THE CRIMINAL MIND AT WORK

 -- In February, police in Corpus Christi, Texas, said they planned to charge a
 34-year-old man in a spree of gumball machine thefts. They were tipped by the
 suspect's landlord, who said the man paid his weekly rent in quarters and that
 when he went to collect one week, he saw a huge pile of Jawbreakers on the
 floor. And Charles James Harding, 31, was arrested in January in Bountiful,
 Utah, and charged with stealing as much as $250,000 a year from vending
 machines (including some in the lobbies of police departments). Police had
 gone to a house seeking another man on a drug charge, but Harding was there,
 too, along with a large box of quarters whose existence neither man could
 adequately explain.

 -- Andre Garfield, 18, filed a $2 million lawsuit in February against the city
 of Rochester, N.Y., because police shot at him as he tried to escape after
 robbing six patrons of the Kim Ching restaurant in August. He pleaded guilty
 in November but nonetheless says the police were wrong to wound him in both
 arms.

 -- Dominic Potter, 19, was arrested for bank robbery and kidnapping near
 Longview, Texas, in February after his getaway car went out of control during
 a chase and crashed badly. A female hostage in the car was not seriously hurt,
 probably because she had fastened her seat belt, but Potter, who was not
 belted, was hospitalized with numerous facial injuries and a broken jaw. Among
 the wreckage was $119,000 taken in the holdup, plus a book entitled "The
 Perfect Crime," whose chapter on bank robbery had been well-thumbed.

 -- Ronald Eugene Cobb, 49, was arrested in the parking lot of the Old Kent
 Bank on Robbins Road in Grand Haven, Mich., in February. He had just robbed
 the bank but had admitted shortly afterward to a teller that he needed
 assistance in exiting because he was visually impaired. After delaying enough
 to allow the police to respond to a silent alarm, a bank employee helpfully
 escorted Cobb out the front door, and he was arrested a couple of minutes
 later.

 -- Rocky Griffith, 45, wanted in Missouri on a weapons charge, was arrested in
 Hancock County, Tenn., in February and charged with robbing a grave. According
 to Robert Trotter, the sheriff in Iron County, Mo., Griffith had a plan to
 fake his own death to avoid having to answer the weapons charge. First, he
 stole a body of a man about his own age. Then, he burned his house down with
 the body inside. Said Trotter, "(M)e, even a dumb country sheriff, I figured
 it out." First, they found the open grave, and then, when they didn't find a
 gun in the house (to indicate that Griffith had shot himself), it meant that
 Griffith wanted everyone to think he set the house on fire and sat there
 calmly as the fire roasted him at an excruciating, hell-like temperature until
 he died.