Armed robbers in Sydney, Australia, picked the wrong target when the raided an Australian bar where a biker gang was holding a meeting.

Machete-wielding masked bandits burst into the Regents Park Sporting Club there and ordered people at the bar to lie on the floor.

But the robbers failed to notice 50 members of the Southern Cross Cruiser Club enjoying a drink in the next room, reports the Sydney Morning Herald, a newspaper there.

“Fifty of us jumped out of our seats and raced out to the main bar,” said club president Jerry ‘Jester’ van Cornewal.

Biker club founder Noel ‘Bear’ Mannix added that the robbers appeared to be regretting the heist as soon as they saw the bikers.

“It was very hard to see the expression on their faces because of the balaclavas, but I imagine it was something along lines of ‘Oh (expletive), what have we done here?’,” he said.

One of the robbers charged through a locked glass door, leapt off a 16-foot balcony and ran through a bowling green to escape.

The other ran through an exit behind the bar but members of the gang ran around the back and caught up with him.

“He came out the door wielding what I thought was a tire lever, but was actually a samurai sword. I raced in and tackled him to the ground, footy-style, onto the concrete,” van Cornewal said.

They tied up the man and waited for police to arrive. Police soon also located the second robber nearby. A 20-year-old man and a 16-year-old, neither of whom were identified, were charged with attempted robbery.

It’s amazing what extremes a criminal can go to in an attempt to escape the cops. 

A man in Rockford, Tennessee, found out the hard way that February in the mountains of the eastern part of the state isn’t the best time to try to hide from the long arm of the law underwater. The Blount County Sheriff’s Office says that the man, identified as 33-year-old James Earl Jett, fled an accident in Rockford after deputies learned that the truck he was driving was reported stolen.

Jett was found by a K-9 unit in the nearby Little River, which flows from Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Only his face was above the surface, with his body hidden by a submerged tree.

The high temperature there on the afternoon of February 27 was 34 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1.1 degrees Celsius, for our readers who are used to the metric system) with a dusting of snow.

According to authorities, Jett refused to get out of the water and had to be “manually extracted.” He was treated for hypothermia at a local hospital and released.

After that, Jett was arrested on a charge of leaving the scene of an accident and is expected to be charged in Knox County in the theft of the truck.

Police in Palistow, New Hampshire, say that the same man tried to rob the same bank,  wearing the same clothes and telling employees the same thing on February 26 as he did two weeks before. The only difference was the outcome.

In the first robbery, the robber got away with an undisclosed amount of cash from the Sovereign Bank branch. On his second attempt, tellers refused to give him money and he left empty-handed.

Police and bank employees say that it was the same guy. The robber said that he had a gun and demanded money both times.

Witnesses told police that the man got away in a Black Chevrolet Avalanche with New Hampshire license plates containing the numbers 223.

All that a man in Cheyenne, Wyoming, wanted was his final paycheck in the mail.

So the man, identified as 20-year-old Eric Livers, called up his coworkers at an auto shop there where he used to work and gave them his new address — 1,738 miles away from the halfway house that police said that he’d fled.

The auto shop called the local sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s office got in touch with police in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and that’s where police arrested Livers on February 20.

“That’s how they found him,” said Melinda Brazzale, a spokeswoman for the Wyoming Department of Corrections. “Crazy, huh?”

Police in New Hampshire also arrested another man, identified as 19-year-old Matthew Boyer, who they say joined Livers in walking away from the Cheyenne Transitional Center on January 25.

Not that New Hampshire police didn’t need to do their own detective work.

After showing up at the apartment of Livers’ cousin, police talked to Boyer without knowing that he was wanted as well, Portsmouth police Sergeant Frank Warchol said.

“He was kicked loose,” Warchol said.

But according to Warchol, police got a cell phone number from a woman who was with Boyer. After finding out that Boyer was wanted, he said that they called her and worked with the phone company to track down Boyer about 15 miles away in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Warchol said that police there found Boyer hiding in the closet of a home where the woman had been staying.

