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SWISSVALE, Pa. (CBS/KDKA) A Pittsburgh man wearing a blond wig, fake breasts, and clown pants was arrested after he robbed a bank at gunpoint.

Swissvale police chief, Greg Geppert, said Dennis Hawkins, 48, shoplifted a BB gun from a local Kmart, and then used it during the heist.

The suspect fled the bank with an undisclosed amount of money.

Shortly after police were called to investigate the robbery, they received a tip from a nearby gas station that a man fitting the description was attempting to steal a car, reports CBS affiliate KDKA.

Hawkins, apparently covered in red dye from an exploding dye pack, entered a woman's parked car. She quickly got out of the vehicle, took her keys, and alerted authorities.

Police arrived at the gas station to find Hawkins still sitting inside the vehicle.

"He would get my nomination for dumbest criminal, I think. Yeah, definitely different," said Swissvale Police Chief Greg Geppert, according to KDKA. "I mean, with the wig on, you still have his black facial hair with a blondish wig, definitely different."

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Left to Right: Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Jesse James & Charlie Bowdre. Photo believed to have been taken in New Mexico in 1879.

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Get Rich Quick with Charles Ponzi,

Carlos “Charles” Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who came to America seeking opportunity and fortune in the early 1900’s.  After a few decades of hard luck, Ponzi came up with a scheme that would make him millions through the arbitrage of international reply coupons.  If you are a person or company who sends letters overseas, and you want the person whom you’d sent the letter to mail a reply back, its often a good idea to pay that person’s postage with an international reply coupon.  An international reply coupon is a coupon that can be exchanged for stamps in any country no matter what the postage rates.  

In 1918 Ponzi found a way to buy international reply coupons for a discount from foreign countries, then redeem them for a profit in the United States.  Now if your wondering, “could you really make much money from buying and selling postage stamp coupons?”  The answer is, obviously not, but the international reply coupons were not the crux of Ponzi’s scheme.

Ponzi claimed that he was able to turn a 400% profit by trading international reply coupons, so much so that he convinced a number of people to invest in his enterprise.  An man with a silver tongue, he convince thousands of people to invest in his get rich quick scheme, which he called the “Securities Exchange Company”.  Part of the allure of Ponzi’s investment scheme was that he offered incredible profits; a 50% return on investment after 45 days, a 100% return on investment after 90 days.

So was Ponzi really turning a 400% profit by selling postage stamp coupons?  Of course not, the whole business was a huge scam.  Rather than truly investing the money of his clients, he simply pocketed the cash and paid off old investors with money from new investors.  So if a person invested $100 with a guarantee of a 100% profit, that person would expect a sum of $200 to be paid out.  What Ponzi did was pocket the $100, then convince three other schmo’s to invest $100 dollars each.  He would then take that $200 to pay off the first investor, while pocketing the other $100. The picture above shows how the scheme works, notice how it looks like a pyramid, and the base gets bigger with each cycle. This cycle would continue, with Ponzi pocketing thousands of dollars of investors money, while recruiting new investors bring more cash into the scheme so he could pay off other investors.  Thus no one would ever suspect that he wasn’t really investing in anything.

Today such a scheme is called a “Ponzi scheme” in honor of Charles Ponzi.  Conducting a Ponzi scheme is illegal and considered fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.  The reason why is because a Ponzi scheme is mathematically impossible to operate and destined to collapse.  As the scheme grows, the fraudster will need to recruit more and more new investors who are willing to invest greater sums of money to pay off old investors.  The fraudster will find that each wave of new investors has to be exponentially bigger than the last for the scheme to work.  Eventually, the fraud will find that he will need every man, woman, and child on the entire planet to invest all of their money in the scheme.  Needless to say, a Ponzi scheme is unsustainable.

By 1920, two years after he had began his scheme, Ponzi was living a life of luxury and making $250,000 a day.  However the cracks in his scheme began to show when he had difficulty paying off his investors.  This launched an investigation into his business.  During the investigation it was discovered that the US Postal Service was not selling international reply coupons to Ponzi.  Despite the discovery, Ponzi’s charm and silver tongue convinced many people to continue investing.  Finally in August of 1920 Charles Ponzi was in a situation where he had to pay off his investors, but he did not have any more money, nor could be recruit new investors to infuse more cash into the scheme.  Instantly, the entire scheme came crashing down.  The next day Charles Ponzi was arrested for fraud.  He plead guilty and spent 14 years in jail.  After his release he was again arrested for partaking in real estate fraud, and thus spent even more time in prison.  He passed away in 1949.  Thousands of people who invested in his scheme lost all their money.  Altogether Ponzi’s scheme lost his investors over $20 million.

