But apparently his knowledge was getting a little stale, so he attempted to update it by robbing a bank in Kansas City in 2004. Officers caught him sitting in a car nearby, still counting his money, as his fake mustache hung from his upper lip.
"There are some things about crime you can't understand," he told Judge Fernando Gaitan, "unless you get into the belly of the beast." He told Judge Gaitan that he had robbed the bank for this very reason. Asked why he had acted in a manner that almost insured he would be caught, Stanley said he had done it "so I could be secluded and do the things I need to do [namely, research the criminal mind] while I still have the time."
Judge Gaitan gave Stanley another nine years to do intensive research.
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