Meanwhile, back in Portsmouth, police there got a tip from the city bus depot that a man resembling Livers had bought a bus ticket to Florida and had signed “Eric Livers” on the paperwork. The bus was scheduled to leave at noon.

“We put some undercover detectives in the bus kiosk to wait for the bus at noontime,” Warchol said. “Mr. Livers sat down next to one of our undercover officers and he was subsequently arrested.”

Portsmouth police said that during the arrest, Livers gave a fake name and was discovered to in possession of a knife and marijuana. As of this writing, he is being held without bail on a fugitive from justice charge, and $20,000 for charges of false report to law enforcement, felon in possession of a weapon and possession of a controlled drug.

According to Brazzale, a judge in Torrington, Wyoming, sentenced Livers in 2006 to 3-6 years in prison for buying or receiving stolen property. She also said that a judge in Gillette, Wyoming, sentenced Boyer in 2007 to 2-4 years on a violation of probation for being an accessory to burglary.

She said the men did time at a boot camp before being sent to the Cheyenne halfway house.

Brazzale said that the pair could face felony escape charges.

Authorities in Anderson County, South Carolina, say that a man was arrested after he picked a bad place to park a stolen convertible — outside the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office.

Sheriff’s spokeswoman Susann Griffin says that the man, identified as Charles Noah Chambers, entered the building demand the return of $1,991 that was seized from him in June of 2007 following his arrest on methamphetamine trafficking charges, according to the February 21 issue of the Anderson (South Carolina) Independent Mail, a newspaper there.

Griffin also says that she noticed Chambers driving away in a 1996 Saab after his demands were rejected. She says that the vehicle was reported stolen from Cartee’s Used Cars between 5:00 PM February 18 and 11:30 AM February 19.

According to Sheriff’s Lieutenant W. F. Looper, Chambers put “a screwdriver into the ignition switch” when deputies caught up to the car and told him to turn off the engine.

Chambers and a woman who was riding in the car with him were arrested. Chambers was charged with possessing/receiving stolen goods, driving with a suspended license and a vehicle tag violation.

Police in Mesa, Arizona, say that a man who tried to buy a watch with two counterfeit $100 bills with Abraham Lincoln’s picture on the front was arrested on forgery charges.

The man, identified as 37-year-old Scott Martin, fought with the owner of the store on February 16 after the shopkeeper confronted him about the phony bills, a court document stated.

The owner stunned Martin with a Taser, according to KPHO-TV Channel 5, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix.

When fire rescue personnel arrived, they cut off Martin’s shirt to treat him, and three more fake $100 bills fell out.

Additionally, two more bogus $100s and one counterfeit $20 were found under Martin’s armpit, officers said. (Hopefully, he was wearing deodorant!)

An officer who examined the $100s found that several of them had identical serial numbers, in addition to Lincoln’s picture, which is actually found on $5 bills.

During the course of his treatment, Martin told authorities that he had swallowed a bag of meth.

Detectives said that they discovered that Martin was free on bail for charges involving other counterfeit $100 bills in Apache Junction.

A call mistakenly placed by a victorious video gamer in Delhi, Louisiana, led to his arrest on an outstanding warrant.

Authorities arrested the man, identified as 29-year-old Thomas Ballard, early February 18 after a woman reported receiving a late-night call from someone saying, “I have killed them all.”

Ballard’s number showed up on the woman’s caller ID; he had called by mistake, instead meaning to reach a friend to talk about his success in an Xbox game, according to Sergeant Julie Lewis, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana State Police.

Authorities following up at the address, to investigate whether there had been any foul play, found no such evidence, she said. But they did find, in the process of identifying Ballard, that he had a 5-year-old warrant out of Baton Rouge, charging him with failure to appear on a charge of possession of cocaine.

Ballard was booked into the Richland Parish Detention Center for extradition to Baton Rouge.

“It was weird the way this all came down,” Lewis said the next day. “This isn’t something you could just make up.”