Pizza man turns to pink mist

[Cyclonite]

Look at this recent attempt at a bank robbery gone wrong, I cant help but find humor in yet another example of darwin at work. The guy should have at least had some fun during his last moments since he could use the bomb as leverage to get what he wanted.



A pizza deliveryman told police he had been forced to rob a bank and asked authorities to help him just minutes before a bomb on his chest exploded, killing him.

On Saturday, federal agents and police in northwestern Pennsylvania were still trying to solve the bizarre case of 46-year-old Brian Douglas Wells, who died after the blast Thursday afternoon with law enforcement officers around him waiting for a bomb squad to arrive.

No one else was hurt in the explosion.

An Erie television station, WJET-TV, captured audio and video from Wells as he sat handcuffed in front of a state police cruiser, asking, "Why is nobody trying to come get this thing off me?" A state police spokesman confirmed Friday night that Wells had made a number of statements, including one that he had been forced to rob the bank.

From the television tape, it was clear that Wells was trying to indicate that someone had "started a timer" on the bomb under his T-shirt and that he had little time before the explosive detonated.

"It's going to go off," Wells said on the tape. "I'm not lying."

FBI Special Agent Bob Rudge called the case unusual, noting Saturday that while bank robbers may claim to have a bomb, they rarely do.

While no one has been arrested or identified as a suspect, Rudge said the investigation was "going extremely well." Wells' death was being investigated as a homicide and investigators were looking into Wells' background and the people he knew.

Linda Payne, who owns the property where Wells lived, described Wells as a private and trustworthy person who liked music and cared for three cats.

Her husband, who had been a pizza deliveryman, met Wells on the job and they developed a friendship, Payne said.

"I couldn't believe that he would rob a bank. He doesn't care that much about money," Payne said. "I think somebody lured him into that place delivering a pizza, dropped a bomb on him and sent him into the bank ... He would not have decided to do that on his own. He took care of things lawfully."

According to a police release, Wells went into a PNC Bank branch outside Erie about 2:40 p.m., producing an "extensive note" demanding money and saying he had an explosive device. He left with an undisclosed amount of money and got into his car, but police surrounded him a short time later in a nearby parking lot, getting Wells out of his car and handcuffing him, authorities said.

It was then that Wells told police he was wearing a bomb under his T-shirt and that it was going to explode. Seeing some kind of device under his shirt, police moved away from him and secured the area.

The bomb exploded at about 3:20 p.m.

Authorities obtained a search warrant for Wells' residence and took evidence away, but a state police spokesman refused to say what was taken. The evidence arrived at FBI laboratories in Washington, D.C., but Rudge could not say how long testing would take.

State police forensics teams searched for evidence in the area of a television transmission tower on Friday, near the address of Wells' last pizza delivery. It was not know what, if anything, they found.

Erie Chief Deputy Coroner Korac Timon said the explosion killed Wells. He said the bomb appeared to have hung from his neck over his chest and that he has been told it was of a "very sophisticated construction."

Bob Heibel, a former FBI agent with 25 years of service who lives in the Erie area, said he couldn't recall such an incident, noting that many bank robberies are "note jobs" in which the culprit may not even be armed.

"He is sent to a nonresidence. ... He goes where there's no house. Right from the beginning, there's certainly something suspicious here," said Heibel, who is now head of the Research Intelligence Analysis Program at Mercyhurst College in Erie.

He said a key to solving the case will be whether officials have the robbery note and, if it was written, whether it is in Wells' hand. Also a key, he said, is determining whether the bomb had a timer or a remote detonating mechanism.

[Arkangel]

BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3196055.stm) News site.

Now SOMEBODY musta videoed this - make sure it gets posted here if you see anything folks?

However, is this a tragedy for the guy, or is he a dickhead that fucked up?

[nbk2000]

Oh shit...I think I've done it again. :(

I seriously doubt that the pizza dude did the robbery of his own free will.

To quote a section from my DVD entitled "Tommorow Files":


Meat Puppets
I've borrowed the term Meat Puppets from a William Gibson book (forgot the title) which describes people who let their bodies be used for activities they wouldn't normally do (like kinky sex) while their conciousness is else where. In MY context, it means someone who'll be doing something they normally wouldn't do for fear of death or extreme pain because you're controlling them remotely.

You would obtain a "puppet" through some ruse. Perhaps one of those "Will Work for Food" people or a homeless person. You could also call a service that delivers or comes to your door, like a pizza delivery driver or taxi, and force them to put the control device on at gunpoint.


