Oops is now a criminal term

A.G.Sulzberger has an article in The New York Times about another guy who thought he got away with it:

As she listened to the outlandish story pour out, slightly slurred, from her new husband’s mouth, Jessica King dismissed the tale of his family’s two-decade run from the law as the product of an overactive imagination and too many drinks. The couple had been married two months, and now Lee King was telling her that his father, a balding local cable technician (photo), was actually an international fugitive who had staged one of England’s most infamous bank heists.
A few weeks later, on 28 December, all doubts vanished. That night, she said her father-in-law appeared at the newlyweds’ home, grabbed her arm and, leaning in to fix his eyes on hers, warned her to keep quiet. “I know you know,” she said he told her in his native British accent. “I will kill you. I will bloody kill you.” A day earlier, King, who recounted these conversations in an interview, had been shocked to discover that her husband’s claims might in fact be true.
Sitting at a computer with two friends who confirmed her account, she discovered an article about a famous 1993 robbery in England with a picture of the suspect, an armored car driver who made off with the equivalent of $1.5 million and disappeared with his wife and infant son, Lee, into the United States.
The man in the photo, identified as Edward Maher, was younger and thinner, with a full head of dark hair, but he was unmistakably her father-in-law, whom she knew as Michael.
After almost twenty years as a wanted man in England, the suspect the British tabloids called Fast Eddie saw his restless run from the law come to an unexpected end last week, his tale of international intrigue emerging in startling contrast to his ordinary life in this mostly rural corner of southwest Missouri.
In a few frenetic days the case was cracked, nearly botched, then brought to an unlikely close. Maher, who had prepared to flee after being accidentally tipped off about the investigation by a police officer, agreed to be taken into custody and acknowledged his real identity, according to court documents.
The distance between his worlds was brought into sharp relief when the Ozark police tried to notify their British counterparts, only to discover that their phone plan did not allow overseas dialing.
After years of tight-lipped caution, Maher, 56, was brought down by his talkative son, the 22-year-old King, who told his wife, she said, that he had been trained to lie as a child to protect the family. Despite that, several people say, King repeatedly shared his most carefully guarded secret, one so unbelievable that for years no one took him at his word. That changed on 6 February when King, increasingly terrified of her husband as well as his father, tipped off the local police about the family.
In an interview King denied his wife’s version of events, saying he learned about his family’s past only last week when his parents showed him his real birth certificate. That, he said, is how he learned his real last name was Brett, his mother’s last name, and not— as is tattooed on both his and his wife’s wrists— King.
But in the hours after learning that his father’s secret had been revealed, King sent his wife a barrage of irate text messages accusing her of telling the police, “things only you know”.  In one of the messages, which she shared to support her story, he lamented his own role in exposing his father. “It’s my fault,” he wrote.
The crime was as carefully executed as the escape. On 22 January 1993, the authorities say, Maher disappeared, along with an armored car he was driving for Securicor. It was found abandoned a half mile from Lloyds Bank in Felixstowe, on England’s east coast, emptied of £1 million in bills and coins. His wife and three-year-old son had already left for the United States. The money was never found. Once in the country the family moved constantly, King said, with stops in New Hampshire, Colorado, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Maher worked regular jobs, including eight years at Nielsen, the television ratings company. His wife, Deborah Brett, who introduced herself variously as Sarah or Barbara (sometimes she couldn’t seem to keep the names straight), raised the two children, including a second son, Mark, who was born in the United States and is now a teenager.By all accounts, the family was private and unusually tight knit. Maher was quiet, with a stern demeanor and a fondness for racial slurs. He seemed to intimidate his family, particularly his doting wife. They spoke rarely, and then only vaguely, about England.
About five years ago the family moved to Ozark. As the fastest-growing city in Missouri, swelling from 4,000 to 18,000 in two decades as it became a popular bedroom community for Springfield, it was an easy place for a newcomer to go unnoticed. Living in a drab housing complex, the family showed few signs of wealth. Maher worked as a broadband technician at Suddenlink, a cable company. Brett cleaned apartments for extra income.
Maher filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Almost $35,000 in debt— more than he earned in a year— he listed assets worth just $3,655, including a Mercury Mountaineer with more than 250,000 miles on it. (Brett once told her son’s fiancée that the family used to have more money, but lost it in the stock market.) The family, however, found unexpected fortune last September when King won $100,000 on a scratch lottery ticket, according to the Missouri Lottery.Meanwhile the celebrated case of Fast Eddie had gone cold in England. A story last month in The Ipswich Star, marking the start of his twentieth year on the run, suggested that it was unlikely that the police would ever catch “the man who committed the perfect crime”.
Even though no one seemed to be on the tail of his father, a growing number of aggrieved former girlfriends were tracking King. Each had similar complaints: he was controlling, physically abusive and an almost pathological liar.
Though he told each, early in the relationship, that his family was here illegally, his explanations varied. “He told me that his dad was an assassin,” said Kayla Jacoby, who had a daughter with King during their two-year relationship.
King, who has a history of pretending to be a decorated military officer, told the same story to Amanda Zignego, his former fiancée and the mother of two of his children, later threatening to kill her if she shared the secret.
When Hannah Evans, his next fiancée, broke off their engagement last September, citing his constant deceptions, he came clean. His father, he confessed, was actually Fast Eddie, a fugitive who, he said, had hijacked an armored car in England. “I thought it was another lie,” said Evans, who is nine months pregnant with his child. “And of every lie he had ever told me, that was the one where I had to laugh at him.”
King, who is also pregnant and currently living in a safe house, said she turned him in, though denied doing so in text messages to him, out of fear for her safety. There was a £100,000 reward in the case, but it is unclear whether the offer was still valid.
David Overcast, the police officer who skeptically took her statement last week, said King seemed nervous  about her safety as she laid out her allegations. “I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years and this, right off the bat, was one of the craziest,” Officer Overcast said.
When Maher learned that he had been exposed, he was irate, threatening to kill the informant, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. After vowing to run again, even spending the night at a motel with his wife and younger son, Maher said that he would not resist arrest, wrote Special Agent Jeffrey W. Atwood.
Maher is being held on federal charges of possessing firearms as an illegal immigrant. The court determined he was unable to pay for a lawyer. Conversations are under way about extradition, which could take months.
A week later, residents still shake their heads at the idea of an international manhunt ending in Ozark. “It’s kind of back to business as usual,” said the police chief, Lyle Hodges. “But it was pretty interesting there for a while.”

Rico says that they always screw up in the end...