by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I was raised to believe in buried treasure. I was an asthmatic child and Mom read to me a lot. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson was one of my favorites. Pirates and parrots and treasure, oh my!

And TV made it appear that there was likely to be buried treasure at the edge of any body of water bigger than the high school pool. There were pirate dramas on all the time.

And movies? When I saw Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate, I pestered my mother, who was a first-class seamstress, to make me a pair of red striped pantaloons like the hero wore.¹ She declined, sending me into a spiral of disappointment that has reached what I hope is its nadir with the Angels and the American electorate.

Nor was it just pirate treasure. Unexpected treasure was a popular theme of the time, and food could be a source of such treasure. I often badgered Mom into buying the cereal with the best toy inside. I wolfed down my crackerjack² looking for the prize. See’s Candies did not individually identify their chocolates so once my favorites were gone, every one left in the box was a search for treasure.³

Apparently I was not alone in my fascination with the idea of food treasure. A reader⁴ sent me a story about smugglers hiding meth in watermelons. According to the story, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at the Otay Mesa Commercial Facility seized more than $5 million worth of methamphetamine disguised and concealed within a shipment of watermelons last Friday.” Wow. Definitely a step up from the Captain Midnight Decoder Ring in my Frosted Flakes.

And definitely a step up for smugglers. In 2003, the Times of London gave me its Judicial Wisdom of the Year Award. The sentence that won the award for me related to a smuggling case. I said, “There is no non-culpable explanation for monkeys in your underpants.” (It was obviously a slow year for judicial wisdom.)⁵

But in the two decades since, it appears smugglers have made an evolutionary leap forward. This watermelon ploy isn’t just a better idea. This isn’t just replacing underpants with a roomier track suit. This is dinosaurs developing feathers for warmth. This is the smuggling equivalent of opposable thumbs.

Watermelons! Who thought the Border Patrol would check watermelons? Talk about something that DOES NOT look suspicious.

I was impressed. As a prosecutor, and then as a criminal courts judge, I occasionally ran across a defendant whose ingenuity seemed commendable even if his goals and methods were not. I remember thinking more than once, “If this guy had put the same level of thought and effort into legitimate enterprise, he’d be a Fortune 500 CEO.”⁶

But meth in watermelons?! That’s not just an improvement on the basic idea, that’s orders of magnitude better. I wanted to find the guy who came up with this idea and buy stock in him.

Then . . . sigh . . . I saw the picture.

The picture that ran with the story made it clear I was not seeing the work of some modern age Professor Moriarty. This was not a case of misdirected genius, it was a case of badly underestimating your opponent—never a good idea if the opponent has the power to put you in prison.

According to the caption that ran with the story, the photo showed “disguised watermelons.” That, of course, was an error. Disguised watermelons would have been watermelons wrapped in rabbit fur or alligator skin—something to keep you from recognizing them as watermelons. This was disguised meth.

But it wasn’t disguised well. What the smugglers had done was mix a bunch of watermelon impersonators—papier-mâché watermelons—in with real melons.

The impersonators looked about as much like real watermelons as a football looks like a tangerine. The hardest part about making these arrests was probably keeping a straight face as you read them their rights.

If your third-grader had tried to make a watermelon using construction paper and sharpies, she would have gotten a C+ from a kind teacher. But these guys got an F from the Customs and Border Protection graders. F for Felony.

I hate to see a good idea botched like this. It could have been done so much better.

They could have used better materials: plastic rather than paper. They could have hired artists.⁷ They could have hollowed out real watermelons. Yeah, that’s time consuming, but how much time do you think they wasted constructing enough paper melons to hold 4,587 pounds of meth?

That’s right. This was more than two tons of meth. Five million dollars’ worth, remember? For that big a crime it was worth buying a few of the pumpkin carving sets they sell every Halloween and putting in a little effort. Clearly, these people were not CEO material.⁸

Nor is the woman⁹ recently sentenced to nine years for embezzling 1.5 million dollars from an Illinois school district. Her modus operandi was more in the monkeys-in-your-underpants school of crime than the meth-in-your-watermelons school. She stole 11,000 cases of chicken wings.

Nope. Not a typo. Eleven thousand cases of chicken wings.

In eighteen months, while serving as Food Services Director for Harvey School District 152, she bought over a million dollars worth of chicken wings and then resold them. The wings never made it to the schoolchildren.

Which is a good thing. I mean, you don’t give chicken wings to a bunch of fourth graders. Not unless you’re trying to break the Guinness World Record for most lawsuits filed against a school district in one semester.

That’s what makes this an iron-age level scam. As the indictment pointed out, chicken wings are “an item that was never served to students because they contain bones.”

Hello!?!?! You might as well have billed the district for “watermelon flavored meth.” Sooner or later, somebody was going to look at the invoices and say, “What? We’re giving chicken wings to grade-schoolers?”

You gotta have an exit strategy here, folks. If you’re actually going to bill the district for chicken wings, you do it once and then buy a one-way ticket to Belarus or Venezuela or someplace else where you can pay cash for the rest of your life. You don’t file more than one invoice for “chicken wings for nine-year-olds” any more than you throw the same pitch over and over to Shohei Ohtani.

Remember the David Letterman Show? When he used to do Stupid Human Tricks? This is the criminal equivalent of Stupid Human Tricks.

Which shouldn’t surprise me. Lord knows, there’s no shortage of stupid humans. I just wish they wouldn’t keep clogging up our courts. We need those courtrooms for the things the CEOs think up.

Where’s the Crimson Pirate when we need him?

BEDS NOTES

1. Google Crimson Pirate and watch the trailer; it’ll be time well-spent.
2. There is no “s” in that word. The plural is the same as the singular. Look at the Crackerjack box and start singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” correctly.
3. Still is.
4. No, you are not the only one.
5. And monkey smugglers.
6. Which would be almost as good as going straight.
7. Or more talented third-graders.
8. In case you’re wondering, the definition of CEO material is someone who has previously served on a corporate board of directors and voted to pay the CEO 15 million dollars a year in hopes of someday getting the job himself. (No, not “or herself.” This is America; we don’t put women in charge of anything we can give to a less-qualified man.)
9. No less-qualified men available.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.