"Control device" is a euphemism for a combination electroshock-A/V monitor-bomb. ;)

Since I've been sending sections of my PDF to various people for review and commentary, it's entirely possible that one of them took the idea and put it into practice. :eek:

Not that I'd mind, far from it :), as long as they don't get caught! :D

This is actually a rather old idea that I saw in an old Readers Digest from the 80's. Seems some criminals in south america were strapping sophisticated bombs with anti-tamper devices onto rich people and setting them free to collect their own ransoms, in exchange for disarming info, before the bombs blew up after a certain period of time ran out if they didn't. :p

As you can see, the idea does work, and I'm so proud to see someone of like mind out there.

As long as s/he was careful in building the device, to not leave any fingerprints/DNA, and to use OTC components that are untraceable, then he's safe. I didnt' hear anything about the cops recovering the money. Hmmm...maybe they didn't...because the Master had already collected the money from the meat puppet?

From the picture, what little there is of it, I don't think the bomb to be very big. A few ounces, directly over the sternum, would be more than enough to do the job quite thouroughly.

To quote the puppet:


It's going to go off, I'm not lying.


And he was proven to be a man of his word! :p

I'm sure it'll be on Rotten.com ASAP.

[THErAPIST]

I guess it could be a good thing that he wasn't turned into a walking claymore like the dog-collar-people in swordfish eh? I'd be damn glad that more explosives weren't used if I were ona those bystandars though. Getting hit in the face with an arm could suck.

Good job NBK. Once again your imagination has proven to be quite interesting :D

[James]

I seam to recall reading something vaugely similar probably say 3/4 of the way through Neuromancer. Only in passing though, Molly (Millions) was telling (Henry Dorset) Case that she bought her claws with money she earned renting out her body. See also Burning Chrome and Creatures of light and darkness. There may be other stories containing such materia but I don't know of them.

[nbk2000]

The "Human Claymore" scene in swordfish was absurd!

People and cars doing mid-air somersaults...nigger, please! :rolleyes:

Plus, 20 pounds of C-4 and 15 pounds of ballbearings per hostage? How many hostages did they have? Do the math and you'll see that that's a hell of a lot of weight to be dragging into a bank on your back. And the ball bearings were WAY too large to be useful because their airdrag and inertia would limit their velocity.

Plus, the gurney ratio is all wrong. One part explosive to Four parts frag is optimal for such things. :)

For use as an HBC (Hostage Bomb Collar), you wouldn't want to use such massive charges, because RTPB "Plan for Failure" says that you must be able to survive an accidential discharge of an HBC in close proximity to you. 10 kilos of C-4 anywhere within 50 yards of you is not going to be healthy. ;)

You'd only have to use a few sub-gram charges of AP putty backing 3/8" steel shot to do the job. The charges are arranged in the collar so that the shot will be propelled into the hostages head. They'll expend most of their energy in penetrating the flesh of the neck/head, penetrating the skull bone, and have just enough left to rattle around inside the brain pan. :)

Anything that does manage to exit the skull will have little energy left, and will likely embed itself in the ceiling or wall, since I envision this being primarily used indoors, more likely than not.

If you used enough to pop the head off, than it'd also frag the collar, which would be bad for you if it went off anywhere near you. :(

I've attached an illustration I made to demonstrate the "head pop" method.

In this case, the meat puppet should have been rigged with a decent fragmentation charge and blown by remote when apprehended by the pigs. This would have made it seem like a cornered robber blew himself up to avoid capture, rather than a helpless victim coerced into commiting a crime by a criminal mastermind, and would have cooked some bacon to boot! :p

PS: The term "Meat Puppet" is used in both Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. A Google search pulls up all sorts of neat commentary on it.

[zeocrash]

hmm, the exploding collar seems awefully familiar to battle royale. 42 kids were put on an island with exploding collars on, they were given weapons and told to go out and kill each other. if they broke the rules, the collars exploded and killed them, if there was more than 1 of them still alive after 3 days the collars exploded.
i quote this for 2 reasons, firstly the exploding collars, and secondly the pizza delivery man's quote reminded me of the scene where the kid realises the bomb around his neck is going to explode. great film, kinda film NBK would like.
anyway, very small amounts of explosive positioned in front of the throat could easily be fatal.
edit: news just in (http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030901/FRONTPAGE/109010326)
sound's like his mate / pizza delivery coleague knew the address of the meat's fateful delivery. interesting that there is no obvious cause of death though. the one thign that did strike me as sloppy on the bahalf of the criminals was using a handwritten note in the bank robbery, unless they got the meat to write the note.

[THErAPIST]

Oh in swordfish I know it was quite unrealistic but I was more or less throwing the thought in. Just think about it though, something like that would have done more than just scare all the nearby cops (if the whole chest plate of explosive acted as a 2 direction claymore blasting away not only the carrier but any cop infront of the carrier). one mini more faced towards the carrier with 3 more facing away from the carrier would do a nice job of getting peoples attention since the pizza man in this case was likely facing the piggies.