Today the legacy of Ponzi continues.  In 2008, the wealthy stockbroker Bernard Madoff confessed to the authorities that his stock brokerage company was a giant Ponzi scheme.  Altogether losses from the Madoff’s Ponzi scheme amounted to a whopping $65 billion, the largest Ponzi scheme in history.  Currently Bernie Madoff is on year 6 of his 150 year federal prison sentence.

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Leonid Efimovich Minin (Ukrainian: Леонід Юхимович Мінін) (Born 14 December 1947) is an international arms trafficker. He was arrested on August 4, 2000 by Italian authorities in Cinisello Balsamo near Milan. Minin had been under surveillance since 1992 for his suspected illegal arms dealings, mostly to West African nations. He was sentenced to two years in prison in Italy.

He was born in Ukraine, but moved to Israel in the 1970s. In the mid-1970s, Germany arrested him for falsifying identity documents and he was suspected of theft of art. He moved to Bolivia, Switzerland, Germany, Monaco, and Italy. In the 1990′s he opened a timber business registered in Zug in Switzerland as well as offices in Monrovia in Liberia and Tel Aviv in Israel.

It is believed that his customers have included Liberian dictator Charles Taylor and the Revolutionary United Front militants in Sierra Leone. Police found documents regarding these transactions in Minin's belongings. The arms allegedly came from Aviatrend, a Russian company owned by Valery Cherny. The same Aviatrend has been involved in money laundering by Slobodan Milošević.

Nicolas Cage's character in the film Lord of War is a composite of Minin and another arms smuggler Viktor Bout.

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Joseph Aulisio, 15, center, is escorted to a court appearance by Lackawanna County sheriff’s deputies in connection with the 1981 slayings of 8-year-old Cheryl Ziemba and her 4-year-old brother, Christopher, of Old Forge, Pa. 

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Missing Female in Stellarton, Nova Scotia – Hayleigh Coady

Stellarton Police are asking for help to locate a missing person.

Hayleigh Coady was last seen on Sunday in the Stellarton area, and police say foul play is not suspected at this point.

She’s described as standing around 5’5″ with a slender build, with long, dark hair, and blue eyes.

A clothing description is not available and police have not released her age.

Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to contact Stellarton Police or Crime Stoppers

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Kelsie Schelling 

went missing from Pueblo, Colorado on the night of February 4, 2013, after driving there from her home in Denver to meet her boyfriend, Donthe Lucas. The 21-year-old was two months pregnant with the couple's child, a reported stress point in the relationship. 

Video released by the Pueblo Police Department shows Schelling’s black 2011 Chevrolet Cruze parked in front of a Walmart store around noon the following day. The vehicle had been left there overnight. The next day at 7:20 a.m., an unidentified man can be seen getting into Schelling’s car and driving away. The car was found abandoned a week later at Saint Mary Corwin Medical Center. 

In November 2017, tips led police to conduct searches in several different areas of Pueblo in connection with Kelsie’s case, but authorities told news sources they were unable to find anything of significance. 

On December 1, 2017, police arrested Donthe Lucas for the first-degree murder of Kelsie. Police said because the investigation remains active, they cannot provide details on what led to the arrest. 

Police have not announced if Kelsie’s remains have been found. If you have any information about Kelsie's case, please contact the Pueblo Crime Stoppers at (719) 542-7867.

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In 2008, Matthew Emmanuel Macon was sentenced to two life sentences without parole for the beating deaths of multiple women. In total, he is suspected of murdering six women, often times torturing and raping them before taking their lives. Most of his victims were middle aged and lived alone.

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Anthony McKnight was found guilty on five counts of murder for the deaths of young women and girls in East Bay in 1985. He also raped and sodomized some of his victims before stabbing them to death. McKnight was already serving a sentence for other crimes when linked to the murders in 2005. He was sentenced to death in 2008, and is on death row as of 2016.

