Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot - TV Tropes

"That's how it always begins. Very small."

Examples by creator

• Naoki Urasawa really loves this one.
  • Monster (1994): Murder of a patient and incidental framing of his doctor → plans to create an Übermensch and take over Germany, and a separate plan to kill as many Germans as possible For the Evulz.
  • 20th Century Boys: Murder of an old classmate → conspiracy to Take Over the World with a cult.
  • Pluto: Serial murder of the World's Strongest Robots → plot of a military superpower to Take Over the World and establish robot control over humans.

Examples by work:

• Arachnid: Alice's uncle is assassinated for his debts to a criminal syndicate → both that and the covered-up murder of Alice's mother were part of a plan to make Alice into the ultimate assassin and the right-hand woman to an ageless Shadow Dictator with parasitic powers who wants to curb Japan's population.
• Case Closed has the Black Organization. It looked like a simple case of blackmail, but they're actually an elite group of murderers that owns huge biological research facilities.
• The Castle of Cagliostro: Lupin discovers the casino he robbed only has counterfeit money → Lupin uncovers an Ancient Conspiracy as well as a plot by the Big Bad to claim a large amount of wealth.
• Dirty Pair: Affair on Nolandia: Mysterious crash involving a runway made to appear out of whack and subsequent murder of the latest client of the Lovely Angels → a Social Darwinist's attempt to remake the universe in his own image.
• Fullmetal Alchemist has at least two points that could be considered either the crime with the warrant that turns out too small or the far more sinister plot. They both go from the Elric brothers' attempt at human transmutation to the murder of Maes Hughes all the way up to outing and defeating an Ancient Conspiracy which may as well be called Amestris' very own Illuminati.
• Fuuto P.I. begins with a man asking the heroes for help in retrieving his stolen bag, which ends up revealing the existence of a parallel dimension where a new group of Gaia Memory users live and fight against the Kamen Riders.
• Subverted in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex; the murder of a policeman who discovered illegal surveillance devices appears to bring the elite hacker Laughing Man out into the open, but it turns out the guy was an imitator. However, later it's played straight: hacker in government-run halfway house → conspiracy involving Japan's entire military-industrial complex.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Stone Ocean: The hit-and-run incident that got Jolyne sent to prison was masterminded by Enrico Pucci to have Jotaro Lured into a Trap by stealing his memories containing the full extent of DIO's Evil Plan that Pucci seeks to fulfill.
  • JoJolion: Josuke's first encounter with a Rock Human has him discovering the existence of the Locacaca Fruit that is tied to his Mysterious Past and that an organization is seeking to take the fruit for their own purposes.
  • The JoJoLands: The team's sneaking into Rohan's villa to steal a blue diamond instead has them discovering much more valuable Green Rocks, then learn that others were intent on obtaining the rocks as well.
• Kill la Kill: Investigating your father's murder → fighting a fascist allegory Absurdly Powerful Student Council while mostly naked → becoming the central figure in a war against aliens that engineered the evolution of the human race for a food source. The murderer was working for a human that aligned themselves with the aliens, and the father was the founder of an organization fighting them.
• This is the plot of Moriarty the Patriot from Deuteragonist Sherlock's point of view. He stumbles across an odd death that is clearly a disguised murder, then finds himself framed for murder, and uncovering that only reveals that his suspicions that there is a mastermind behind the crimes is accurate.

• StrikerS Sound Stage X of Lyrical Nanoha: Murder of various Old Belka researchers → Terrorist plot to attack Mid-childa with the undead army of a legendary Dark King.

• Batman: Black and White: "Blackout", set in World War II, starts with Batman investigating a window that's showing a light in defiance of the blackout order, which leads to him discovering a jewel robbery in progress, which leads to him learning that the owner of the jewels was using them to fund a Nazi spy ring.
• Captain America: Steve investigates his ex Bernie's sister going missing → a plot by Mother Night to indoctrinate teenagers en masse. And when it's over, Steve finds out Bernie's sister's disappearance was completely unrelated to this.
• Gordon Of Gotham:
  • A vice squad raid discovers several mobsters pouring cement onto the corpse of a dead associate. In exchange for leniency, one of the prisoners then offers to blow the lid on a 6-million-dollar robbery that left ten innocent people dead.
  • Gordon tickets Officer Davidson for causing a traffic collision while driving a police truck, then gets suspicious when Davidson's report lies about where the accident took place. Davidson was delivering rigged voting machines away from his beat, and is willing to make a stab at murder to keep Gordon from figuring this out.
• Hellblazer: Inverted in one story where John reveals to a journalist that The British Royal Family are in fact snake people from space who had Diana killed because she was trying to resist the Body Horror required for her to give birth to their spawn, that Kennedy was killed by The Greys (a Servant Race to the aforementioned reptilians) because he saw his wife quite enjoying sex with a reptilian, and that the Earth is hollow, filled with tunnels that allow easy transportation beteen the continents. John then fakes his death, ostensibly by governmental spooks. It's all lies, of course: the journalist was getting uncomfortably close to a perfectly mundane drug-supplying ring in Buckingham Palace and John was hired to scare him off.
• Sensation Comics: Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor meet a poor boy and are concerned about his home life due to some things he says, when Diana looks into it she discovers that not only is the uncle he and his sister and mother live with so incredibly abusive their mother is terrified that he's going to kill the kids, he's also running a huge racketeering ring from his basement and plotting the armed robbery of a bunch of gold.
• Sin City: Murder of a hooker and frameup of the guy who was with her → uncovering a cannibal farm boy and a corrupt priest who has pretty much the entire city in his pocket.
• Played with in Status 7: Overload, we have a botched ATM hacking leading to a Cyberwarfare attack with a terrorist attack on a MegaCorp for good measure but the whole thing was a cover for embezzlement that gets dealt with during the epilogue.
• Suske en Wiske: the album "Het Aruba dossier" ("The Aruba File"). The minor crime: two men ignore a red traffic light and crash into Professor Barabas' car, sending all three of them to the hospital. The major plot: once in the hospital, Barabas is accidentally given a briefcase that belongs to the other two men. In the briefcase, he finds a file that describes plans of a big criminal organisation to distribute a highly toxic substance as a new fertilizer for crops.
• Many Tintin stories tend to be built around this premise.
  • Cigars of the Pharaoh and its sequel The Blue Lotus: Disappearance of an Egyptian archaeologist → Uncovering a secret brotherhood of international opium smugglers.
  • King Ottokar's Sceptre: Kidnapping of an expert on Syldavian history → coup d'état.
  • The Crab with the Golden Claws: A dead sailor found with counterfeit coins → another opium smuggling ring
• Watchmen: Investigating the murder of an ex-superhero → uncovering a plot to prevent nuclear war by destroying a city.
• X-Men Noir: Open-and-shut gangland murder → a secret brotherhood of Dirty Cops.
  • In the sequel, X-Men Noir: Mark of Cain: Murder of Cain Marko → a secret government agency training criminals to be the ultimate spies and assassins.

• The Far Side has a comic where the Hardy Boys are Hauled Before a Senate Subcommittee to testify about how they stumbled upon the Iran-Contra affair while trying to solve the secret of Pirate's Cove.

