Gene Emery calls it an “oh wow” moment, sometimes a “holy cow” moment. He’ll be scanning police reports, and he’ll strike gold.

“When you start laughing, you know,” he says.

Earlier this week, he knew. He was reading a report from the Barrington Police Department. It was about a beer theft from a house on Laurel Lane. It was a beer theft so howlingly stupid that it set off those sensors which serve Emery so well when trolling the shallow waters of slapstick crime.

“Here’s a helpful hint if you’re planning to steal beer from someone’s house: try not to confuse the getaway car with a police car.”

That was the lead paragraph in Emery’s story in Wednesday’s Journal. It told the reader there was delicious absurdity ahead.

Emery works out of the East Bay bureau of The Journal and during a lot of years on the job he has developed a deep appreciation for those collisions of faulty judgment and low-rent crime that provide such rich local accents to the morning paper. He puts in the considerable time involved in gathering all the madcap details, then does them up in artful understatement.

“I make it my thing to check out the little stuff,” says Emery.

And there, in the little stuff, were the two guys who allegedly stole beer from the refrigerator of the house on Laurel Lane in Barrington early Sunday morning. According to that police report, the two then flagged down a passing SUV. It was a police cruiser.

A few minutes later, a woman showed up driving a similar SUV and told the police she was there to pick up some friends.

Bryce Beaver Hanrahan and Ryan T. Wirth, both 21 and both from Barrington, were charged in the incident. They also claimed a provisional place in the Gene Emery Anthology of Crimes You Wouldn’t Believe If You Didn’t Read About Them In The Paper.

The headlines track Emery’s path along the very soft underbelly of local crime:

“Golf balls, nude sunbathing, dispute over $1 lead to arrests.”

“Cocaine charge follows report of ‘bear attack.’ ”

The cocaine/bear story is one of Emery’s favorites. It involved a Somerset couple, Joseph and Christine Crawford, who called the police to report three bears in their backyard. The police came, they looked, they found no bears. Just a few minutes later, they came again to the Crawfords’ house after a frantic call that the bears were trying to enter the house. Again, the police found no bears. What they did find is best summed up in a quote from Somerset Officer Lance Mello in Emery’s story:

“I then asked Mr. Crawford if he was under the influence of any drugs and he stated he and his wife have been doing cocaine all night long. I then asked Mr. Crawford if he had any cocaine on him and he stated he had a bag in his front pocket and two straws in his rear pocket.”

Crawford was arrested, and took his special criminal place apart from the dreary muggers and thieves.

Then there was: “Fall River man charged in theft of bottle of tequila.”

It sounds pretty mundane, but Emery again found treasure in the details:

“A prominent bulge in the front of his pants, which turned out to be a $52 bottle of tequila, has landed a Fall River man in jail.”

Then, in the brief but intoxicating story, Emery brought his special touch to that moment when the police were finally able to arrest a suspect in the ongoing shoplifting at Somerset Liquors:

“But then the worm turned.”

You can’t make them up. And you can’t write them any better.

bkerr@projo.com