I agree that a small pop-the-head-off-like-a-zit charge would be better if one was using a remote collar though. Small shaped charges placed in the collar like the mini AP shaped charges would do a good enough job of rendering someones neck pillar useless without penetrating the skull at all. Making a collar out of something like flexible plastic and using the collar itself as the shaping for the shaped charge would minimize damage to you if you were around also.

When thinking about the idea of a remote detonator, making the chestplate explosive into a claymore type device could be even better. Just wait for your meat puppet to turn in the direction of the person who you disliked the most and then hit the pretty button;)

[Nihilist]

NBK, you have clearly not seen the whole claymore scene from swordfish. When they rob the bank they drive through the front windows of the bank in hummer's that have all of their supplies in them. The hostages have to be able to move and walk around with the stuff on, since they have to be moved rather quickly when they leave the bank, so 80 pounds of ball bearing, isn't really practical. Another thing is that the ball bearings have to travel quite a long distance and at very high velocities, much higher than that of the average claymore, to do any real damage. Since the area has been cleared out of civillians, and most of the surroundings are office buildings. The explosives in this case were used more as a deterrent than as something that they would actually need to use, so planning for their own safety should one go off was not as important as the fear factor caused by the devices. Of course, cars doing somersaults in the air is still completely absurd no matter how you slice it.

[Flake2m]

There were 22 hostages taken in swordfish.
22 x 20pbs = 440pbs of explosive :eek: .
22 x 15 = 330 pbs of ball bearings
440 + 330 = 770pbs (346kg) of gear + dog collars and detonation gear. That is a shit load of gear to carry even for a hummer when you include people, weapons and other equipment.

If you wanted hostages as walking claymores then you'd be better to use suicide vests that have ball bearings and C4 instead of more crude explosives and shrapnel. 1kg of 10 or 12mm ball bearings and 5kg of C4 for each hostage would still be enough to do considerable damage plus the gear load has already been reduced to a third (132kg) without counting collars and detonation gear.

[Nihilist]

there were actually 3-4 hummer's used in swordfish so that works out to ~250 lbs of gear per car. Which is quite manageable.

[nbk2000]

Sounds to me like a darwin case now that the pizza mans friend is dead too.

Two losers come up with "The Perfect Plan" to rob a bank, that being of strapping a bomb that one of them constructs onto the other, who then goes into a bank and demands money. If caught, the guy says he was forced to wear the bomb by some criminal at gunpoint, and he's free and clear.

But, pizza dude doesn't know that his "friend" either set the timer short to kill him if caught, or thought there was more time left on the clock than there actually was. :p

If pizza guy had written a confession on his legs, detailing his crimey, then even if his crimey blew him up, pizza dude wouldn't have gone down alone, which would have been the smart thing to do. Though, if he was going to do the smart thing, he wouldn't have been wearing a bomb that someone else had made, right? :D

His partner, realizing what a snafu the whole thing was, OD's on pills to avoid going to prison and being bubba'd. :eek:

BTW, the cause of death in this case is so blazingly obvious (chest torn open by bomb), that to require the M.E. to state the obvious, shows how stupid the cops are.

As regards swordfish, even at 250lbs per hummer, that's still WAY too much weight to be dragging around. Oh, and Hummer's aren't exactly inconspicuous getaway vehicles, eh? ;) Naturally, it was a movie, and a good one at that...:rolleyes:

Flake, you got the ratios backwards. It'd be 5 kilos frags to 1 kilo HE. Though that's still too much. A claymore mine will do a number on you at 100 meters using only 700 grams of C-4 and a kilo of frags. The whole thing (HE/frags/det circuit/vest) should weigh less than 10 pounds, so it's easy for the hostages to wear, otherwise fatigue will make them slow,which makes you slow. Tsk, tsk.

[Nihilist]

NBK!!!! you must see the whole movie before commenting. They do not use the hummer's to get away. In fact the getaway is probably the coolest part of the whole movie!!!!!

[knowledgehungry]

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/regional/s_153015.html

More updates with picture of device, the explosive used was supposedly very rare, the bomb squad guy claimed to have only seen it once before in Bogota, Columbia. My guess is its not THAT rare just not very useful, I would imagine a good deal of us have dreampt whatever it was before. I'd still like to know what it was though.

[A-BOMB]

The thing looks like a big ass handcuff, and it looks like someone put a large amount of time into it 4 key lock and a combo I think thats a bit of over kill. I wonder what was the explosive?