• Adventures of a Screwed Up Clone: A minor mission Danny has with the League has him discover that there's a secret operation involving shades going on, which he could only discover because his powers allowed him to see through the invisibility.
• (æ)mæth: When Masumi is being plagued by nightmares involving Duel Monsters she's never seen or heard of before, she decides to look their names up in her school database. That's when she finds out they've been erased, implying that not only are they real, but that her dream might not have been a dream after all.
• Boldores And Boomsticks: Team RWBY is sent off on a mission to find out why the Grimm in the area have been ignoring their normal targets. They end up falling through a portal to the world of Pokémon, which Salem had been trying to prevent contact with.
• Conversations with a Cryptid: Izuku has a talent for uncovering these:
  • Conversations with a Cryptid: Izuku attempts to uncover All for One's long, long criminal history → Discovery of a two-centuries-long and ongoing conspiracy.
  • Kidnapping of a Cryptid: Izuku, Mineta and Mei investigate why it's illegal for pro-heroes to use their own Support items for private use as prosthetics. Which reveals the government's massive human rights violations and corruption and how the anti-quirk laws are actually extremely unconstitutional.
• The Desert Storm: The sequel's Haunting arc starts out with Jedi Knight Quinlan Vos being assigned by the Jedi Council to investigate reports of an illegal drug ring in Coruscant's undercity. His investigation sees him uncover a string of assassinations being carried out by a Dark Side cult and eventually leads to the discovery that one of the Jedi Order's reclaimed Padawans is a mole for the Sith.
• A Drop of Poison:
  • Iruka realizes that Naruto is being purposefully failed and shows the Hokage who has a dozen men look over the last ten years of exams. They find that at least a couple dozen students have been deliberately failed and all of them (barring Naruto and those who failed the previous year) are listed as Missing, Dead, or Presumed Dead.
  • Naruto ends up discovering a plot of his own. He starts by investigating arson cases and other setbacks perpetrated by mysterious figures against Konoha businesses, including his own holdings. They turn out to be part of a conspiracy by the Merchant Council to create a monopoly of businesses held by a single bloc of voters. It's implied that Danzo's ROOT organization is connected to both of these plots, which would make this an instance of Working the Same Case.
• Eroninja: Naruto saves Kurenai from some Naughty Tentacles; this ends up uncovering Furofuki's plot to become another Kaguya-like figure.
• In Eye of the Storm (KisekiMa), Shirou looks for the missing Sakura. With the girl being both a lesser grail and in possession of a Servant, it is obvious that it will lead him to the current Holy Grail War.
• First Try Series: In Team Tetsuo, Naruto tells Sasuke about Mizuki being a traitor, leading Sasuke to suspect his education was sabotaged. Tetsuo tests them on their history, revealing that their textbooks are missing massive swatches of information, spurring an investigation that leads to a massive overhaul of their educational system, with everyone who'd graduated over the last six years being retested.
• Foxfire (Rahar_Moonfire): Investigating some ghost sightings morphs into having to stop a powerful spirit from hurting innocents in her quest for vengeance by tracking down her adulterous, child-murdering ex-lover.
• In God Save the Esteem's version of "Murder, She Snored", someone attacks Kevin shortly after he's accused of cheating on the test, hospitalizing him with minor injuries; Daria and Cindy have to investigate why. In the process, they discover that Kevin got his test answers from a massive operation spanning multiple schools, which they get shut down. (Amusingly, Kevin's attack had nothing to do with this—he was cheating with some other guy's girlfriend and just got jumped as revenge.)
• Juxtapose: Investigating Izuku's old middle and elementary schools for their neglect in letting Katsuki bully other students reveals a potentially nation-spanning conspiracy by the Meta Liberation Army to indoctrinate people with strong Quirks.
• Played with in The Karma of Lies: After Hawkmoth is unmasked and arrested, Lila tearfully confesses to her mother that she'd secretly taken a modeling job with Agreste Fashion, a significantly lesser crime. She then invokes this while giving her statement to the police, painting herself as an Unwitting Pawn whom Gabriel and Adrien tricked into providing information about her classmates so that Hawkmoth could exploit their emotional states by akumatizing them. She plays the role to the hilt, tearfully defending Adrien upon 'realizing' their rising suspicions, asserting he couldn't possibly be involved in a way that ensures they don't believe her.
• Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard?: Colin is called in when two Protectorate teams get into a fight which wrecks both of their bases. During standard removal of network equipment from the compromised structures, he discovers data taps linking back to the Elite and the fact that half of the local Protectorate were being bribed.
• Implacable: Taylor is press-ganged by the Wards to avoid juvie when she lashes out at Sophia during her Trigger event that Sophia and her cronies are responsible for. Director Piggot tries to bury the investigation into this incident once it's clear the end result would see Shadow Stalker (i.e. Sophia) in juvie and Taylor free from the Wards, potentially losing two Wards. The relentless pushback and formal complaints from Taylor and her father eventually leads to the Youth Guard discovering the Wards ENE are so badly mismanaged that their charter is revoked (i.e. their government-sponsored superhero taskforce is disbanded entirely) and Piggot is fired from her position and ends up under investigation. This apparently triggered more investigations countrywide as it's mentioned other Wards departments are being shuttered due to their own scandals for similar cases of rampant negligence.
• In Perfection Is Overrated Hitomi using Mind Control to force people to make withdrawals from their bank accounts (which later escalates to murder) → plot by SUEs to kill all the Himes and reshape the world.
• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines:
  • In Chapter 22 the main story, the strange behavior of Poison-type Pokémon in the Crimson City area is revealed to be part of a plan to attack the Gringy City power plant.
  • A side story has Gym Leader Clay helping the local police with a ship whose paperwork is out of line. This leads to League authorities encountering Shadow Pokémon for the first time.
• Not That Kinda Fired:
  • When Izuku is sent to supervise Rei's annual mental health assessment, he realizes that Rei should have been released already and notices the doctors act fishy. He finds a project to recreate the Nomus, and promptly reports it to Burnin'.
  • Downplayed with the triplets from Accounting. Harassing Izuku at work by forcing them to do their work for them is bad enough, but it's later revealed that as accountants, foisting their work onto someone else automatically makes them guilty of account-tampering in a Pro-Hero agency, getting them fired by Endeavor and arrested.
• In the Neptunia story Rei Ryghts: Ace Attorney Turnabout Of The Night, the murder of the CFO of a sunscreen manufacturer eventually leads to a conspiracy by a vampire to bring about The Night That Never Ends.
• Relic Of The Future: Emerald and Vernal notice that Oscar is uncomfortably insistent about trying to train Ruby, so they try to talk to Summer about it. When she won't tell them anything, they work together to trick Summer into thinking she's talking to Oscar - Vernal serves as a body, while Emerald makes Summer see and hear her as Oscar. Summer then calls him Ozpin, and when Emerald adjusts her vision of Oscar accordingly and Summer treats it like normal, they realize they've accidentally stumbled on something huge.
• In later chapters of Shards to a Whole, small discrepancies in the totals of military pay accounts → embezzlement and corruption within CGI (Coast Guard Investigations) → a decades-old conspiracy to rig US Presidential and Congressional elections.
• In Son of the Sannin, Naruto's first C-Rank mission has him and his teammates sent to protect a village from bandits. They end up discovering Orochimaru's takeover of the Land of Rice fields much earlier than in canon.
• Starlight Over Detrot starts with the investigation of a murder outside a swanky hotel, and quickly turns into a race to stop a plot that could destroy the whole city.
• Double Subverted in A Teacher's Glory: The invasion causes the reveal of some corruption in the Konoha hierarchy afterwards, but considering how much a Curb-Stomp Battle the invasion was, the corruption is actually more important and devastating after all.
• Things Left Behind: A Gallian reconnaissance team is sent to investigate Imperial activity just before the Clash at Naggiar. Instead they find a pitched battle between Imperial and Federation forces, and end up in an Enemy Mine situation with Federation survivors. This compounds once the Imperials are dealt with, as unbeknownst to the heroes, both Gallian and Federation spies are really there to steal gold from a secret vault.
• More like Major Crime Reveals Major Crime, but in Who Silenced Elly Patterson, investigating Elly Patterson's death ended up opening a cold case on a woman's disappearance when Gavin Caine came under suspicion of Elly's death and a house search found the woman's body. To make things worse, the woman was his first wife.
• In With Pearl and Ruby Glowing, King Candy initially gets arrested for tax fraud, but when the police search his house, they discover videotapes of him sexually abusing his kids, the Sugar Rush racers (except Vanellope).

• Antz: Accidental abduction of Princess Bala —> Attempt to destroy the colony by its deranged general.
• Big Hero 6: Theft of Hiro's microbots and death of his older brother Tadashi → plot by Hiro's former mentor Professor Callaghan to destroy Alistair Krei for causing his daughter's death by using the stolen microbots and Krei's teleportation portal.
• In the éX-Driver film, Soichi Sugano and his friends happen to discover that Angela Gambino caused two AI cars to go out of control in Los Angeles and at the racetrack, only for them to realize that it was part of Angela's plot to stop her father Rico from betting on the race.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society begins with a crime that is no means minor, but over the course of the story, explodes into an absolutely massive Milkman Conspiracy that actually tramples two other conspiracies going on at the same time: Suicides of several members of a deposed Korean military junta → a gigantic socio-economic engineering project led by Japan's invalid and elderly, via abducting at-risk children and manipulating legal records.
• The Great Mouse Detective: The kidnapping of a toymaker → a plot to rule England's mouse population.
• The Incredibles: Mysterious disappearance of a lawyer known for fighting for the rights of supers → a scheming Arms Dealer's murderous plan to make himself a figure of public adulation.
• Monsters, Inc.: The eponymous power company's scare floor being used after hours by Randall, resulting in Boo breaking loose and wreaking havoc in Monstropolis → a dangerous machine designed to extract screams from children as part of a scheme by Randall and Mr. Waternoose.
• Zootopia: A series of seemingly unrelated missing mammals → the Mayor's imprisonment and cover-up of predator species who have inexplicably "gone savage" → the Assistant Mayor's plot to create and exploit anti-predator sentiment for political gain.

• A cop pulls over a man for speeding.

  Cop: Sir, you were doing 70 in a 50 mph zone. Any particular reason?
  Driver: Well, so you wouldn't find the 200 kilos of crack cocaine I've got in the backseat. Or the anthrax bomb in the glove compartment. Or the dead hooker in the trunk. Or the six-year-old girl tied up next to the dead hooker. To be honest, I'm on like fifteen different kinds of drugs right now and I drank six beers before starting out, so I might have left a few out.

The cop, seeing the arrest of a lifetime before him, immediately calls for backup, who proceeds to thoroughly search the car and test the man. Once they're finally done, having found absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing, another cop comes up to the driver and apologizes for wasting his time, as the arresting officer thought he was dealing with some kind of serial killer pedophile terrorist criminal.

Examples by creator:

• Isaac Asimov:
  • The Naked Sun: A man killed by his spouse in a fit of anger → a plot to conquer the Galaxy with automated warships.
  • The Robots of Dawn: A man damaging a valuable piece of his own property → an attempt to steal an important theory through Grand Theft Prototype.
  • The Merchant Princes: A few ships vanishing on another state's territory → a general of the Galactic Empire using the state as a proxy and beachhead for his conquest plans on the Periphery.

Examples by work:

