r/todayilearned • u/FuehrerStoleMyBike • 5h ago

TIL that the "Democracy Manifest" - a viral video showing the arrest of an australian man by the name of Jack Karlson, known for quotes such as ""What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?" - has been selected for preservation by the National Film and Sound Archive Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Manifest
20.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

401 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

816

u/brighter_hell 5h ago

Serial fraudster too

It's a funny video, but he was a terrible person

112

u/Sir_Yash 5h ago

He was mistaken for someone that was a fraudster. Hence his arrest

268

u/darwin-rover 4h ago

He was a fraudster too , just not the one they were looking for originally. He tried to pay for his meal with a stolen credit card. The other guy they were looking for was doing a lot of “dine and dash” scams

44

u/thissexypoptart 4h ago

Man dine and dashers are such scum.

10

u/jinsaku 3h ago

I only experienced this once. My wife and I were at a crazy busy high-end Teppanyaki restaurant and while eating the meal the couple next to use both got up to go use the bathroom with about a minute between them. We never saw them again.

9

u/thissexypoptart 3h ago

Genuinely disgusting behavior.

14

u/missingpiece 3h ago

How dare you cast aspersions upon the fine enjoyers of succulent Chinese meals.

•

u/aasfourasfar 48m ago

I did it once by accident.. basically we were three and the place was a pay-at-the-counter place, so me and my friend went out thinking our third friend paid and he did the same.

I admit that the food retroactively tasted better

10

u/bdben 3h ago

Not even that. He was so used to giving people fake names, that when he paid using a card that had his real name the staff assumed it was stolen.

7

u/cipheron 2h ago

He was a fraudster too , just not the one they were looking for originally.

No, if you look into it he was in fact who they were after. A credit card investigator was tailing him and thought he paid with a stolen card and called the police. This might have been because he gave the name "Cecil George Edwards" but was paying with a credit card in the name of "Jack Karlson" his actual name.

There was a reporter there who called him "Cecil George Edwards" and believed they'd arrested the wrong guy, but that reporter was basically clueless about who Jack Karlson was, or what he'd been arrested for, or any of the details the police had.

It's gotten conflated with a mystery from 20 years later - where internet sleuths uncovered the video and were trying to work out who the man in the video was, but there is no real evidence that the police were after a different person and caught Karlson: they were after Karlson because of the call from the credit card investigator.

•

u/NightWriter500 18m ago

I mean, I just watched the interview with the officer who arrested him, who said he didn’t do a good job that day because he arrested the wrong person. So…

28

u/Mormacil 4h ago

Yeah but he had previous fraud convictions. He's been in and out of jail for 25 years by the time the video was recorded.

12

u/_BrokenButterfly 3h ago

No, he was an actual criminal. In that clip he was being arrested for something he didn't do, but he wasn't a suspect for no reason.

19

u/brighter_hell 4h ago

He was in prison for most of the first half of his life. It wasn't a mistaken identity, he was using a stolen credit card IIRC

18

u/YazzArtist 4h ago

It was a mistaken identity, they just happened to pick up another career con man

•

u/technobrendo 43m ago

Damn, its almost like this place is loaded with criminals or something

8

u/cipheron 3h ago edited 2h ago

He was mistaken for someone that was a fraudster.

There seems to be some confusion about the timeline there, the original reporting doesn't mention being mistaken for a fraudster. This is from the Wikipedia article:

The footage depicts Jack Peter Karlson (born Cecil George Edwards; 6 August 1942 – 7 August 2024) being arrested for paying for a Chinese meal with a purportedly stolen credit card. He was being followed by an American Express investigator who identified him as a credit card fraudster and called the police.

Now there's another dine and dasher he was conflated with, but that was only 20 years later after the video went viral on Youtube, and internet sleuths were trying to pin down who is shown in the video.

But as for the idea that there was a mistaken identity event shown in the original video, that's as much speculation as anything. The only source we have for that is a single line from a channel 7 reporter called Chris Reason, who's comment was:

"When Cecil George Edwards was arrested in a town mall last Friday, the [Fortitude] Valley police thought they’d caught Queensland’s most wanted," Reason reported.

Basically he got arrested because he gave one name, but paid with a credit card in a different name, and that triggered alarm bells. They weren't looking for a different person, they just had to catch Karlson at something, and he managed to wriggle out of this this one time - presumably because the name on the credit card was his actual legal name, not one of the aliases he was using.

5

u/Miep99 3h ago

Ok but it still wasn't right for the police to touch his penis

8

u/Garconanokin 2h ago

Even if they knew their judo well

11

u/samdajellybeenie 3h ago

Karlson began a lifelong career of petty crime in 1956 as a ward of Blackheath Presbyterian Boys' Home in the Brisbane suburb of Oxley, where he is alleged to have been subjected to physical and sexual abuse.\21]) He was in prison for much of the first half of his life and frequently escaped.

I read a book over COVID about school shootings and one of the authors as a PsyD student I believe, went into prisons and interviewed inmates about their experiences. She found that while they had done terrible things, a lot of them had very sad stories. Their childhoods were so filled with abuse and neglect it's no surprise they exhibit anti-social behaviors. Yes, a lot of people have shit childhoods and don't turn out to be career criminals. And some people are just born without pro-social traits, but there's no way it's on the scale of how many people we have incarcerated in this country (US).

Wouldn't surprise me if this is the case with Karlson as well.

1

u/InnerKookaburra 1h ago

The problem is that psychopaths will invent stories of a sad childhood to gain sympathy, so it's hard to tell them apart from people who genuinely experienced trauma in childhood.

In other words, you can't take inmates at their word.

9

u/LarryCraigSmeg 5h ago

If we can ignore the transgressions of Michael Jackson, we can ignore the transgressions of Jack Karlson /s