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Ivan Hill, AKA the 60 Freeway Killer, was sentenced to death in 2007 for the 1990s murders of six women, all of whom were found dead along the Pomona (60) Freeway. His DNA later linked him to two additional murders. Most of his victims were also robbed and raped. As of 2016, Hill is on death row.

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Phoenix Coldon

College junior Phoenix Coldon was last seen on December 18, 2011, pulling out of the driveway of her family's home in Spanish Lake, Missouri. About three hours later, the 23-year-old’s car was found abandoned in East St. Louis, about a 25-minute drive from her home. The vehicle was still running with the keys in the ignition and the driver's door open, according to police. Phoenix's mother, Goldia Coldon, continues to do everything she can to search for her daughter, including posting to social media and rallying for coverage of Phoenix's case. The family continues to run the Facebook page 'Missing Phoenix Coldon'. 

If you have any information regarding Phoenix’s case, please contact the St. Louis Police Department at (314) 615-5400.

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A Louisiana man (bottom image) was sentenced to one year in federal prison  for using an underage relative to lure a Texas A&M University professor into a sexually explicit online relationship that led to blackmail, and ended when the educator leapt to his death from atop a campus parking garage.

Daniel Timothy Duplaisir, 38, had demanded in insulting, obscenity-laced tirades that James Aune (top image), chairman of the school's Communications Department, pay him $5,000 to cover the cost of therapy for a supposedly transgender teenage relative.

"If I do not hear from you, I swear to God Almighty that police, your place of employment, students all over the Internet - all of them - will be able to see your conversations, texts and the pictures you sent," Duplaisir said in one of several threatening messages as he sought payment from the professor.

But in a final act on Jan. 8, 2013, at 10:29 a.m. - less than three hours before Duplaisir was to go public - the 59-year-old professor promised justice.

"Killing myself now. And U will be prosecuted for blackmail," he said in a final message to Duplaisir.

Aune left his office and walked to a six-story garage.

Emotional statement

Before Duplaisir was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes at the federal courthouse in downtown Houston, Aune's widow gave an emotional statement in which she said no prison sentence could be long enough.

Miriam Aune said that she, along with her two sons who have autism, have been served a sentence of living the rest of their lives without Aune.

But she said she still had mercy for Duplaisir.

"I truly wanted to hate him, I tried very hard to hate him," Miriam Aune said of Duplaisir. "How much sadness there must be in this man's life ... how much anger there must be in his heart."

Miriam Aune said her husband confessed to her a week before he killed himself, and that she found it absurd that a man who was academically so brilliant could have so few street smarts that he was reeled in for a blackmail scam by a father who was supposedly outraged, but would take $5,000 to go away.

"The day he told me the story I laughed," she said. "If this was a plot on 'Law & Order'," you would kick the television. It was just unbelievable."

She now wishes she had somehow helped him come up with the rest of the money Duplaisir demanded, but that given the expense of caring for their sons, there wasn't any money left to give.

She conceded that there was a side to the man she had loved for decades that she did not know, and that she doubts she will ever again be able to trust anyone.

Aune struggled with alcoholism, she said, and had been forever changed by a bout with prostate cancer.

Bogus online profile

Much of the evidence that police used to track down Duplaisir came from the phone Aune had with him, as well as from his office computer.

Duplaisir's underage relative later told authorities that Duplaisir took nude photographs and videos of her, and that the two of them created an online profile that was used to send the images to various men.

Duplaisir would later contact them and say he was an outraged relative and that they owed him money to pay for therapy.

Aune never met her in person, and most of the communication that Aune had with her appears to have actually been with Duplaisir, according to court documents.

Duplaisir had begged for mercy in at least two letters to Hughes.

"Please do the right thing for everybody and put me in a mental hospital so I can begin long-term care," he wrote. "I need help to stop being so twisted up and lost in my own mind."

Lack of empathy

Before announcing punishment, Hughes noted that Duplaisir was not charged with causing the professor's death, but extortion.

"Mr. Duplaisir did not intend the death of his victim and he is not charged with that," Hughes said. "What you did do is wrong," he said. "It is not just illegal, it is a really bad idea."

Aune's widow later said that she wished Duplaisir had gotten the two-year maximum sentence.