• All the time in the Alex Rider series, except for maybe Scorpia.
  • Stormbreaker: murder of MI6 agent Ian Rider → plot to kill all of London's schoolchildren.
  • Point Blanc: "accidental" deaths of a New York multibillionaire and an ex-KGB general → an apartheid scientist replacing the children of sixteen powerful men around the world with teenage clones of himself.
  • Skeleton Key: sale of uranium to a former Russian general and death of the two men who delivered it → plan by the general to detonate a nuclear bomb among a fleet of decaying nuclear submarines, contaminating most of Europe, seizing power in Russia, and reinstating Soviet communism.
  • Eagle Strike: attempted assassination of journalist Edward Pleasure → attempt to wipe out drugs by dropping 25 American nuclear missiles on worldwide drug sources.
  • Ark Angel: attempted kidnapping of Paul Drevin → plan to drop the Ark Angel hotel from outer space onto Washington, D.C.
  • Snakehead: two deaths of ASIS agents infiltrating a snakehead and the theft of a bomb prototype → plot to wipe out an island conference aiming at ending world poverty by creating a tsunami that will also wipe out most of Western Australia.
  • Crocodile Tears: investigation into an accountant at a bio-research facility → the Big Bad's plot to create a famine in Africa via poisoned wheat, then claim millions of dollars through his charity.
  • Scorpia Rising: This one's complicated. The murder of Levi Kroll plus a shooting at Alex's school → a plot to assassinate the American secretary of state and frame Alex (and by extension the British government) for the crime, thereby giving Scorpia leverage to force the British government to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Then at the end, it's revealed that the school shooting had nothing to do with Scorpia's plot. That was masterminded by Alan Blunt so Alex would think he was in danger and agree to go to Cairo for MI6.
• Happens several times in the Artemis Fowl books.
  • The Arctic Incident: Gangsters smuggling AA batteries into Haven → high treason and an attempt to Take Over the World.
  • The Eternity Code: LEP space probes being hijacked → a crooked businessman's plan to illegally destroy his competitors.
  • The Opal Deception: A high-profile criminal escapes from prison → a plot to start an interspecies war.
  • The Lost Colony: An imp being kidnapped by mysterious human criminals → an effort to exterminate the demon race.
  • The Time Paradox: The theft of an endangered lemur → a conspiracy to achieve ultimate power.
• Bazil Broketail: Thrembode enchanting Relkin and drugging Bazil to prevent them interfering with his plot to assassinate the king reveals it later to Lessis when she investigates after treating them.
• The Baztan Trilogy begins with a teenager being murdered and found in a ritualistic position, which eventually leads to the discovery of a Cult conspiracy that has been murdering babies for decades and that has people in high places - including the judge that is attached to the investigation. And the main character's mother is one of the ringleaders and had tried to do her in when she was a baby.
• Ian Rankin's novel Bleeding Hearts features an assassin who is contracted to kill a TV reporter. When he carries out the hit but is nearly arrested, he believes he was set up and sets out to find out why, eventually uncovering and dismantling an evil cult. In an interesting use of the Detective Patsy trope, he was hired and set up by the same person, the reporter, in order for him to discover the truth about the cult.
• In The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, a routine EPA investigation into a potential leak at an industrial waste dump uncovers a conspiracy to revive a God of Evil.
• The Cat in the Stacks Mysteries: In book 2, Charlie is invited to James Delacorte's house to inventory his rare book collection, since Delacorte thinks a family member has stolen from him. This puts Charlie in place to investigate Delacorte's subsequent murder, which is actually committed for unrelated reasons.
• City of Devils starts with a simple missing mummy case and spirals into the discovery of a ring of powerful monsters including some law enforcement, illegally kidnapping humans and turning them into monsters on film as a bizarre form of pornography.
  • The sequel ups the ante by starting with a couple missing persons (and one missing toad) cases and a secret admirer, and turns into the creation of Godzilla.
• Cyber Dreams: Juliet does this as part of Framing the Guilty Party; a Corrupt Corporate Executive kills a ship full of his own employees to give Juliet a good cover identity as a dangerous pirate. Juliet documents all the evidence and uses it to get him into enough trouble that they can frame him for selling corporate secrets, which the corporate courts actually consider far more important.
• In The Day of the Jackal, the French police are baffled by a series of seemingly-unconnected bank robberies and jewelry heists. It turns out they're being orchestrated by the OAS terrorist group to fund the titular assassin's plot to kill Charles de Gaulle.
• Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. books;
  • Death Warmed Over: Divorce settlement → Van Helsing Hate Crime via pharmaceuticals.
  • Hair Raising: Complaint about body-parts store's service → Organ Theft ring.
• Discworld City Watch novels:
  • Men at Arms: A break-in at the Assassins' Guild → a plot to overthrow the Patrician.
  • Feet of Clay: The death of a palace maid's grandmother → solving the otherwise-unsolvable poisoning of the Patrician.
  • The Fifth Elephant: The murder of a rubber goods manufacturer and the theft of a replica Scone of Stone → a plot to overthrow the Low King of the Dwarfs.
  • Thud!: The murder of a rabble-rousing dwarf, and the theft of a painting → a plot to prevent peace between dwarfs and trolls by obfuscating their shared history.
  • Snuff: The death of a goblin (not strictly murder except in the soul of Sam Vimes) → a massive smuggling ring and slave plantations.
    • Vimes actually lampshades this while talking with another character, referencing a case wherein a man had killed his dog, with Lord Vetinari ordering Vimes to search the man's house, stating that "where one finds little crimes, one often finds larger crimes." Vimes confirms to the other character that they did find larger crimes connected to the dog-killer.
• Dream Park: In The Barsoom Project, electronic tampering with a high-tech LARP → multiple acts of lethal sabotage in support of covert corporate takeover scheme.
• The Dresden Files does this almost once per book.
  • Storm Front: Hired to find a woman's missing husband and help the police with a murder → uncovering an Axe-Crazy practitioner of Black Magic.
  • Summer Knight: Investigating a suspicious death → averting a faerie war.
  • Death Masks: Recovering a stolen religious artifact → preventing a souped-up Black Plague.
  • Dead Beat: Finding a certain book for a vampire → preventing some necromancers from achieving godhood.
  • White Night: Investigating the murders of a few low-level witches → stopping a coup in the White Court.
  • Small Favor: Checking out an attack on Marcone → preventing Ivy from becoming a Denarian.
  • Turn Coat: Giving the defamed Morgan asylum → outing The Mole in the White Council.
  • Changes: Saving Harry's daughter from Red Court kidnappers → Killing the entire Red Court.
  • Cold Days: Killing an immortal (Maeve) to... stopping an Outsider plot to rule the world, and nuke half of Chicago.
• Once the villain of Emil and the Detectives is arrested for stealing a few bills off a kid, a further search reveals him to carry the cash from a recent bank robbery.
• Fatherland: An alternate history in which Germany won WWII and a Nazi Protagonist detective discovers the truth about the Holocaust after investigating a series of murders and suicides (the government officially claimed that Jews and other Holocaust victims were being resettled in Eastern Europe).
• In A Game of Thrones, the investigation into the murder of Jon Arryn leads Eddard Stark to evidence that none of the heirs to the throne are actually the children of the king and the assumption that Arryn was murdered to cover up this fact. This knowledge eventually leads to a succession crisis called the War of the Five Kings, and Stark's own execution. Ironically, it is revealed later that Arryn wasn't murdered to cover up the Queen's affair at all, but rather because Arryn's wife wanted to be free to marry the man she'd been having an affair with for years.
• Half Moon Investigations has the young detective investigating a series of sabotaging attacks on various members of the community, but in the process, he discovers that several of the events were carried out by a separate conspiracy. YMMV as to which conspiracy was the major or minor, but the fact that the one accidentally discovered was being carried out by ten-year-old girls with all the efficiency of an adult...
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The break-in at Gringotts → Voldemort attempting to rise back to power.
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The escape of a famous convict → A devoted servant trying to rejoin with Voldemort. The "devoted servant" being actually a snivelling coward who framed said convict.
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The disappearance of a Ministry official → a genocidal maniac planning to return to power.
• In the Cold War thriller An H-Bomb for Alice by Ian Stewart, a detective investigates the apparent suicide of the Australian Minister of Aboriginal Affairs. Although he was about to pass an important bill, there appears to be no motive for murder as no government or mining interests are threatened by it. It turns out the Soviet Union is planning to invade China, and a hidden strike force is waiting to seize the US surveillance station at Pine Gap which they fear will provide prior warning of the attack. The strike force was operating under the cover of a hippy colony that would have been evicted from Aboriginal land if the bill had been passed.
• Hercule Poirot:
  • In "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook", the disappearance of a cook from her employer's place → the murder of a bank clerk and a plan to spirit away thousands of pounds in securities.
  • In Hickory Dickory Dock, Poirot gets interested in a student hostel because of a series of petty thefts. A kleptomaniac seems to be stealing random items, most of them with no real value. Poirot's investigation ends up uncovering connections between the owner of the hostel and smuggling operation.
  • Hallowe'en Party: The death of a young girl at a Hallowe'en party → a conspiracy revealed to have murdered several people for the sake of securing an inheritance.
