Without a doubt Britains dumbest robber.....
An optimistic robber who thought he could hold up shopkeepers with a banana was jailed yesterday after his second attempt ended in farce.
Robert Downey's harmless weapon was so badly disguised in a plastic bag, which revealed both its colour and tell-tale bend, that his victims carried on chatting as he screamed: "I want the money or I will effing shoot you."
The 24-year-old drug addict was sentenced to seven years after Southwark Crown court heard that his futile assault on a bookies followed a similar raid for which he was jailed five years ago. He was arrested this time within minutes of fleeing the bookies in frustration, still struggling to get off his balaclava mask because it was too small.
Downey was told by Judge Paul Dodgson that the fruit gun had at least saved him from a life term, because it was so absurd that no one had been frightened. Patrick Cahill, prosecuting, said that there had been virtually no reaction when Downey poked the plastic-wrapped banana under the security screen at William Claridges bookmakers in Tower Hamlets, east London.
Betting clerk Peter Humphrey simply turned to a colleague and said: "He says he has a gun, but then it might be a banana." Downey, who was desperate for money to buy crack cocaine, fell back on pretending he had another gun in his pocket, but this was all too obviously a small pair of scissors.
"They were shiny and metallic and he pointed them from his pocket," said Mr Cahill. "But then, realising that no money was going to be handed over, he ran out of the shop."
Downey was found shortly afterwards by police, not far from his abandoned banana. The court heard that he had tried to hide it 100 yards away but a police dog sniffed it out, badly bruised and still in its plastic bag.
Judge Dodgson told Downey who admitted attempted robbery and possessing an imitation firearm: "It may seem comic now, but it was not quite so comic when you claimed that you had a gun. Your victims guessed what it really was, but by trying to raid that shop in that way, albeit with a banana, you put yourself at risk of an automatic life sentence."
Rajiv Menon said in mitigation for Downey that the raid was so ridiculous and incompetent that no damage had been done. "It was a banana, not even a plastic gun, or something that even looked like a gun." The judge agreed that these were sufficiently "exceptional circumstances" for a life term to be avoided.
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