Often, Los Angeles petty theft cases take a turn for the bizarre. Separating truth from fiction can be a lot more challenging than people realize. How are your instincts? Take this quiz to find out. 
Three of stories actually happened, and three are totally made up.
1. Shoe fetishist steals 40 pairs of Marla Maples’ shoes
Last Saturday, a 6 year veteran of the LAPD, Miguel Angel Schiappapietra, was arrested on charges of Los Angeles lewd conduct near Castaic. 
Police say Schiappapietra lured two neighborhood girls to his home and sexually assaulted them. He had been patrolling the Foothill area prior to the arrest. At the initial hearing, Schiappapietra pled not guilty to Los Angeles lewd conduct felony charges. The prosecution doubled his bail to $200,000.
Pending the criminal case as well as an internal police investigation, Schiappapietra was put on paid administrative leave. The Sheriff’s Special Victims Unit is handling the case.
Rob Kardashian’s Los Angeles petty theft and battery case has earned him time in the limelight, but odds are that his spotlight-hungry sisters are not particularly jealous. 
In March, Kardashian — the youngest child of Kris Jenner and lawyer Robert Kardashian — allegedly swiped camera equipment from a photographer in the parking lot of a West Hollywood gym. Per reports, he was retaliating for her attempt to take shirtless pictures of him. He allegedly grabbed the memory card from the camera and told that he would pay for the card later.
According to celebrity news sources, Rob was undergoing a weight loss program, which might have explained why he wanted to keep the shirtless pictures out of the news. Andra Vaik, the photographer, subsequently sued the reality star.
If you’ve recently been investigated or arrested for lewd conduct in Los Angeles, you’re likely feeling terrified, overwhelmed, and isolated.
In this fraught state, odds are high that you will make one of the following 4 errors that could make your situation much more painful, legally complicated, and generally annoying. Read this article to “inoculate” yourself from these mistakes.
Mistake #1. Taking no action.
Many Los Angeles Medicare and Medicaid fraud cases end in disaster for all stakeholders. For a tragic “rags to riches to rags” story, take a look at the disaster that befell the Scooter Store. 
If you’ve ever watched daytime TV, you’ve no doubt seen commercials for the Scooter Store. The vendor of power wheelchairs (based in New Braunfels, Texas) sold its products to consumers by pummeling the airwaves with advertisements. But a blockbuster CBS News investigative piece about the company led to a federal government investigation and ultimately an FBI raid. Doctors and salespeople alleged that the company followed a diabolical playbook. Salespeople would contact doctors’ offices and badger physicians to prescribe power wheelchairs and scooters to patients, even if patients did not need the products. They then relied on Medicare and Medicaid errors and bureaucratic snafus to approve the bad claims.
After the FBI raid, the company furloughed every employee and then laid off 1,000 workers.
A 50-year-old Calabasas man, Dr. Pezhman Ebrahimzadeh, was sentenced to three and a half years behind bars for falsely billing Medicare for over $3 million. 
As penance for perpetrating healthcare fraud in Los Angeles, Dr. Ebrahimzadeh has been ordered to pay over $3 million in restitution, for his part in billing Medicare for medical services that he never performed. In many cases, these services involved patients who were no longer alive. Ebrahimzadeh – also known as Pez Abrahams – owns a cosmetic clinic called the Winnetka Medical Group, which provides liposuction and radiofrequency laser treatments.
Federal prosecutors say he collected information from beneficiaries to bill Medicare for never-performed procedures. He also collected information from 25 Medicare patients who were dead when they supposedly “got treated,” and then he changed medical records to conceal the Los Angeles Medicare fraud. He claimed he performed a bunch of pricey procedures, including radiotherapy catheter placement, bone tumor ablation, and revascularization, even though he lacked the equipment to do these procedures.
The courts have financial incentive to avoid dealing with trivial Los Angeles petty theft cases.
Here’s a bold illustration why.
Up in Monterey, 75-year-old Lilia Estoesta just got convicted of a single petty theft charge for stealing $60 worth of jewelry. The cost of the trial – just for the translator! – exceeded $2,000.
Our Los Angeles lewd conduct blog recently reported on the tragic but compelling story of 34-year-old Courtney Sue Reschke, who was arrested back in December 2012 for performing sexual acts with a 15-year-old boy. 
The Idaho woman just pled guilty to six counts of lewd conduct – she was originally charged with 11 felony lewd conduct counts as well as misdemeanor charges for offering alcohol to underage minors.
Per court documents, Reschke offered a bunch of high school students alcohol and then engaged in sexual conduct with them. In exchange for the guilty plea, prosecutors dropped five felony counts, but the remaining six counts each carries a life in prison sentence as a max charge.
This blog is devoted to Los Angeles lewd conduct news. But, for whatever reason, we’ve been reporting on multiple stories out of Idaho, of all places. 
The most recent (and extremely sad/depressing) case comes out of Idaho Falls, where a 57-year-old man, Viggo Robert Madsen, recently got arrested on charges two counts of lascivious and lewd conduct.
Investigators say that, over the past seven months, Madsen engaged in relationships with two 14-year-old girls.
If you tried to design a Los Angeles petty theft crime that would make you look like a classic “bad guy,” you’d have a hard time beating this guy. 
According to NBC Los Angeles, a skateboarder recently stole over $400 worth of cookie money from a local Girl Scout troop that had been stationed outside a grocery store in San Bernardino County. Deputies later stopped and arrested 20-year-old Colin Sawyer, after they saw footage of the theft on NBC4 news.
Girl Scout troop 1303 had been selling cookies outside of a Stater Brothers store in Phelan all day. They were folding up for the day, when the thief snatched their money and took off. A young Girl Scout, who gave her name as Victoria, ran after him. But she fell and got scraped up. She told reporters “My sister put the money on the table, and as fast as he can, he took the money and ran off… my first instinct was to run after him.”
Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorney Blog