• Honor Harrington: In On Basilisk Station, routine policing to stop smuggling and the murder of several local cops leads to the discovery of a plot for invasion. Amusingly played with in that the people doing the plotting try to call the invasion off and would have been able to do it unmolested if their plot hadn't been so revealed.
• Illuminatus! starts off with this. Murder of a news columnist → Wheels within wheels conspiracy for control of Earth, involving rock bands, undead Nazis and Eldritch Abomination(s).
• In Death:
  • Origin in Death: Murder of a "saintly" doctor → massive decades-old illegal human-cloning and people-made-to-order operation.
  • Born in Death: Murder of two young accountants → tax fraud and other financial crimes → baby-selling ring.
  • Faithless in Death: Murder of artist → Breeding Cult involved in Human Trafficking and related crimes.
• In The Snows Of Haz: Finding Dimali's murderer → foiling a plot to topple The Empire.
• The Laundry Files usually has Bob, one of the titular organization's field agents/computational demonologists/IT guys sent out on a minor call, only to pull the string on something larger:
  • The Atrocity Archive: Extract a British national being kept inside America by the CIA's occult wing → stop an Eldritch Abomination from crossing over from a world where the Nazis won World War II.
  • "The Concrete Jungle": Get sent to Milton Keynes because there are one too many concrete cows → uncover and prevent an internal coup within the Laundry.
  • The Jennifer Morgue: Go to a conference for occult intelligence across the EU → get roped into a James Bond plot and have to stop a mad billionaire from resurrecting an ancient cyborg war god.
  • The Apocalypse Codex: Get sent to oversee an external contractor who's looking into a televangelist's close relationship with the Prime Minister → stop said televangelist from summoning an Eldritch Abomination in the middle of Colorado Springs.
• "Coldheart", a novella in the League of Magi collection of the same name, starts with a missing woman and goes into hundreds of kidnappings, immortal sorcerers, superpowered beings, monsters, and oh yeah, a ritual summoning of a wendigo.
• Lord Peter Wimsey: In Murder Must Advertise, the murder of an advertising copywriter → massive cocaine-smuggling ring.
• The Macbeth Murder Mystery: Parodied when a Genre Savvy Detective Drama reader mistakes the book of ''The Tragedy of Macbeth'' for a Detective Drama, → The Reveal of the identity of the real murderer, menacing the Shakespearean canon of the last four hundred years.
• In Mr. Monk in Outer Space, the heart-attack death of a fast-food company CEO that is dressed up as a shooting → exposure of an embezzlement scam.
• In Nerve Zero, the hero just wanted to find an old flame to get her off-world and ended up discovering a cult, an investigation by the secret police, and a plot to evacuate the planet.
• No. 6: One mysterious death, then more, leads to the truth of an entire utopian city being used as test subjects to revive Eliurias.
• The mid-war Philip Marlowe novel The Lady in the Lake starts with finding a missing (possibly run away on her own) wife and leads to three murders and mafia involvement in defense industries.
• In Quarantine (1992), an investigation into the disappearance of a severely developmentally delayed woman from a care home eventually reveals a plot to radically alter the nature of reality at a quantum level.
• In Rainbow Six, the FBI carries out a search for a missing woman, believing it to be part of a kidnapping or serial killing, only to find a plan to wipe out most of humanity.
  • Clear and Present Danger starts off with the Coast Guard pulling over suspicious yacht, only to discover the men aboard it have murdered the family of a wealthy American businessman, which leads to the discovery of his connections to a Colombian drug cartel.
• The Reckoning: A beloved minister is murdered in 1946 Mississippi by a prominent citizen who takes his reasons to the grave → Misplaced Retribution for cheating with said prominent citizen's wife, resulting in her having to have a painful abortion.
• The Repairman Jack novels by F. Paul Wilson often start with Jack being asked to solve a small mystery, such as a missing person or a robbery. This mystery invariably turns out to be related in some way to the bigger 'Adversary Cycle' arc that spans the whole series.
• Rivers of London: The Hanging Tree starts off with Peter having to fulfill his owed favour to Lady Ty by making sure her daughter isn't implicated in a suspicious death by drug overdose, which is tied into an investigation of how the teenagers at the party in question got access to a flat in the highly-secure One Hyde Park. This leads to the identity of the Faceless Man being exposed.
• In the Sano Ichiro novel The Samurai’s Wife, Sano’s investigation into the death of the imperial left minister eventually exposes a plot to overthrow the Tokugawa government and reinstate the emperor as ruler of Japan.
• The Sherlock Holmes stories have a lot of this.
  • "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons". A madman is stealing Napoleon busts and smashing them → The recovery of a stolen pearl.
  • "The Blue Carbuncle". Man loses his Christmas dinner → The recovery of the eponymous stolen gemstone (seriously).
  • "The Red-Headed League". A man was a member of an exclusive club only for redheads → A bank heist using an underground tunnel.
  • "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches". A woman gets a too-good-to-be-true job offer → Turns out that she was there to take the place of the daughter of his employer who is imprisoned somewhere in the house.
• Slayers: Destroying a bandit hideout and looting some of the contents reveals a plot to revive THE Darkest Lord of the Demonic forces and possibly destroy the world.
• In the Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note series, Aya discussed this trope with Kuroki during The Backyard Knows, expressing some disappointment that the crime involved in the arc was indeed minor, performed by a perennial small-time criminal without more apparent complexities. But the story does go that way, although still downplayed: it lead to a case of museum theft which causes the loss of some expensive butterfly specimens.
• The Teresa Knight Trilogy: In Strip Poker Teresa looking into blackmail and an ordinary murder leads her to discovering an international conspiracy by corporations smuggling coltan mined inside the Democratic Republic of Cargo by forced child labor that's connected with brutal rebels who have committed countless atrocities.
• Terra Ignota: The theft of the Seven-Ten List, an annual newspaper editorial of the ten most powerful people in the world, leads to the exposure of two intergovernmental conspiracies, various national secrets, and plunges the world into World War III.
• The Thinking Machine: In "The Problem of the Organ Grinder", the investigation of what appears to be a truly pointless crime — the murder of an organ grinder's monkey—leads the exposure of a major counterfeiting ring.
• The Tommy and Tuppence story "The Ambassador's Boots": The theft and almost immediate return of said boots → a major drug smuggling operation.
• Several of Andrei Belyanin's Tsar Gorokh's Detective Agency novels use this trope:
  • The very first (eponymous) novel starts with the theft of the Tsar's chrysoprase ring and a chest of gold coins. This leads to the unraveling of a massive conspiracy to destroy the city.
  • The second novel, The Plot of the Black Mass, starts with several merchants complaining about the theft of black fabric. This leads to a mad rush to stop a demonic Summoning Ritual that would leave the land in ruin.
  • The third novel, The Flying Ship, starts with the theft of the blueprints for the latest novelty invention. This leads to an attempt to stop an Evil Overlord from building a fleet of flying warships capable of laying waste to any city.
  • The fourth novel, Bride Elimination, starts with the theft of a diplomatic gift. This leads to an attempt by a foreign diplomat to start a multinational war.
• The Venus Prime series loves this trope. In the first book, the investigation into a case of sabotage leads to the uncovering of an elaborate plot to steal a very expensive book, which in turn flushes out a member of a hidden conspiracy involving eugenics and aliens. Similarly, the second book starts with the investigation into an attempted murder, which uncovers a secret drug ring, which ends up being connected to the above-mentioned conspiracy. The third book starts with an investigation into the murder of a colony administrator and exposes a nasty union fight, which again turns out to be connected to an ancient conspiracy...
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga: Komarr starts with the investigation of a collision between a freighter and an orbital terraforming mirror. It makes a detour to a modest embezzlement scheme before settling on a plot to eliminate the only wormhole link between Barrayar and the rest of the populated galaxy that would actually, due to incomplete analysis of the underlying science, result in the destruction of at least one space station with several thousand residents and transients aboard.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • This happens with amusing regularity to COMMISSAR CIAPHAS CAIN, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!!. With the caveat that "minor crime" is usually a planet-engulfing war, and "major plot" is something with the potential to severely upset the balance of power across the galaxy. There's also a Running Gag that Cain will find or contrive some piece of busywork on scant evidence to avoid the serious fighting and fall face-first into the real threat or a faceoff with the enemy leaders.
  • In Ravenor, the titular inquisitor's investigation into the flect trade reveals that a cabal of rogue traders are smuggling Chaos-tainted computers onto the sub-sector capital. This, in turn, reveals that a cult lead by highly-influential members of the sub-sector government is using those computers to reconstruct a dead Language of Magic in order to become gods.
• In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a man's murder (while stretching the limits of minor crime) eventually reveals a plot by conservative Jews in collaboration with right-wing America to overthrow Palestine (which in this Alternate Universe is still a widely recognized sovereign state, Israel only having existed in the modern world for a few months) by blowing up the al-Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, which is dramatically worse.

