When does a prank turn into a crime?

By BRUCE RUSHTON
STAFF WRITER

Published Sunday, March 18, 2007

The law has little sense of humor. Just ask Gabriel Bruno.

The Rhode Island sheriff's deputy was a year away from retirement in 2002, when he was charged with felony vandalism and fired after leaving fake deer feces in the bathrooms of two judges.

The incident is an example of a practical joke that led to serious consequences. There are plenty of other cases in which someone's idea of a prank led to tragedy.

A judge in Ohio last year sentenced two high school football players to 60-day jail terms after they pleaded guilty to putting a fake deer on a country road and watching as motorists swerved to avoid it. One motorist crashed and suffered a broken neck; his passenger sustained brain damage.

There isn't much debate that a prank that injures someone or results in property damage is a crime.

But what about toilet-papering someone's house? Tossing an egg on an unoccupied car and causing no permanent damage? Did California Institute of Technology students break any laws when they engineered one of the greatest pranks in collegiate history: Swapping instructions left on thousands of spectators' seats so that cards held up at halftime of the 1961 Rose Bowl spelled out "Caltech?"

The answer could be "yes" in all of these cases, at least in Illinois.

Under state law, if someone is alarmed or disturbed, a prankster can be charged with disorderly conduct. If the person whose car is egged or whose house is covered in toilet paper reacts angrily, someone could go to jail, at least in theory.

"Really and truly, it comes down to the targets of these pranks - it doesn't cause any damage, but it alarms and disturbs you," said Sgt. Pat Ross, spokesman for the Springfield Police Department.

By that measure, the Caltech students whose halftime prank was captured on national television could be considered criminals. The University of Washington marching band was alarmed and disturbed enough that it stopped playing as the stadium fell silent. Washington fans were supposed to continue flipping cards, but shocked cheerleaders aborted the routine.

While such stunts might arguably be breaches of peace under the law, first assistant state's attorney Steve Weinhoeft observed that Sangamon County has no football stadiums large enough to accommodate these kinds of tricks. He chuckled when asked what he would do if he was the prosecutor in a town where football fans were tricked into holding up the wrong cards.

"There are issues of prosecutorial discretion," he said.

Even when a prankster crosses the line into criminal activity, the response isn't an automatic trip to jail. Ross chooses his words carefully when asked what he would do about someone caught toilet-papering a yard.

"We have to keep it in perspective," Ross said. "Quite frankly, me, using discretion, if I was to come across someone toilet-papering someone's tree, I would probably stop them. I would warn them that what they were doing is questionable, then I would knock on the door and ask the homeowner what course of action they would like to take. I would probably recommend that the kids clean the mess up."

Because the target's response decides whether a prank is just fun or something else, and because human reactions can be impossible to predict, Dr. Stephen Soltys, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, recommends that practical jokes be avoided.

"Humor at the expense of someone else is not humor," said Soltys, who specializes in child psychiatry. "A lot of people say, 'I was just teasing.' You have to realize that teasing is one of the first signs I see of aggression."

Even when targets appear to be good sports, they might not be laughing inside, Soltys said.

"They may be offended by it and feel obligated to put on the face of a good sport, but feel resentment at what was done," Soltys said. "You step over the line, you've either alienated someone or you've got legal problems."

Larry Rife, a professional prankster, is willing to take the risk.

Rife, who lives in Des Moines, Iowa, pulls jokes on people for money. But he has standards. He won't, for example, deliver black roses to your ex-wife to mark a divorce-that's not a prank, he says, that's malicious.

"What kind of feeling do you want to invoke?" Rife said. "Do you want them to be upset? That's not a prank. Do you want them to be smiling? Then it's a prank."

What Rife will do is figure out the best way to pull a joke on your spouse, co-worker, best friend or anyone else who might benefit from a practical joke, usually to mark a birthday or some other special occasion. He says he has to be certain that the person will ultimately enjoy the joke, so he asks about their sense of humor. And he won't agree to a workplace prank unless management is informed. It's never fun if the prank ends with someone getting fired.

When he posed as a person who was loudly threatening a restaurant owner with a lawsuit, the waiters and nearby diners all knew it wasn't for real, Rife said. The owner was a good enough sport that he gave Rife a free lunch.

A hotel employee who was tricked into thinking she'd lost a quarter-million dollar account was a prankster herself, the junior-high sort who puts Vaseline on doorknobs, so she was fair game, he said. In that case, the employee's manager hired Rife, saying he wanted the woman to be so fooled that she would never pull another prank again.

Rife said he turns down a fair amount of business.

"It's usually along the lines of 'I just won a lawsuit against you and want to shove it in your face'- that, we'll never do," he said.

"If your ultimate objective is to make them smile when it's all said and done, to put them in a better mood when it's done than when you started, you're probably not going to cross a line."

Bruce Rushton can be reached at 788-1542 or bruce.rushton@sj-r.com.

Brick wall prank at SHG took a lot of brain power

By BRUCE RUSHTON

STAFF WRITER

Successful tricksters agree: Look before you prank.

Careful preparation can avert a trip to jail or a prank falling flat. And a good prank can teach you things you never thought you’d know.

Marc Lim, for instance, knows that the main entrance of Sacred Heart-Griffin High School is 22 feet wide and 101/2 feet high. He knows this because he and some friends put fake bricks across the entrance to mark the end of their senior year in 2004.