"The reason I wanted two years is it is going to take a long time to teach him empathy because he doesn't have any," she said. "He can't feel for other people."

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A Texas man was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences after being convicted of filming the rape of a 3-month-old child.

David Vincent Akins, from was convicted last week of four counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child. The 38-year-old opted to let a judge, rather than a jury, render his punishment.

Akins was arrested in 2016 after his former landlord reported finding child pornography on his computer. Investigators determined Akins made images and videos of sexual acts with an infant between 1 and 3 months old.

Several other victims testified that Akins had raped or assaulted them when they were as young as 3.

The judge sentenced Akins to four life sentences to run consecutively and without the eligibility of parole. 

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Heather Elvis 

Heather Elvis  was last seen on December 18, 2013, near her Myrtle Beach, South Carolina apartment after a date. The 20-year-old was reported missing the following day. Heather’s car was found at Peachtree boat landing on the outskirts of town several days later. In February of 2014, more than a year after Heather's case captivated the nation, Sidney and Tammy Moorer were charged with murder and kidnapping in the case. Murder charges against the pair were later dropped. 

In August, Sidney was found guilty of obstructing justice during the December 2013 investigation into Heather’s disappearance and was given the maximum sentence of 10 years. He will be eligible for parole in 2019. Officials still say they will try Sidney on the kidnapping charge, but a new trial date has not yet been set. A trial date for Tammy has also not been set. Heather's body has not been found. 

If you have any information regarding Heather’s case, please call the Horry County Police Department at (843) 915-8477. 

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Despite active pursuits on social media for many years now, the families of five young men who went missing in the San Francisco, California area over the past several years still have few answers. Jackson Miller, missing May 15, 2010, Cameron Remmer, missing October 6, 2011, Shawn Dickerson, missing December 2, 2011, Crishtian Hughes, missing February 7, 2013, and Sean Sidi, missing May 21, 2013, all vanished from various areas of San Francisco without a trace. Leads and searches have unearthed virtually no clues in any of their cases, but members of every family have banded together to help in the search efforts and cope with their shared emotional pain. 

If you have any information regarding any of these five cases, please contact the San Francisco Police Department at (415) 558-5508. 

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Jessica Heeringa 

Jessica Heeringa was working alone at a gas station in Norton Shores, Michigan on April 26, 2013, when she disappeared. A witness told police he saw the 25-year-old mother being forced into a silver Chrysler minivan. Investigators found Jessica's cell phone, keys and purse inside the store. In September 2016, officials charged Jeffrey Willis, 46, with abduction and murder in relation to Jessica’s case; police told Dateline his trial date is expected to be set for Spring of 2018. He has pleaded not guilty. Willis still faces charges for the April 2016 abduction of a teenager who ended up escaping. Upon escaping, that victim led police to a van where, according to court testimony, investigators found bondage items and lists of women’s name and addresses. 

According to NBC affiliate WOOD-TV, investigators said they also found a file labeled “VICS” (short for victims) that contained a folder labeled with Rebekah Bletsch’s initials and a code for the date of her death. In November 2017, Willis was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and felony firearm in connection to Rebekah’s 2014 shooting death. Police told WOOD-TV there was also a file bearing Jessica’s initials on Willis’s computer. On November 27, 2017 Willis’s cousin Kevin Bluhm pleaded no contest to being an accessory after the fact in Jessica’s murder. Bluhm has been jailed since September 2016 on the charge. Jessica’s body has not been found. Police told Dateline they continue to do searches but have no leads as to her location. 

If you have any information regarding Jessica’s case, please call the Norton Shores Police Department at (231) 733-2691 or the Silent Observer at (231) 722-7463. 

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JAKE LATIOLAIS

It was the early morning hours of August 29, 2014 when Jake Latiolais told friends he was headed to West Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That was the last time anyone heard from the 22-year-old. Shortly after, police received an anonymous call about a person going over the railing of the Mississippi Ridge Bridge. Responding officers found Jake’s truck on the shoulder of the bridge. The truck was still running, and Jake’s cell phone was on the pavement next to it. A dive team was called in, but nothing of significance was found. Officials have not ruled out foul play. Family members insist Jake would not simply disappear on his own or take his own life. 

If you have any information regarding Jake’s case, please call the Baton Rouge Police Department at 225-389-3948.