• Call of Cthulhu supplement Masks of Nyarlathotep. The murder of author Jackson Elias by cultists leads to a worldwide conspiracy to open a Gate and let the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos conquer the Earth.
• Magic: The Gathering: In the Dissension novel, Agrus Kos is sent to infiltrate the Simic Combine to find out their involvement in a potential Dimir plot...and is surprised and chagrined when guildleader Momir Vig begins monologuing about his own, completely unrelated plan to Take Over the World.
• This is the standard structure for Pathfinder Adventure Paths, to justify starting at level 1 (when everything is kobolds and copper pieces, and you get excited over a potion of barkskin) and ending at 15-20 (when you can pick fights with legendary monsters and win): adventurers go to Town X at the behest of Patron Y, and whatever happens there starts them on a path to stopping the evil plan of Potentially Setting-Reshaping Threat Z.
  • Rise of the Runelords begins with a bunch of goblins attacking a town during a local festival, leading to an investigation that reveals that sevent ancient tyrants seek to be resurrected so they can retake their power.
  • Legacy of Fire begins with a mysterious fire killing a merchant princess's personal astrologer, and the investigation ends with a crazed genie and his minions attempting to steal the power of an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Kingmaker begins with a group of people being sent into an unclaimed land to form a new kingdom, which leads to the reveal of an exiled mad nymph seeking to bottle said unclaimed land in an attempt to regain her old life.
  • Iron Gods begins with someone sabotaging the purple "flame" that fuels most of the town of Torch's industry and ends with an unhinged AI launching a bid for godhood from within the confines of an ancient crashed spaceship.
  • Carrion Crown starts with the apparently accidental death of a scholar, with the player characters being old friends attending his funeral, and winds its way through various horror tropes to an attempt to bring back an ancient lich.
• One Shadowrun supplement, about Lone Star Security, mentions how police in the Robbery division often wind up investigating major crimes: ones that'd started out looking like a simple robbery due to cover-up efforts by the perpetrators.

• The court case in The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochne Krug) by Heinrich von Kleist is about - you guessed it - a broken jug. As it turns out, there is a particularly nasty case of blackmail behind it.
• Played with in Hamilton, where Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and James Madison's search for dirt on Alexander Hamilton leads them to a supposed tip that he's been engaging in embezzlement of government funds. What they actually uncover is a considerably less criminal enterprise - Hamilton's affair with Maria Reynolds. Their fishing trip might have been an embarrassment for them, except that Hamilton is so paranoid about being accused and so arrogant about his own talent for maneuvering that he decides to publish a pamphlet admitting to the affair, which turns it into a huge scandal that tarnishes his reputation and almost ends his marriage.

• Meta Runner: Sudden disappearance of a TASCorp Meta Runner → Plot by insane Mad Scientist to trap every Meta Runner in the world inside his digital simulation.
• RWBY: In the pilot episode, Ruby foils a local criminal's attempt to rob a Dust shop. When Dust robberies keep happening, and seem to also involve the terrorist White Fang organisation, Team RWBY begins a vigilante investigation that eventually drags them and their friends into a vast, global conspiracy that has spent millennia waging a Secret War to decide the fate of humanity which eventually ends up resulting in the destruction of one of the four remaining Kingdoms of Humanity.

• In Forest Hill a school bully repeatedly running away from home, and what at first seems to be an unrelated incident of a 5-year-old girl sexually molesting a boy → the school bully is being prostituted by his father to other pedophiles and the girl is the daughter of one of his clients, who has been forcing the two of them to have sex.
• The Letters Of The Devil is started by Cedric's investigation into Rita Carey's fraudulent business practices, and we discover a plethora of other, more heinous crimes as his investigation progresses.
• The Order of the Stick: Murder/robbery of Eugene Greenhilt's mentor → Multiverse-spanning plot to gain control of an Eldritch Abomination that could destroy the world and kill the gods.

• Can You Spare a Quarter?: It turns out that Jamie's parents are part of a much larger group of people who abuse children. And the investigation in the case of Jamie leads to the arrest of a number of people in high positions.
• The Salvation War: Pantheocide: Discovery of illegal human items in Heaven → multiple conspiracies to bring down Yahweh.
• The creepypasta Teacher Wanted, Must Love Kids has one hell of an example: Male teacher is fired for allegedly groping female student. → Female teacher framed him to cover up the fact that she's an Eldritch Abomination doing much worse things with the male students.

• The Cartoon Man trilogy: Missing persons case. → A plot by said missing person to enslave the world.
• While Critical Role usually has events gain a connection later as opposed to being planned out, the third campaign has a very clear (after the fact) through-line from "magically animated and violent furniture" -> "a plot to kill the gods by releasing a god eater from the moon".