“Up to that point, there was no tradition of a senior prank,” said Lim, who was the valedictorian of SHG’s class of ’04. “There were things that, for want of a better word, were stupid. Someone would throw a stink bomb or a can of trash.”

Lim and his friends wanted to do something clever that couldn’t be misconstrued as mean-spirited or destructive. At first, they thought they’d build the wall out of real bricks, but gave up that idea after finding out they would need several tons of material. They settled on sheets of Masonite, a wood-fiber material, with a brick veneer that looked like the real thing, only much lighter.

They wired the school’s doors shut so that no one would open them from the inside and topple the fake wall. They put pads and protective sheeting over the glass entryway so nothing would be damaged. They taped over nearby lights so no one would see them at work in the wee hours. And they brought walkie-talkies and posted lookouts in case of passing police.

“The point wasn’t to damage the school or to vandalize anything,” Lim said. “It was to have people come to school the next day and find a big brick wall where there used to be an entryway.”

The group finished at 3 a.m., and the plot worked perfectly, at least for a while. Early arrivers were mystified.

“Some people got really confused and started circling around the building, trying to figure out what had happened, trying side entrances,” Lim recalled. “There was one teacher who thought she had maybe taken too many medications that morning.”

But it didn’t last. School officials dismantled the wall before most students arrived at 8 a.m., and then administrators acted as if nothing had happened.

Still, Lim considers the prank a success.

“Enough people saw it and enough people knew about it that I was satisfied,” Lim said.

School officials quickly figured out who had built the wall.

“It was meticulous enough and anal-retentive enough that there was a small group of students who would be willing or able to do it,” Lim said.

But no one ’fessed up until diplomas were safely in hand, and perhaps with good reason.

SHG officials declined comment on pranks, saying they don’t want to inspire anyone.

Nearly three years later, Lim - who is studying biomedical engineering at Northwestern University - still laughs when he recounts the trick. It’s one of his favorite high school memories.

“Honestly, it was a great bonding experience between me and my friends,” he said.

Bruce Rushton can be

reached at 788-1542 or

bruce.rushton@sj-r.com.

Some good, some not so good pranks

Some pranks work better than others, and some don’t work at all. Here are some pranks that proved immortal and hurt no one:

Arm The Homeless: Conceived in 1993 by Ohio State University students who wanted to draw attention to homeless issues, the hoax involves a phony charity that says it is distributing free guns and ammunition to the destitute. The Columbus Dispatch, CNN and Rush Limbaugh were all taken in by the prank, which included Santa Claus collecting donations at a mall. The prank has been repeated at least twice, most recently by Phoenix New Times, an alternative newspaper in Arizona. On April 1, 1999, the paper published a phony hot line number for the pretend charity and received as many as three calls per minute, including queries from radio stations, The Associated Press and “60 Minutes II.”

The Taco Liberty Bell: Taco Bell took out full-page ads in major newspapers on April 1, 1996, to announce that it had purchased the Liberty Bell, which would henceforth be called the Taco Liberty Bell. Thousands of outraged people called the National Park Service, the bell’s caretaker, while the White House joined the joke by telling the media that the Ford Motor Co. was buying the Lincoln Memorial and re-naming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial. Taco Bell had the last laugh. Sales on April 1 and 2 that year were $1.1 million higher than the previous year.

Veterans of Future Wars: Inspired by legislation that allowed World War I veterans to collect $1,000 service bonuses, Princeton students formed an organization called Veterans of Future Wars, which allegedly was aimed at getting bonuses for young men who would fight in yet-undeclared wars.

Enter As Often As You Wish: Students at the California Institute of Technology took that notion to heart in a 1975 contest sponsored by McDonalds, which said it would accept as many entries as contestants wished to submit in a sweepstakes that offered a sports car, a year of free groceries, cash and McDonalds gift certificates as prizes. The students printed 1 million entries and stuffed entry boxes in nearly 100 restaurants. They won the car, $3,000 and $1,500 in gift certificates. They donated the car to charity, paid a tax debt and the cost of the contest with the cash and, being college students, kept the gift certificates for themselves.

Some pranks raise the question: What were they thinking?

University of Virginia students in 1965 put a calf atop the school’s famous rotunda building. The calf died of shock, dehydration and a tranquilizer overdose shortly after it was taken down. The stunt went unsolved until 1997, when Alfred Berkeley III, president of the Nasdaq stock exchange, confessed that he and four fraternity brothers had done the deed. Berkeley donated $1,765, the amount spent to investigate the incident, to an EMS squad at the request of the local sheriff.

Gray Dawg, the mascot for Southern Illinois University, thought it would be funny to grab cheerleaders from the University of Tennessee-Martin at a football game and pretend to kidnap them. When fans started booing, Grey Dawg pulled down his shorts and mooned the crowd, although, thankfully, what he exposed was shaggy. The student in the costume was suspended for two games.

Inspired by a scene in “National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation,” Paul Michael Goobie tied a dead Chihuahua to a friend’s truck in 2004 in Broward County, Fla. The friend was deaf and, oblivious to shouts and honking by horrified onlookers, drove for two miles before he stopped. Goobie was charged with unlawful disposal of a dead animal.

Billy Peixotto, a senior at Prosper High School in Texas, was charged with felony criminal mischief for helping spray-paint “Prosper Sr. 2000” on the town water tower the night before homecoming in 1999. But Peixotto went on to serve with the Marines in Iraq, winning the Bronze Star in 2003 for extinguishing a fire in a blazing tank and pulling his comrades to safety.

Ellie