Too Much For a Hooker

A young white guy came to the station to report he'd been robbed. He claimed meeting a black man on Saunders Street, at a convenience store, and giving the guy a ride. At some point the man demanded he take money out of his ATM. He said the man intimated harming him if he failed to do so. His story was "iffy" at best, but due to the serious allegations, detectives had to treat the case like he was truly a robbery victim.

The man's car was printed by a CCBI technician. Detectives went to every store the man visited throughout the day. This took quite a bit of time. Two days later detectives had collected all evidence and reviewed the tapes. The video painted a different story. The white guy was visible in every shot, and he didn't look like a victim. He looked like someone hanging around with a friend. This led detectives to believe he had some unspoken motive for reporting the crime in the first place.

He was given a polygraph test and failed miserably. It was at this point, three days into an investigation and no less than forty man hours, that he decided to come clean. The real story is as follows:

He was at a convenience store on Saunders Street when he suddenly had an epiphany. He'd never had sex with a prostitute before. Some sort of "Pretty Woman" scenario played out in his head. How wonderful would that be? Then came the conundrum every potential "John" is faced with, "How does someone broker such a deal?" That's when he noticed a black guy hanging around the pay phone next to the store. This street ruffian must know how to go about such things, he thought.

"Hell yeah I can get you some ass, boy!"

He was as happy as a pig in mud. The man said all he had to do was come up with five hundred bucks and they could do business. At this point the black man got inside dummy's car and the two of them drove to the bank teller, where dummy withdrew five hundred bucks and gave it to the guy. The black man then had the white guy chauffeur him around town for several hours, running numerous personal errands, before hopping out of the car at a stop light, leaving the white guy in the middle of downtown Raleigh, much poorer.

He figured he could get even with the trickster by reporting it to the police. I guess he envisioned us rushing out to retrieve his hard earned money and then locking up the bad guy. Instead, the white guy went to jail for filing a false police report and had to call his mommy to get bailed out.