• American Dad!: Parodied, and played straight. Steve does a research project on peanut butter and discovers a secret conspiracy dating back to the days of Abraham Lincoln. The parody occurs earlier in the episode in the form of a Noodle Incident where Snot claims that he gave up sleuthing after "the case of a missing bike horn turned into a double rape homicide".
• Beast Wars: Pursuit of a crew of rogue Predacons that ends in a crash landing on an unknown planet -> an attempt from said rogue crew to Ret-Gone the Autobots out of existence.
• Ben 10: Alien Force's first two-part episode has alien weapon smugglers on Earth. Magister Labrid was correct saying "That's just the tip of the iceberg", as it's discovered later on that said smugglers were gathering enough cash in the black market to fund their Galactic scale Apocalypse How plan.
• A common plot in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers:
  • "Catteries Not Included": Finding a missing kitten → foiling a plot by a mad scientist to devastate the city with lightning.
  • "Song of the Night 'n Dale": Reuniting a nightingale with a Chinese ruler → foiling a plot by said ruler's sister to take over the throne.
  • "Normie's Science Project": Helping a kid find his lost science project → foiling a plot by the same mad scientist wanting to level the city...again.
  • "A Creep In The Deep": An attack on a fish truck → stopping a submarine full of seas creatures from flooding the city.
  • Even their first mission in "To The Rescue" had a case of a stolen ruby turn out to be part of a scheme to rob the world gold depository.
  • "A Pie In The Sky" even has Chip lampshading the idea: he doesn't want to help a bird who's lost her flock migrate to Capistrano because the case is "too small", only for it to turn into a case of a woman using a giant magnet to screw up birds' sense of direction in order to capture them and bake them into pies, which ends up bringing down an entire airplane in the end.
• Parodied in an episode of Code Monkeys, when both Dave and the United Nations believe that: the theft of the new Impalavision game console from the US, along with two video-game developers → create a computer-powered superweapon capable of launching nukes at the US. The actual plot is much smaller, if not weirder: steal consoles and kidnap developers → restore Khakistan's coffers by selling the consoles back to Americans at a discount to make tons of cash (the programmers were needed to make games, as apparently the Impalavision's launch titles weren't great).
• This is baked into the very plot of Detentionaire. Protagonist Lee Ping is falsely accused of pulling off a massive prank at the start of the high school year, and evidence planted in his backpack indicates he was framed. He starts breaking out of detention in search of clues to the true culprit, but in the process, ends up uncovering a massive conspiracy involving mind control experiments on students, people disappearing for knowing too much, cloning, and a MegaCorp working alongside a Reptilian Conspiracy to install a new world order.
• Dexter's Laboratory:
  • Dial M For Monkey - "Barbequor": The Silver Spooner steals the condiments meant for Monkey's birthday → Barbequor attempts to devour the solar system.
  • The Justice Friends - "TV Super Pals": Disgruntled Postman steals a valuable postage stamp → Attempt to bomb the White House.
• Gargoyles begins with Elisa investigating the relatively minor crimes of property damage and theft, and this investigation exposes her to the major plot from the very beginning.
• Kim Possible has this happen quite a few times. The biggest example is from Kim Possible Movie: So the Drama where the attempted kidnapping of a toy magnate was merely the first step in Drakken's most ambitious Take Over the World plot yet. In one episode this trope is also implied when it is mentioned that Kim once brought an end to an interstate police chase that was set off by a driver having a broken brake light, but no further details are given.
• Played with in the Miraculous Ladybug episodes "Revelation", "Confrontation", and "Collusion", in which Sabrina getting caught writing papers for Chloe → Chloe being exposed as having not done any homework since elementary school, and getting away with it because her dad's the mayor → Chloe and Lila attempting to sabotage all their classmate's career forms → a string of firings at College Francois Dupont → an insidious plot to undermine Dupont so that Mayor Bourgeois can turn the school into a prison. Except that last part did not exist; Monarch used a doctored video to convince people that Mayor Bourgeois was far more corrupt than he actually was in order to convince the recently-fired teacher Caline Bustier that her firing was part of a larger conspiracy so that he could turn her into an akuma capable of removing Bourgeois from power.
• While Spongebob Squarepants is picking up trash in the Krusty Krab parking lot, he calls the police on someone he sees littering. It turns out the guy was actually a dangerous criminal known as the "Tattletale Strangler", who vows to kill SpongeBob in revenge for turning him in.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks:
  • Outpost scientist is turned to stone → plot by another outpost scientist and planetary resident to make money by stealing Starfleet information and selling it on the black market.
  • To an extent, Rutherford's entire story arc through the first three seasons: engineering ensign creates Ax-Crazy AI helper with unstable coding → said ensign's cybernetic implant begins to malfunction and causes repressed memories and old personality to resurface → revelation of plot by Insane Admiral to make a name for himself by creating automated Starfleet ships...which then kill him after he attempts to cover it up and rampage until the entire fleet of ships they were supposed to replace destroy them.
• 1973-74 Super Friends episode "The Planet Splitter". The theft of diamonds weighing 100+ carats → A plot to split Cygnus Uno, a planet in another solar system.
• Happens in several episodes of The Simpsons:
  • "Bart the Fink": Bart not getting a check signed by Krusty the Clown himself → Krusty is arrested for tax fraud (all in less than 5 minutes!).
  • "24 Minutes": Bullies steal expired yogurt from the Kwik-E-Mart → Plot to unleash a stink bomb on the school's bake sale.
  • "Mother Simpson": Homer fakes his death to get out cleaning a highway for work → Homer's mother is alive (Grandpa lied to Homer and said his mother died) and on the run from the cops for destroying germ weapons.
  • "Mona Leaves-a": Homer fulfills his late mother's final wishes → Uncovering Mr. Burns' plan to send a rocket full of radioactive waste to the Amazon rainforest.
• Young Justice (2010): The first outing (unofficial, at that) of the Team is to investigate a fire at Cadmus Labs. The fire allows them to uncover a vast secret project to create genetically engineered soldiers... including Superboy. It's also the first glimpse into the operations of the Light, who are secretly responsible for every villainous act in the series.

Pre 1800

• In late 1670s France, an investigation into a forged marriage certificate led to the exposure of a massive network of poisoners, one that reached as far as the inner circle of Louis XIV. The "Affair of the Poisons" became one of the greatest^note  scandals in French history.

1800s

• An investigation into pornography being illegally sold in victorian Soho → a series of corruption inquiries and trials when it was revealed not only that the so-called "Dirty Squad"^note  were on the pornographers' payroll, but that the corruption extended to multiple high-ranking officers.

1900s

• In 1903, a maid in Essex sued her former employer, Samuel Herbert Dougal, for unpaid bastardy payments (the contemporary term for child support). The court began investigating Dougal's source of income further and discovered that, while he had no legal income, he had been involved in a number of forgery and fraud schemes which had made most of his money. This led to questions about the whereabouts of one of his former wives, who he had bigamously married as part of a fraud scheme and who had since gone missing, having last been seen leaving in a carriage with Dougal who later falsely claimed she had left the country. Her murdered body was eventually found buried on the property and Dougal was hanged for her murder.
• The case of The Bluebeard James P. Watson. Bigamy → the murders of seven women.
• In 1923, police in the Soviet Union were called to deal with a horse trader who was suspected of bootlegging. While searching his stable for alcohol, they found a murdered body hidden under the haystack. It turned out that the trader, Vasili Komaroff, was a Serial Killer who had murdered 22 other people before that one.
• In 1948, an attempted robbery took place in Los Angeles, in which the perpetrator was shot and killed. Normally, this wouldn't lead to much... but the investigation revealed an illicit partnership (and a possible love affair) between LAPD vice cop Elmer V. Jackson and brothel madam Brenda Allen. The subsequent prostitution and police corruption trials resulted in a massive shake-up and reform of the Los Angeles Police Department.
• In 1951, one foreman in a Soviet unit dealing with construction since 1942 complained to the police that he was not being paid correctly. An investigation was opened, showing that the entire unit was a huge scam created by one Nikolay Pavlenko, a deserter first lieutenant who faked documents proclaiming him a colonel. The unit was busy not only with construction profits, but also looting German territory during the war. 400 were arrested, Pavlenko was shot, 16 sentenced, the rest released due to not knowing the truth themselves. Some senior officials tied to them were discharged as well, but avoided trial.
• A curious state trooper stumbles upon Criminal Convention on November 14, 1957 → the discovery of a secretive Italian-American criminal society called Cosa Nostra, or Our Thing in Italian. Vito Genovese, the organizer of the disastrous Apalachin Meeting, received a lot of flak from his peers and was imprisoned on presumably flimsy drug charges. Later on, a low-level mobster named Joe Valachi squeals on national TV in 1963, giving a good glimpse on the mob's inner workings and a who's who of the Mafia.
• This can happen twice to the same person. In 1957, 23-year-old Gerald Mason ran a red light in California, was stopped by two police officers, and promptly shot them. He was just driving a stolen car from a lover's lane where he had robbed four teenagers at gunpoint and raped one of them. 45 years later, a computerized fingerprint database found a match between a print in the steering wheel of the car and Mason's file for a burglary in South Carolina in 1956. The police went to look for Mason, who was now a wealthy, retired businessman and grandfather. He immediately collapsed and confessed everything. He had little choice because he still bore in his back the scar left by a bullet fired by one of the officers as he fled.
• The last execution of a teenager in British history, when 19-year-old Anthony Miller was hanged for murder in 1960, came about when one of Miller's friends was arrested for cottaging in a public park and found to have a newspaper clipping on him about a murder that had happened in the same park earlier that year; police got suspicious and questioned him about it, and he soon confessed that he and Miller had been involved.
• The 1962 assassination attempt on French President Charles de Gaulle was solved when a wanted Foreign Legion deserter was detained for not having papers at a police checkpoint.
• The Profumo Affair began when a petty criminal fired at a house his ex-girlfriend was hiding in and resulted in the Harold Macmillan government being permanently discredited.
• Assassination of John F. Kennedy:
  • After shooting John F Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippet, Lee Harvey Oswald was nabbed while sneaking into a movie theater without paying for a ticket. The theater manager suspected Oswald might be more than a petty criminal and called the cops.
  • Although Jim Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw has been generally ridiculed by serious assassination researchers, Oliver Stone found the way it spun out of a fight between two low-rent private eyes to be fascinating, which led to the movie JFK.

    Oliver Stone: This pistol whipping occurs on the night of November 22, 1963, on a rainy night in which this guy, Jack Martin, gets his skull laid open by his boss, Guy Banister, and out of that little Raymond Chandler kind of incident, Garrison spins this tale of international intrigue — a hell of a trail. As a dramatist, that excited me.

