Posted 8:03 PM by Gene

One of our true guilty pleasures is The Chicago Tribune's Web site's Mugs in the News. Yes, it is as advertised. The faces are fascinating. Most have guilty etched on their faces. Some look off to the side rather than straight at the camera; some rare ones smile (a la PILLHEAD), some pot growers look stoned. Remarkable is how more than a few of them bear the marks of crime like blotches of blood or scratch marks; no bruises, so the cops must be doing their jobs. A very very few of the whores look beddable, but most look like "You'd sleep with THAT?" And every mug has a story. This sorry tale says incontrovertibly that criminals is stupid:

David Sidener, in jail on murder charges, only wanted a little reciprocation from Cook County sheriff's investigators.

If they convinced prosecutors to drop his first-degree murder charge, he'd happily reveal the location of a makeshift gun, or "zip gun" stashed somewhere within jail walls.

But when the investigators rebuffed his proposition last month, the Evansville, Ind. man said something that stuck with them.

“This is not how I planned it would go,” Sidener told investigators as he was led back to his psychiatric ward jail cell, officials said in a news release. Sidener’s curious statement prompted an investigation that revealed that Sidener was behind a scheme that involved bullets and gunpowder being mailed to the jail's hospital, officials said.

Sidener was charged this week with two counts of possession of contraband in a penal institution, sheriff’s officials said. He was ordered held in lieu of $1 million bail Tuesday.

Yes, there are the unreadable tales -- scum who kill children -- but for the most part we guess patrons of Mugs in the News won't leave without a smile on their faces.