(This despicable human cockfighting needs to stop.)

A schizophrenic man walks into a party store and tells the clerk he has a gun in his pocket and that he’ll use it if he doesn’t give him the money out of the register.

No, this isn’t the set-up to a corny joke, it’s what went down last Thursday in Grand Rapids, Michigan but that isn’t the remarkable part of the story; it’s what happened next that makes the robbery attempt much more interesting.

“I look at the cashier — I kind of know him, I come in there every day — I whispered to him, I mouthed to him, ‘Are you getting robbed right now?’ He said, ‘Yeah,’ like really scared,” recalls customer Zack Thome, an Army vet and current college student who also happened to be a trained MMA fighter.

(Heil SpongeBob!)

The next likely Soviet serial killer, Vyacheslav Datsik won’t be getting out of jail for at least six months, thanks to the foresight of a St. Petersburg appeals court who rejected the batshit crazy former fighter’s request for early release and house arrest.

According to a report from RapsiNews.com, officials believe that the Neo-Nazi Russian, who was the first of many fighters to knock out Andrei Arlovski, poses a major flight risk and that he will almost certainly resume his criminal activities if he is released. Datsik escaped incarceration from a St. Petersburg mental institution in 2010 and fled to Norway where he was arrested carrying a loaded handgun. Prior to his arrest, members of the white extremist group he belongs to told reporters that he told them he would never be taken alive, but later relented and turned himself into Oslo police, asking them for asylum. He was extradited back to his home country where he has been detained ever since.

(Fuckin’ amateurs.) 

Props to CP reader Frndlylion for the find, which involves yet another criminal getting his comeuppance at the hands of a mixed martial artist. We’ve seen them get rubber-guarded by some 10th Planet boys in a hotel lobby, we’ve seen them get beat to hell by an unnamed UFC champ, and we’ve even seen them get chased down by a current UFC champ. The latest story comes to us from Davenport, Iowa, where a 23 year old local by the name of Justin Tincher not only thwarted a robbery attempt on his girlfriend’s car, but managed to chase down the robber, bare foot and shirtless, and pin him to the pavement until the police came. The QCTimes explains:

Bishop Thornton allegedly jiggled the handles of several locked cars in the 700 block of Franklin Avenue, Davenport, last weekend before he came to an unlocked one belonging to Justin Tincher’s girlfriend. The 2002 Ford Focus was parked in front of Tincher’s house.

When Tincher saw the attempted theft in progress, he bolted out of his house without socks, shoes or a shirt, chased Thornton down Franklin Avenue, tackled the 19-year-old East Moline man and had him pinned until police arrived.

Tincher, 23, is a former mixed martial arts fighter.

“I don’t take kindly to people messing with my house, my girlfriend or my family,” Tincher said last week while still recovering at home after the ordeal.

He claims Thornton punched and kicked him while he had the suspect pinned. He also claims Thornton bit him on the left side of his torso after police arrived. The bite mark still was visible Friday afternoon.

(Video courtesy of YouTube/Hollywood2NY)

A would-be thief picked the wrong hotel to rob last week.

According to the LA Times, 31-year-old Luis Rosales walked into a hotel in Los Angeles’ Koreatown around midnight on Wednesday and pointed a gun at the night manager, telling him to fill his duffle bag with cash. When the suspect attempted to flee the scene, the manager grabbed him in a bear hug and managed to keep him from reaching the gun which he had put back into the bag, and called for help from a pair of guests who had exited the elevator in the hotel lobby.

The men, who happened to be competitors in last weekend’s World Jiu-Jitsu No-Gi Championship in Long Beach, quickly sprang into action.

(I can’t see why two GQ-looking guys stuck out in Morocco.)

The man who admitted to being former UFC fighter Lee Murray’s right-hand man in the Securitas depot robbery four years ago that netted "Lightning" and his team the equivalent of $85 million USD, was sentenced on Monday to 18 years behind bars for his part in the mega heist.

0-0-1 former MMA fighter Paul "The Enforcer" Allen, who was handed over to British authorities in 2008 after being arrested in Morocco with Murray in 2006 pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to kidnap, conspiracy to commit robbery and conspiracy to possess a firearm and was sentenced to nearly double the years in jail as Lee, who was identified as the mastermind behind the spectacular robbery.

The well-planned out heist that saw Murray, disguised with a prosthetic nose and chin and dressed as a police officer kidnap the security depot’s manager and his family at gunpoint before cleaning out a number of vaults from the previously thought to be uncompromisable money storage depot.

We’ve touched on Lee Murray’s Tito-stomping, depot-robbing exploits in the past, but ESPN dug a little deeper on Tuesday’s episode of E:60, presenting the full story of Murray’s journey from MMA fighter to legendary thief. Part one is above, part two is below; fist bump to MMA Mania.

Related: SI’s story on Murray going to film

(Former IFL fighter Claude Patrick: awake and relatively unscathed.)

It seems that the fighting didn’t stop with the final bell at Ottawa’s Freedom Fight this past weekend, as word of a taser-filled assault is spreading across the internet. The boys at Fightlinker (who attended the show, and whose whereabouts the time of the attack are currently unaccounted for) first mentioned the story yesterday.

Details about exactly who was tasered and beaten, by whom, and why, have all been sketchy. But Sherdog caught up with Canadian welterweight Claude Patrick, who was a victim of the assault. Unfortunately, because he was tasered into unconsciousness and then put into a medically-induced coma for twenty-four hours at the hospital, he doesn’t really know what happened either:

“All I know is that I walked into my friend Pete Rodley’s room to say goodnight and thanks for the show, and next thing I woke up in the hospital,” Patrick told Sherdog.com Monday. “I’m assuming I got tased from behind. They said I got hit with a stun gun or a taser and that’s all she wrote.”

[...]

“Dude, I was hoping you were calling me to tell me what happened,” Patrick joked. “They kept me in an induced coma for 24 hours and I just got up today. Actually, I thought today was Sunday.”

So, we published a list feature on Friday (“The 10 Most Despicable People in MMA”), and reactions were, let’s just say, “mixed.” A lot of you felt that Dana White shouldn’t have been as high as #2, to which we can only reply “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.” Yes, yes, we’re aware of all the great things he’s done for our sport. But can you think of anybody else in the world of MMA who you’ve bitched about more over the last couple years? We’re particularly bitter about his contempt for the websites and blogs that work harder than any other media outlet to publicize mixed martial arts. Where do you go for MMA coverage — the sports section of your local paper? ESPN2? No, you have to read eRags like CagePotato because the mainstream media doesn’t care about this sport yet. You’d think Dana White would want to show some love to the journalists that actually understand and care about the UFC, but to him we’re part of the Untouchable class. Trust us, if he provided any sort of press privileges to bloggers whatsoever, DW would be #2 on our list of Favorite People in MMA (after Krazy Horse, obvi).

Still, there was one aspect of the list that we definitely did regret the morning after. As commenter “homegrowncone” said:

Wow. I waited all the way till number 1 for Lee Murray only for him to not even get an honourable mention. This list looses all credibility because of that.

We have to admit, that was an oversight. And we’d just like to take this belated opportunity to say that Lee Murray is a despicable scumbag.