• The Charles Manson Family was originally arrested for car theft, and it wasn't until one of them bragged to a fellow inmate that they were implicated in the string of high-profile murders occurring at the time.
• The Watergate scandal, aside from adding a new suffix to the English language, is the most famous example of this trope in a real-world context, even being the former page image◊ and a satirical political Miniseries in the form of White House Plumbers.
  • A foiled "third-rate" burglary at the Watergate complex revealed the discovery of suspiciously diverted funds and a massive conspiracy to manipulate the US election that went right up to the President Richard Nixon, despite Nixon himself having a prominent lead over George McGovern.
  • Even the burglary itself was tipped off by a tiny clue: Security guard Frank Wills found the lock on a stairwell door in the garage taped open, but thinking it had been left by maintenance workers, he removed the tape. When he came back to find the lock taped open again by James McCord, who left the tape on the door rather than removing it, he called the police and made a more thorough search, catching him and the burglars in the act.
  • Nixon accomplice and former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt told Bernard "Macho" Barker to throw a brief tip he owed Lakewood Country Club in the mail chute. When the burglars were arrested that night, the check was discovered and Hunt immediately faced indictment, while dragging the White House into the case. Furthermore, Hunt's actions made it much easier for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to make the link to the White House, resulting in Nixon's resignation. It's likely that Nixon's involvement would never have been discovered if Macho did not have his tip.
• Ted Bundy's initial capture was this: On August 16, 1975, an off-duty cop driving around his own neighborhood in a suburb of Salt Lake City saw a Volkswagen Bug that didn't belong there driving with its lights off. Bundy promptly took off. The cop eventually chased him down and cited Bundy for failure to stop for an officer and possession of burglary tools. A detective connected Bundy with an open case of kidnapping and attempted murder. He was soon linked with some two dozen murders and became America's most notorious serial killer. This happened two more times. After he was convicted of kidnapping in Utah, Colorado extradited him to face a murder charge. Bundy managed to escape (after an attempted escape in Utah), but was pulled over in a stolen car weaving in and out of the lanes. He then managed to escape yet again from a Colorado jail and went to Florida, where he killed two more women. He was then stopped in another stolen car by a patrol officer making a routine check and captured for the last time.
• In 1976, while applying for a visa, a Soviet military officer found a discrepancy in his family documents: one of his relatives was actually Antonina Makarova, a notorious Nazi collaborator who had murdered thousands of Soviet prisoners. After being identified by several people who had known her during World War II, Makarova was executed for treason in 1979.
• David Berkowitz, the 'Son of Sam' serial killer, was tracked down because his getaway car was ticketed for illegal parking at the scene of one of his murders.
• The FBI's Operation ABSCAM, initially targeting forgers and art thieves, ended up uncovering widespread political corruption and leading to the conviction of multiple state representatives and a senator after a forger targeted in the sting mentioned that gambling licences could be bought from New Jersey politicians.
• The Cuckoo's Egg tells of how astrophysicist Clifford Stoll was asked to resolve a 75¢ discrepancy in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory computer usage accounts, and ended up uncovering a German computer hacker selling secrets to the KGB.
• The PTL scandal could have its beginning linked to a 1980 scandal involving a sexual encounter between PTL founder Jim Bakker (who was temporarily separated from then-wife Tammy Faye) and a young church secretary named Jessica Hahn (depending on whether you believe either Hahn's account; accusing Bakker of essentially date-raping her, or Bakker's version, stating the sex was consensual and possibly an attempt at revenge due to Tammy Faye's infatuation with music producer Gary S. Paxton). What got the Charlotte Observer's attention was initial concerns of financial misdeeds such as the $1,000 lifetime partnerships for their Heritage USA theme park, along with later revelations that $265,000 was given to Hahn as "hush money" to keep the incident quiet.
• In 1984, the arrest of a man for driving an unregistered vehicle with a forged license led to the discovery and killing of fugitive South African bank robber André Stander in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
• Leonard Lake and Charles Ng kidnapped and killed upwards of 25 people together and were only stopped when Ng was caught shoplifting in 1985 from a hardware store, having driven there in a car that belonged to one of their victims. Lake was taken into custody where he promptly killed himself knowing it was all over, but Ng managed to evade authorities until he was again busted while shoplifting.
• As covered by Down the Rabbit Hole, the 1985 Austrian Wine Poisoning Scandal initially started when a wine-ferrying trucker refused to allow his cargo to be tainted with water. His tipping off of it to the Austrian government eventually snowballed into one of the biggest public health scandals in central Europe. Investigators discovered that thanks to climate change causing premature grape abscission, wine makers nationwide were regularly tainting sweet wines with diethylene glycol, an initially hard-to-detect but highly toxic chemical used in wallpaper remover. The end result was countless arrests and incarcerations, the total collapse of the Austrian wine industry (which would take around a decade to fully recover), and massive amounts of public ridicule around the world, up to and including a jab from The Simpsons in its season one episode "The Crepes of Wrath".^note 
• In 1991, Hollywood was beset by four bizarre events: one of Dustin Hoffman's checks bounced, the premiere of Thelma & Louise was delayed, Sean Connery threatened to boycott the premiere of The Russia House over an overdue letter of credit, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer missed a payment of bond interest. Within a few years, all four events were traced back to the Italian fraudster Giancarlo Parretti (a protégé of the above-mentioned Michele Sindona), who'd embezzled billions from not only MGM, but also Crédit Lyonnais (then the largest bank in France) and several smaller film studios; the entire sordid saga can be read about here. Credit Lyonnais ultimately wound up selling MGM back to Kirk Kerkorian, while their library of films from almost all the other film companies they'd become entangled with, rolled under the "Epic Productions" banner^note  wound up being sold to PolyGram Filmed Entertainment in 1996; two years later, PolyGram was bought out by Seagram's — mostly for their music holdings — and their pre-1996 library, including all the stuff they'd bought from Credit Lyonnais, was sold to MGM and integrated into their Orion Pictures holdings.
• Timothy McVeigh was arrested for illegal firearm possession and driving without a license plate, and nearly made bail before he was finally connected to the Oklahoma City bombing.
• The Los Angeles Police Department Rampart Scandal in the late 1990s, which was the inspiration for the movie Training Day and the TV series The Shield:
  • It started on March 18, 1997, when Rampart CRASH^note  officer Kevin Gaines was shot dead in self-defense by undercover LAPD officer Frank Lyga. The resulting investigation revealed that Gaines not only had a history of road rage but lived a lifestyle far beyond his annual LAPD salary and was associated with Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight, and it came out that Death Row had gang ties with the Bloods and hired off-duty LAPD officers as security guards.
  • The investigation into Gaines also led to suspicions that he and other officers were involved in the fatal drive-by shooting of The Notorious B.I.G..
  • In March of 1998, eight pounds of cocaine worth $800,000 was stolen from an evidence room. Rampart CRASH officer Rafael Pérez was arrested for the theft, suspected to be an attempt at framing Frank Lyga in retaliation for Gaines's death; the cocaine stash was evidence in a prior arrest made by Lyga. Pérez was also suspected of knowing about the illegal activities of fellow CRASH officer David Mack, who'd robbed a bank his assistant manager girlfriend worked at in November 1997. When Pérez got a mistrial, he took a plea bargain and pled guilty to cocaine theft in exchange for providing prosecutors information about two "bad" shootings and three other Rampart CRASH officers engaged in illegal activity. Ultimately, over 4,000 pages of sworn testimony came out of Pérez, which resulted in more than 70 officers being implicated in serious misconduct. Worse, the scandal led to the Police Chief, District Attorney, and Mayor of Los Angeles all eventually being not re-appointed or re-elected (after allegations arose that the chief had tried to censor the lead investigators in the Rampart case, and one of these detectives resigned as a form of protest). Over 100 criminal convictions were also overturned as a result.
• The fallout from a car crash in rural Turkey involving a wanted ultranationalist, his girlfriend, a police official, and an MP, eventually spiralled a scandal that revealed cooperation between the Turkish government, the extreme-right paramilitary Grey Wolves, and organized crime, causing (among other things) the resignation of the Prime Minister.
• Serial killer Joel Rifkin initially drew the attention of a patrolman for driving without a license plate. When he was stopped (after a high-speed chase), police found the body of a dead prostitute in the trunk. Rifkin was eventually convicted of 17 murders.
• Police in Britain pulled over a man named Peter Sutcliffe for driving with fake licence plates and caught him with a sex worker in his car. When Sutcliffe was brought in, officers recognised his striking resemblence to composite sketches of the Yorkshire Ripper - a then-unidentified serial killer who targeted sex workers. Sutcliffe eventually confessed to the crimes and received a life sentence.
• The Riverside Killer William Suff was arrested after he made an illegal U-Turn and a rope and a bloody knife were found in his car.
• Serial killer Randy Kraft was caught when police officers stopped him for drunk driving and realized that his passenger had been strangled to death. The police then noticed Kraft's backseat was stained with blood despite said victim not having any lacerations.
• Canadian serial killer Cody Legebokoff was caught when a RCMP officer saw him pull onto the highway from a remote logging road and speeding erratically. The RCMP officer suspected that he was a poacher and pulled him over. The officer then found several tools covered in blood and arrested Cody for poaching. A conservation officer was sent to find the poached animal, but instead found the remains of one of Cody's victims.
• Robert Ben Rhoades, the "Truck Stop Killer" implicated in the rape, torture and murder of dozens of women across the United States, was apprehended when an Arizona Highway Patrol officer went over to investigate after seeing his truck parked at the side of the interstate with its hazard lights on, only to catch him in the act of raping his latest victim in the back of the truck.
• The "Festina Affair" that first blew the lid off the systematic doping by teams at the Tour de France in 1998 began with one of the Festina team's cars being routinely stopped by customs at the France-Belgium border and the discovery of steroids, EPO, syringes and other paraphernalia in the car's trunk.
• Malcolm Webster, the Black Widower, was tripped up in this manner. Alleged embezzlement of angler club funds revealed the murder of Claire Morris, his first wife, and attempted murder of Felicity Drumm, his second wife.
• Britain's most prolific serial killer, Dr. Harold Shipman, was originally investigated over allegations that he had forged the will of a recently deceased patient. The fake will was traceable to his typewriter, which led to the patient being exhumed. Traces of diamorphine were found in her body, and other apparently healthy patients who died suddenly were then also exhumed. It has been suggested that Shipman deliberately invoked the trope himself, making the ham-fisted forgery because he wanted to be caught.
• A pair of Los Angeles Times journalists investigating small-time malfeasance in Maywood, California, then stumbled across a much larger, far-reaching embezzling scheme in the neighboring town of Bell. Despite having a population of 35,000, three of its leaders had annual incomes higher than the President of the United States. The embezzlement is so complicated and intense that it threatened to suck the people of both Bell and Maywood dry of money, and five years later, the FBI is still discovering new ways that Bell officials had siphoned money into their hands.
• Around the time Nintendo released one of its disc-based consoles, a bunch of employees at one game store decided to play a prank involving a Box of Stupid, an empty box for a console which they had filled with junk to see if anybody would steal it. The unlucky victim was their assistant manager, and the incident turned out to be just the latest in which he had been helping himself to the store's inventory.
• An investigation into how the daughter of a New Age South Korea cultist managed to get into a prestigious academy despite weak grades eventually led to the discovery of the enormous influence the cult had on President Park Gun-hye and her subsequent impeachment.
• In the late 1970s, FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone attempted to infiltrate mob-affiliated truck hijacking and burglary crews by posing as a jewelry thief named Donnie Brasc. Barely getting past by the fences that were his initial target, Pistone found himself making contacts in the Bonnano family to the point of being proposed for membership. The intel gathered by his investigation revealed the existence and scope of the Mafia Commission, links between the various Mafia families in the country, mob involvement in labor racketeering, and a large-scale drug-running operation between the United States and Sicily. Said undercover operation inspired the Johnny Depp film "Donnie Brasco".
• In the late 1970s and early 1980s, American and Italian authorities were investigating the business failures of prominent banker Michele Sindona, due to reports of financial irregularities. Digging into bank records and Sindona's dirty laundry revealed not only that he was a fraudster and connected to The Mafia, but also the existence of a very scary secret society called Propaganda Due that held a lot of influence over Italian government and society.
• In 1995, Montreal animator Claude Robinson sued production company CINAR for allegedly plagiarizing the concept of Robinson Sucroe from a 1986 pitch he'd made to the company. In the ensuing investigation, Canadian authorities discovered that CINAR's co-founders, Ronald Weinberg and Micheline Charest, had embezzled millions from the company via offshore bank accounts, including money earmarked for Canadian content development. Weinberg and Charest wound up fired in 2001 and CINAR went down the tubes for a few years, until its assets were purchased by Nelvana founder Michael Hirsch and the company was reborn as Cookie Jar Entertainment. As for Robinson, the court ruled in his favor and awarded him $5.2 million in damages.
• The Lockheed Bribery scandals began as an inquiry into Lockheed for the potential misappropriation of government bailout money. By the time it was over, a multinational bribery scandal had been revealed that caused major shakeups in the governments of Italy, Japan, West Germany, and the Netherlands, the arrest of the Japanese prime minister, a kamikaze attack on a Yakuza boss's house by a far right activist pornstar, a constitutional crisis in the Netherlands and nearly destroyed Lockheed as a company for good.
• The Sandusky Affair started with one Aaron Fisher, then a freshman at Central Mountain High School, mentioning a relationship with former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky that involved "inappropriate touching". Three years later, it would explode into a university-wide scandal that went all the way up to its president, among other higher-ups, cost one of the all-time most revered college football coaches his job shortly before his death, got the NCAA involved, and still influences local politics and leaves bitter memories among Penn State alumni to this day.
• The WorldCom scandal. One random financial analyst, Kim Emigh, was instructed to basically commit tax fraud; attempting to escalate the matter got him fired, and he told the Fort Worth Weekly about the incident. An internal audit manager at WorldCom caught wind of the article and decided to initiate their own investigation. Things soon snowballed until the extent of the scheme was uncovered; much like what happened at Enron, the higher-ups had been cooking the books (using something they called "prepaid capacity") in an attempt to inflate the stock price amid the dot-com bubble's bursting. WorldCom promptly went bankrupt (taking the title of largest bankruptcy away from Enron), and was reorganized into the new MCI (MCI and WorldCom having merged in 1998); the new MCI didn't last long before Verizon acquired it in 2006.

