Saturday, June 03, 2006

Back with a little jailhouse gossip...

On a tip from an elderly inmate the FBI recently spent two weeks digging at a farm in Michigan looking for Jimmy Hoffa. For those of you too young to remember, Hoffa was a union leader who disappeared in 1975 and is believed by most people to have been killed by the mob.

One estimate puts the cost of this little "excursion" at about $250,000. All because of something said by an elderly prison inmate, but hey, if you can’t trust an old jailbird whom can you trust? So, I decided to delve deeper into the gold mine of knowledge possessed by the old geezer segment of the prison population and this is what they had to say…

That was not the real John Dillinger that the authorities killed in 1934. Dillinger quietly retired from his life of crime and used his ill-gotten gains to pursue his life long dream of opening an ice cream parlor in Bayonne New Jersey.

The Hindenburg disaster was no accident. The zeppelin was actually blown up by an escaped mental patient, who as a child had seen his father (an overly ambitious purveyor of helium filled balloons) overload himself with his merchandise one windy day, rise high into the air never to be seen again. The lunatic was eventually returned to the asylum after he was caught at the Thanksgiving Day parade trying to puncture one of the floats with his teeth.

Apparently, famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart was a man. A shocking revelation to most people, but no one was more shocked that the old inmate who told me that he found out one boozy night in 1932 that the "cockpit" of Amelia’s plane was more aptly named then he could have imagined.

One of the oldest inmates, a man nicknamed "Lumpy" due to the countless blows on the head he has received during his decades in prison, claimed that the Great Train Robbery never really happened. He went on to say " I mean, even if you could steal a whole train, what are you gonna do with it?"

I think I’ll file that one under dubious. Anyway, I’m off to see if I can get the FBI to look into any of these or at least give me the money and let me look into it for them. Hey, anything for justice.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back!!! My question is this: Why does our government care where Jimmy Hoffa's bones may or may not be? Will life as we know it change if we one day we find out that instead of being buried with the fishes or the earth worms in the end zone of Giants Stadium he has, all these years, been decaying beneath a horse farm? But then...what do I know?

Raymond Betancourt said...

Thanks Joel, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the popularity of the Sopranos had something to with this.

The next thing you know, they'll be dragging Bob Dylan in for questioning because of that song he wrote about "Crazy Joe" Gallo thirty years ago.

Anonymous said...

i always suspected amelia would have been more aptly named "armande".

my question is this: if dillinger didn't actually die that fateful day in chicago, whose penis was preserved in that jar that's been in the basement at the smithsonian all these years? (just wonderin'...)

WELCOME BACK! you were missed!! : D