[Haggis]

The media here said that it was a small pipebomb. Seems like it would be the easiest, but one cannot be sure because of the amount of work put with the complex collar. If there is a video somewhere of ignition/detonation, it would be easier to find our what it was.

[nbk2000]

In an interview Sunday with Fox News, Kenneth McCabe, special agent in charge of the FBI's Pittsburgh office, said he has seen the highly unusual type of explosive only once before, in Bogota, Colombia.

By "type of explosive", they didn't mean the actual chemical component of the bomb that explodes, but rather the style of device which, as I said, was south american in orgin. Journalists use explosive/bomb/device interchangeably, rather sloppy, but true.

I also believe I see a bit a dark red stain on the bomb collar in the picture. Might that be the remains of bloody brain goo from the victim they took it off of? :D

A-bomb, I think "headcuff" would be more appropriate, don't you? ;)

Boy, this story is getting interesting now, huh? :D

As usual, the quality of the journalism is amazing, complete with the usual quote from podunk cop about "I've worked X number of years and never seen this before, though I've seen many a man sqeal like a pig..." ;)

Oh, and the landlady saying how the dead dudes cats are traumatized after the FBI blew down the door to his house. :rolleyes:

[EP]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/09/04/pizza.bomb/index.html

[Haggis]

They are known as "cane guns" and were popular in the 1800's for gentlemen to ward off dogs and street vermin. A search of this name will bring up some information. http://www.desmort.com/cg.html

[wrench352]

You can see the video here:
crappy fox video (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96109,00.html)
although your warned about its graphicness they dont show the explosion however you do see the after effect or lack there of .it must have been a small charge you can see his body is largely intact and theres no real damage to the copcar.

[knowledgehungry]

The fact that the blast was so small leads me to believe that the people who constructed the bomb were expierienced in the field of explosives. The blast did exactly what it needed to do, which is the mark of someone who knows what they are doing. A typical mistake of amateurs is to do overkill, because they dont know how powerful the thing is that they are using, underkill is often a sign of inexpierience too, but this seemed just right.

[DBSP]

It's corect that it seemes that "just enaugh" explosives where used to complete it's task. And that that might point out that the one who constructed the device knew what he was doing.

However in this case the newbie mistake AKA overkill whouldn't have been to bad since it would probably messed the device up a bit more than the charge in this one did thus making it a lot harder for the piggies to get some evidence out of it.

If planned even a bit more tha charge could have been rigged to more or less selfdestruct upon detonation leaving very little evidence of the device to find.

Overkill isn't always bad, sometimes it's very good.

The device did it's job very well and killed the pizza guy, however a charge of the double size would have done the job just as well but it would have left less evidence behind..

[nbk2000]

I just heard that some dumb bitch in my state robbed a bank saying she was wired with a bomb and that the controller was outside.

She got the money, got caught, and was found to have a crouqet (SP? [knitting crap]) bundle and an electrical adapter wound around her.

:rolleyes:

Why do they even try? :p

[Jakio]

I have somthing that is claimed to be a video of the actual explosion; I'm not in a position to judge its authenticity, but it fits with the newcast photos and the scenario as far as I can tell.

Yahoo briefcase: jakio pw: tehwin ... 14 meg download...

[nbk2000]

Jakio, are you sure you got the password right? The account locked up after I tried twice to log in. :(

Remember, passwords are case-sensitive, so TeHwIn is not the same as tehwin, if that's the case.

[Jakio]

ehh, I'm officially retarded. Sorry 'bout that...

l: jakio50 pw: tehwin

here is a link to briefcase.... (http://briefcase.yahoo.com)

[Bert]

You have the video in a format I can't uncompress (.rar)

Anyone got it in a more common format?

[Nihilist]

erm....rar is VERY common(especially if you like warez:p ). www.rarlab.com

[kingspaz]

www.win-rar.com
40 day trial version. not sure if it still functions after the 40days or not. but it WILL function enough for you to uncompress that file now.

edit: dam NiHilist you just beat me :o

[Anthony]

.rar is a compressed file format like .zip, winzip might handle it, the version I have doesn't seem to associate with it. Or you could just download winrar, it was freeware last time I looked.

[Bert]

Bear with me, I know something about display fireworks,
not much about computer programs (much less 'warez')

I looked at the rar sites and didn't find the free trial
version. Don't wanna spend 30.00 on the whole hog just now...

[kingspaz]

http://www.win-rar.com/index.php?lang=eng&aid=dl&dl=wrar320.exe

[A-BOMB]

Try winACE it will uncompress anything and even though it is a demo it will work even past the 30day trial. www.winace.com

[Darkbloodpriest]

A copy of the corporate(non serial) version of winrar might just
mysteriously appear on the ftp...;)