The most effective crimes, like business deals, take a lot of planning.
You have to consider the eventualities and anticipate the unexpected.
There may, therefore, have been insufficient aforethought in the cell-phone scheme of newly convicted thief Florin Constantin.
Constantin, 28, who arrived in England from Romania earlier this year, used a unique means to store multiple cell phones. He wore a pair of specially-designed leggings beneath his pants.
As the Daily Mail reports, he then headed to the Waterfront bar in Norwich to allegedly help steal as many cell phones as possible from the unsuspecting.
All, apparently, went quite well, as he stuffed phone after phone down his pants and into his leggings.
But he'd overlooked one small human trait. When people lose their cell phones, one of the things they do is borrow a friend's phone to call their own number. Just in case, you know, it happens to be nearby.
And so it was that Constantin's pants began constantly ringing.
Staff at the bar had already been alerted by victims of these thefts. So when they saw -- and, more importantly, heard -- a man whose pants played tunes of various descriptions, they quickly figured out who the alleged culprit might be.
The judge didn't offer a ringing endorsement of the crimes. Constantin was sentenced last week to three months in jail.
If only he'd switched the phones to silent, he might have gotten away with it.