Billy Bob Teeth
Posted on 04/09/2004 3:28:50 PM PDT by mylife
Thieves extract cache of novelty teeth Thursday, April 08, 2004 By BRYAN CORBIN Daily Journal News Editor, bcorbin@thejournalnet.com
Putting a bite into crime, thieves stole a White River Township man’s pickup truck and cargo trailer Thursday, apparently not realizing that it contained at least 25,000 sets of Billy Bob Teeth.
A distant cousin of plastic Halloween vampire fangs, the Billy Bob novelty items make the wearer appear to sport crooked, decayed, tobacco-stained teeth.
Greg O’Dell, a distributor of Billy Bob Teeth in Greenwood, reported that he had a delivery of between 25,000 and 30,000 sets of teeth stored overnight in his cargo trailer, hitched to his white-and-tan Ford F350 pickup. Between 10:30 p.m. Wednesday and 7 a.m. Thursday, someone made off with the truck and trailer near Sugar Grove Elementary School, and the cargo along with it.
“I’ve got a feeling someone is going to be disappointed when they get into the back of that cargo trailer and think they’ve got computers or construction tools and find out they’ve got Billy Bob Teeth,” said Chief Deputy Doug Cox of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office.
O’Dell had been a partner in the Greenwood-based Billy Bob Teeth online sales company but recently stepped down to become a distributor of the novelties and start his own company, he said.
“I’m just a guy who sold crooked teeth for almost eight years,” O’Dell said. “I wanted to sell other items and was in the process of moving inventory to our new office, and basically I got ripped off.”
At $10 per set of rotten-looking teeth, the delivery was worth upwards of $300,000 retail to O’Dell, he said.
To the thieves, however, the loot is essentially worthless. Manufactured in Taiwan, the loose sets of teeth were unpackaged. Without the putty adhesive to make them custom-fit into wearers’ mouths, they have little resale potential.
“For them to re-sell them on the market, they don’t have what it takes to make them work right,” O’Dell said.
According to the inventory O’Dell provided the sheriff’s office, the stolen cargo trailer contained assorted Billy Bob Teeth products, including infant pacifiers. Among the novelty teeth styles stolen were the Real McCoy, the Austin Powers, the Slapshot and the Deliverance Cavity, the report said. Another 200 dozen sunglasses also were stolen.
O’Dell said someone must have broken into the locked pickup truck, hot-wired it and driven off.
“Whatever they did, they tore the heck out of the ditch trying to get away,” he said.
Thursday’s teeth heist followed complaints of other thefts in the neighborhoods along County Line and Morgantown roads in White River Township. In some cases, cargo trailers have been broken into and tools or all-terrain vehicles have been stolen; in others, the entire cargo trailer was taken, the sheriff’s office reported.
No one has been arrested yet. One of the recent thefts involved two men in an early 1990s dark red Chevrolet pickup with loud exhaust pipes, the sheriff’s office reported.
Anyone seeing suspicious activity in the area is asked to call the sheriff’s office at 736-5155.
Cox said a detective has been assigned to O’Dell’s theft case and extra patrols were ordered. He emphasized that deputies will work just as hard to solve the stolen novelty-teeth case as they would any other.
“I don’t think it’s funny. He’s a victim, just like if it was computer equipment that was stolen,” Cox said.
And indeed, the theft thousands of dollars of merchandise is a setback for O’Dell, just as he is getting his new business, Party Power Inc., off the ground.
While insurance may cover the loss of his vehicle and trailer, it will not cover the theft of his products.
O’Dell urges anyone with information about his stolen teeth to contact him at 513-4703 or call the sheriff’s office.
He hopes the pilfered Billy Bob Teeth will turn up discarded in a Dumpster somewhere. If they don’t, O’Dell isn’t sure how he will recoup his losses.
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” he said. “You can’t keep a good crooked-tooth salesman down.”
| Rank | Location | Receipts | Donors/Avg | Freepers/Avg | Monthlies | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40 | New Hampshire | 150.00 |
5 |
30.00 |
111 |
1.35 |
|
|
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Wow! sounds like your local news team has bite!
Use Billy Bob Dental Floss!
Yeah. Of course, they demonstrated the teeth. :^) We felt sorry for the guy, but it was kinda funny.
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