2000s

• The attempted Millennium Dome heist in 2000 and the subsequent sting operation that led to the arrest of the would-be robbers began when police investigated a series of sophisticated armored car heists. While by no means small, they would have paled in comparison to a successful heist at the Millennium Dome, which would have netted the robbers £350 million in diamonds.
• 9/11 started filming as a documentary about the journey of Tony Benetatos, a probationary firefighter aspiring to become a full-fledged firefighter in New York City. On September 11, 2001, while Tony's battalion investigated a supposed gas leak at Church and Lispenard, co-director Jules Naudet captured one of the only three known recordings to clearly show American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the World Trade Center's North Tower.
• In the 2003 Antwerp diamond heist, which is one of the largest at over $100 million, the criminals were largely caught thanks to littering when they made a rather unlucky choice of where to dump their trash and it was quickly found the next day by an annoyed resident.
• On April 20, 2007, a man named Davon Boddie was arrested for pot dealing outside of the Royal Suite nightclub in Roanoke, Virginia. Boddie was the cousin of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick and gave Vick's home address as his own. Five days later, police searched the home and discovered a massive dog-fighting ring, leading to the arrest and conviction of Vick and four others.
• In April 2011, sheriff's deputies in Gloucester County, Virginia, searched a home for stolen property. They found a six-year-old girl near death, locked in a cage, apparently having been hidden from society for most of her life. And her brother's remains buried under a shed.
• In 2012, a chef at the Virginia Governor's Mansion was fired for stealing food from the mansion. The investigation into this small-time petty crime ended up revealing a far more serious crime involving Governor Bob McDonnell accepting extremely expensive gifts in return for illegally using his office to market a dietary supplement. The chef ended up with two misdemeanor embezzlement charges, while McDonnell and his wife were convicted of a combined 19 felony charges relating to corruption and fraud.
• In 2001; the FBI was investigating general corruption in the government of Waterbury, Connecticut^note  when phone records and photographs were discovered of Waterbury Mayor Philip Giordano, who had been the Republican nominee almost by default running against 2-term incumbent Democratic Senator (and in 2000; the nominee for Vice-President) Joe Lieberman, alongside a local prostitute and, more seriously, the woman's underage daughter and niece. The scandal tanked Giordano's campaign, leading to Lieberman winning a third term in a landslide. Giordano would eventually be arrested and ultimately convicted on 14 counts of using an interstate device (his cellphone) to arrange sexual contact with children, receiving a 37-year prison sentence - with Giordano not eligible for release until 2034.
• The energy company Enron saw its luck sour in 2001 as many questioned their finances when Enron's reported stock value was 55 times larger than their earnings, along with numerous other opaque and bizarre accounting practices. This and other discrepancies forced the SEC to do its own investigation, and as it went on, more and more crimes were uncovered. What had essentially started into looking into the odd accounting practices of the company mushroomed into a laundry list of crimes committed by and with the knowledge of the majority of its executives that included embezzlement, insider trading and fraud, the last of which included a supervillain-level scheme of deliberately blacking out California to profit on hugely inflated energy prices. The end result saw several Enron executives going to prison (and the CEO dying of a heart attack before he could be sentenced), stronger penalties for "cooking the books", and Enron becoming the world's largest corporate bankruptcy in history until the collapse of WorldCom just about a year later. The fallout also destroyed the reputation of Arthur Andersen, one of the world's largest accounting firms, so thoroughly that they too soon folded.
• Brazil:
  • In 2005, a former Brazil Postal Service executive was filmed negotiating a bribe, while saying he had the backing of a congressman. Said politician went on to reveal the government was buying the support of a lot of deputies. If that wasn't big enough, a decade later a money laundering operation using a gas station uncovered a massive corruption scheme that sunk the value of the country's biggest company and ultimately forced the president out of office—which, embarrassingly enough, happened right after she was forced to miss the Olympics due to a suspension pending a verdict in an impeachment trial intended to remove her.
  • And, as of 2017, the latter scandal has resulted in an investigation into Brazil's sitting president, the vice president who had replaced the president, and the conviction of her predecessor on corruption charges. All this galvanized support for the Brazilian far-right, culminating in the controversial election of the very far-right-aligned Jair Bolsonaro to the Brazilian Presidency in 2018. And the corruption has only gotten worse under him, to the point where the people are actively calling for him to be impeached, too—it doesn't help that the obstruction investigation the Supreme Court authorized towards the end of April 2020 in the wake of his termination of Brazil's top cop came as the country was sinking fast under the weight of his gross mismanagement of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• In April 2011, sheriff's deputies in Gloucester County, Virginia, searched a home for stolen property. They found a six-year-old girl near death, locked in a cage, apparently having been hidden from society for most of her life. And her brother's remains buried under a shed.
• The case of Larry Nassar at Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics, only the second major sex scandal to rock the sports world since the Sandusky Affair. It started when a coach heard one of her gymnasts and another girl discussing Nassar's "treatments" and thought that something didn't sound right, so she reported it. From there, what unfolded was a full-blown sex abuse case, with well over a hundred victims ultimately named, and Nassar receiving a Longer-Than-Life Sentence. What's more, the investigation not only involved Nassar himself, but also implicated Michigan State University and a few higher-ups at USA Gymnastics in a major coverup, and also opened the door for subsequent allegations of verbal and physical abuse against individual coaches. The full extent of the situation may not be known until the conclusion of the investigation, which is expected to take years.
• The Volkswagen emissions scandal was also revealed this way when a small research team from West Virginia University did a study on the difference in emissions between European and American cars. While they were at it, they discovered a difference in emissions from Volkswagen cars in a controlled environment and those same cars on actual roads. When investigated, it turned out that Volkswagen had been installing "defeat devices" on all its diesel cars, fooling laboratory tests into thinking the cars met standards they didn't in actual driving. The fallout from that, including a major backlash against diesel cars as a whole to the point of threatening to end their relevance both de jure in certain parts of Europe and de facto most elsewhere, caused Volkswagen stock to drop by a third, several higher-ups resigned or were suspended, and ended up with a 2.8 billion dollar fine. One wonders why they thought that would be less expensive than actually bringing their cars up to standard.
• In the late '80s, a certain priest in Louisiana named Gilbert Gauthe was busted for molesting dozens upon dozens of children. Over the next few decades, it became increasingly clear that he was only the first case of a real-life Pedophile Priest to be exposed, and when the lid was blown on Pennsylvania in 2018, Gauthe turned out to be not even the earliest real-life example by four decades, and in a similar fallout to the Weinstein Effect law enforcement is hellbent on finding out how much worse it is than what has already been revealed. Worse, the entire scandal has the potential to cause the single biggest schism this side of the Reformation, as traditional Catholics who supported Pope Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict, and reformist Catholics who back the decidedly more liberal-minded Pope Francis are at each other’s throats like never before.
• In December 2018, Niagara Regional Police noticed a car parked in a handicapped spot without a permit. They checked the plates and discovered it was stolen, with a prohibited rifle and fentanyl opioids in the backseat.
• 2016 US Election:
• A pediatrician working for Indian Health Services is assaulted by one of his patients revealed multiple allegations of pedophilic sexual abuse by said pediatrician, a certain Stanley Patrick Weber.
• The 2019 college admissions bribery scandal got blown open because Morrie Tobin, who was under investigation by the SEC in an unrelated pump-and-dump securities fraud, offered information about the admissions scheme to the government in exchange for leniency. An alumnus of Yale, he told authorities that the Yale women's soccer head coach, Rudolph "Rudy" Meredith, had asked for $450,000 in exchange for helping his daughter gain admission to the school. The FBI had Tobin wear a wire while talking to Meredith in a Boston hotel on April 12, 2018; Meredith subsequently agreed to cooperate with the FBI and led them to William Rick Singer, the ringleader.
• A retired Major League Baseball player is shot in a hit gone wrong → a drug running conspiracy.
• While not so much "minor" as much as a case of two seemingly unrelated crimes being connected that led to the downfall of former Illinois Republican Governor George Ryan. During an investigation into a traffic accident in Wisconsin where 6 children in the Wills family were killed while the parents survived but were severely burned, it was discovered that unqualified truck drivers were giving out bribes to members of Ryan's staff when Ryan was Illinois Secretary of State; resulting in a grand total of 79 people (mostly state officials and lobbyists) being charged - 76 of them convicted while Ryan decided not to run for a 2nd term in 2002^note ; eventually being indicted on 22 various counts in late 2003 (during the trial, Ryan's daughters and one son-in-law would also be implicated in the scheme); and - aided by part by Ryan's former chief of staff Scott Fawell testifying against Ryan - eventually being convicted on all charges (two of which would be thrown out by the judge in post-trial motions) and would ultimately serve 6 and a half years in federal prison.
• An investigation into fraudulent credit card charges of carpet cleaning business ZZZZ Best by the Los Angeles Times led to the lid being blown off one of the biggest accounting scandals ever, involving fraudulent restoration jobs and eventually revealing that ZZZZ Best was just a front for a Ponzi scheme. The scheme landed whiz-kid founder Barry Minkow in federal prison in 1988. After Minkow's release in 1995, he became a pastor, but eventually fell back into his old ways, pleading guilty to securities fraud in 2011 and to defrauding his church in 2014, serving a five year sentence and paying restitution to the tune of $3.4 million, on top of the $26 million he was ordered to pay for the ZZZZ Best scheme.
• Another corporate financial scandal was one that erupted in the early 2010s at Olympus, the Japanese camera company. Former head of European medical devices group wonders why Tokyo handled the buyouts of European businesses instead of him -> is Kicked Upstairs in hopes of shutting him up -> continues investigating and gets fired for it -> independent audits reveal massive financial malfeasance and possible links to the Yakuza(!) More investigation uncovered that this had been going as early as the 1980s, in part to combat the weakening of the yen as the US worked to prevent Japan from taking over the world, and subsequently had ballooned out of control during the "Lost Decade" (after the Japanese economic bubble burst).
• In January 2020, the head of San Francisco's Public Works Department (Mohammed "Mr. Clean" Nuru) and restaurant owner Nick Bovis were arrested by the FBI for a 2018 attempt to bribe an airport official with five thousand dollars, which the official reported. Over the next year, a "permit expediter" named Walter Wing Lok Wong agreed to cooperate with authorities, revealing a history of bribery and fraud going back to at least 2004 and leading to the arrest or resignation of, among others, the General Manager of the Public Utilities Commission, the Building Inspections Director, and the City Administrator (the highest-ranked appointed official in the city), with revelations of millions of dollars in bribes and cheating on multi-million dollar bids, with indictments from the US Attorney, city attorney, and the IRS. (As of January 2021, the investigation is ongoing.)
• A tax collector's house is raided in connection with his stalking of a political rival → a sex trafficking ring also involving local representative Matt Gaetz (R). Only in Florida! This has since mushroomed into allegations that Gaetz was in a pay-to-play scheme that included paid travel and escorts in exchange for doling out political favors to marijuana companies, attempted to obstruct justice by intimidating witnesses, and had inappropriate relationships with female staffers.
• In April 2010, a police officer searching the home of 76-year-old Joseph Naso, who had been arrested for shoplifting, found multiple images of Naso violating women and a diary in which he detailed multiple murders. Naso was eventually convicted of the murders of four women, but is suspected of more.
• Saudi Arabian police arrested a teenager for vagrancy in 2009. In order to avoid charges, he told police that he had witnessed his father, Awdah Salem, murdering a woman, causing them to suspect he was the serial killer who had murdered three Indonesian maids in Yanbu. A double example because Saudi police wanted to hold off on charging him until they had proof he had killed all three victims. Eventually they found evidence he was actually a Yemeni citizen and was living in Saudi Arabia under a false passport, allowing them to arrest him, search his house and find the evidence they needed.
• The Turf Fraud Scandal: a run-of-the-mill confidence trick → three of the Metropolitan Police's highest-ranking detectives were on the take and helped criminals to evade the police.
• The suicide of Joe Gliniewicz. A former police officer is murdered → the murder was actually a suicide staged to look like a murder in order to cover up a massive embezzlement and money laundering scheme run by the dead man and an attempt to arrange the assassination of a city auditor investigating the scheme.
• In 2017, a janitor finds a loaded gun in the bathroom of an airport, and catches a German officer whose fingerprints are registered as a Syrian refugee. Further investigations revealed the existence of a neo-Nazi plot called Day X, where special forces members, military officials, and police officers with neo-Nazi sympathies planned to stockpile weapons and assassinate left-leaning members of the federal government to seize power.
• Veronica Packman disappeared in 1985. Her husband Russell Causley was suspected, but the case was dropped after somebody claiming to be her contacted police. Several years later in 1993, Causley was arrested after he was caught Faking the Dead so his girlfriend could claim a life insurance payout. This fraud brought the case to the attention of the Dorset Police, who became suspicious about Veronica's disappearance due to there being no trace of her after she supposedly turned up alive. Their enquiry uncovered constant changing stories by Causley about his wife's whereabouts^note , the forging of Veronica's signature by Causley on multiple documents she had supposedly signed after her disappearance, a family member who claimed Causley had confessed to killing his wife during an argument and three fellow prisoners who Causley allegedly confessed to, including one who told police that Causley had admitted having a friend's wife impersonate Veronica. Causley was convicted of Veronica's murder, and very likely would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for the life insurance fraud.
• An investigation by the Wall Street Journal for sexual misconduct and infidelity in 2022 led to Vince McMahon resigning as chairman and CEO from WWE after revealing the head honcho had been involved in extramarital affairs with four other women, and he shelled out cash on them as a way to keep their mouths shut.
• The UK's infamous Thorpe affair. An inept thug shoots a dog and makes a half-hearted attempt to kill the dog's owner reveals a conspiracy by a prominent politician to murder his gay lover.
• Modesto Officers investigating a domestic violence case uncover a puppy mill run by the accused abuser.
• On May 29, 1986, a sting operation led to the arrest of two men for stealing a yacht. This resulted in the discovery that one of them, LAPD officer "Mild Bill" Leasure, spent his free time running a criminal underworld that stole yachts and cars, defrauded insurance companies and conducted contract killings.
• Indian Serial Killer Rasu Miah confessed to killing eleven women after being caught stealing a ceiling fan from a mosque.
• The collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX: News website CoinDesk reports on the connection between FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research, revealing that the bulk of Alameda's holdings were in the form of FTX's own token, FTT. In simplified terms, FTX's wealth came from printing their own money and using the activities of a closely associated company to artificially inflate its value, a "pump-and-dump" tactic that is illegal in traditional banking. This ultimately led to FTX's collapse as FTT lost its value, revealing a much wider scheme of fraud and embezzlement between the two companies.
• John Edward Robinson was arrested in June 2000 after a woman filed a sexual battery complaint and another charged him with stealing her sex toys. The police then found that he had murdered eight women, four of whom he met online.
• In 2019, a man was beaten up by security at a South Korean nightclub named Burning Sun. He claimed that he had been attacked after intervening to help a woman being sexually harassed by club staff. This led to more accusations coming out about numerous cases of date rape and non-consensual filming and online sharing of sex acts at the Burning Sun, including by K-pop singers Choi Jong-hoon and Jung Joon-young. Things escalated further when group chat messages were discovered showing that famous K-pop singer Seungri, Burning Sun's publicity director, had not only been aware of the endemic rape at the club, but had directed employees to procure prostitutes in order to bribe potential investors for his nightclub business, Yuri Holdings. The result was the prosecution of numerous persons involved at Burning Sun and Yuri Holdings, with those convicted including Seungri, Jong-hoon, Joon-young and Seungri's business partner Yoo In-seok, who exposed yet more malfeasance when he implicated himself and Seungri in embezzling money from Yuri Holdings. In addition, several police officers were accused of accepting bribes from Seungri in return for turning a blind eye to the crimes committed at the club.
• In June of 2023, the GRAC (effectively the South Korean equivalent to the ESRB) was investigated and its members were found out to have embezzled 700 million won (Approx. $532,000 US Dollars based on the Won - USD exchange rate as of early July 2023) in taxpayer money to fund personal ventures into cryptocurrency, prompting several criminal charges and an overhaul of the entire ratings board committee. The reason for the investigation was a petition by disgruntled Blue Archive players that was started back in October 2022, protesting their game getting an unwarranted bump in age rating from 15 to 18+.
• A DEA raid, on suspicions of illegal prescription sales, led to the uncovering of a deeply unsanitary abortion clinic in Philadelphia, where the unsafe practices of Kermit Gosnell had inflicted several women with serious injuries or venereal diseases. Worse, Gosnell had not only aborted multiple foetuses which were past the legal cut-off point, but had even outright murdered several babies after they were born and kept their remains in jars.
• H.Bomberguy's video ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 starts as a look into the origins of the titular Roblox sound effect, before snowballing into an exposé about video game composer Tommy Tallarico's long history of lying about his career and stealing credit from composers employed in his company.
• The largest drug trafficking investigation in Finnish history is known as the "Katiska case". The name refers to how the investigation started; from officers responding to a report of a domestic disturbance at an apartment at Katiskapolku, where the officers found a large stash of drugs, and the participants of the reported domestic disturbance ready to cut a deal to reduce their sentences.
• As reported by The Guardian, the arrest of a 23-year-old in New York in 2021 on gun possession charges led the FBI to the discovery of 764, a "Neo-Nazi Satanist extortion cult" accused of luring minors into the group and then manipulating and blackmailing them into performing violent and sexually explicit acts on video.