I like how they also convicted him of blowing up his own mail box.

@1 - that's what struck me. If somebody makes their own crappy mailbox out of some old plywood and duct tape, say, does that suddenly make it a sacred object to the USPS? Do you have to decommission an old mailbox before you can get rid of it? Have a priest unconsecrate it? I understand not being allowed to blow things up but the seperate charge makes it seem like postboxes are some kind of magical creature.

What's with the Ponzi scheme rhetoric. It's Ponzi business as usual, Treasury Department style.

@2:

It's not so much the box itself, but the contents it may contain. Deliberately messing with the U.S. Mail is, I believe, a Federal crime, and one that's apparently taken very seriously, even when the crime involves blowing up ones own mail box. Maybe, as is fairly common, there were other mail boxes adjacent to it, maybe it could have gone off while the mail deliverer was putting mail in it, maybe his mom or kid could have been there to take mail out of it - who knows?

Because, from the sound of things, it's pretty clear this guy wasn't exactly the sharpest chainsaw in the woodshed, as they say down in those parts...

I would cast Randy Quaid to play this guy in a film version of this.

i was soing to say "what a dumbass," but i like what sall said better at @5. (still, though, he's a pretty big dumbass.)

They say in life that we all have a destiny...

This should be a movie...

chehalis.

@8,5, I agree, this deserves to be a movie. Maybe cast Nicholas Cage as the guy, though. Randy Quaid can be the doofus friend.

@11 Only if they cast Lindsay Lohan as the drunken, slutty mailbox.

I think the issue with the mailbox is the fraud aspect of it. Filing a false police report is still a crime. They would have charged him with that had he blown up his own garden shed and claimed someone else did it "to silence him".

@4 is pretty close. The mailbox belongs to you but the space inside it is the property of the federal government, whether it has any mail in it at this moment or not. When he blew it up, he was destroying federal property, which is not a wise thing to do.

I'd rather do time in a federal prison than a Georgia state one, that's for damn sure.