Always nice to know that going to an Ivy League institution doesn't necessarily mean a person is the sharpest tool in the box. Columbia University, our local Ivy, for instance has had its fair share of harebrained criminals of late. First there were those drug-dealing frat boys and now a sophomore football player, 19-year-old Lions wide receiver Anthony Johnson Jr., has been arrested for buying 42 fake IDs.
According to the Manhattan DA's Office, Johnson bought the IDs from a Chinese company (Id Chief) for $65 bucks-a-pop and was planning to sell them to his friends for $67. “It was him and like 20 other guys,” Allegra Roberts, an acquaintance of Johnson, told the Columbia Spectator. “The website apparently gives you two copies of each ID.”
Johnson's big mistake seems to be that he ordered his IDs in bulk, which is what caught the eye of investigators in the first place. After all, fake IDs are nothing new on any college campus. We'd even put money down that others at Columbia have used the services of Id Chief (which, by the way, must be loving the free press).
Johnson, who has been suspended by Columbia and is back in Philadelphia with his family, has been charged with 42 counts of Criminal Possession of a Forged Instrument in the Second Degree (each count of which bring a maximum punishment of seven years in prison).
So why'd he do it? At his arraignment last week Johnson reportedly said “I ordered the IDs online because there’s a lot of places around school where you need to be 21.” Sigh. When will the kids realize that underage really is just a phase?
