World’s Most Arrested Man is Black: Arrested 1500 Times in the Past 4 Decades

The Smoking Gun
November 30, 2013

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Henry Earl. Record-breaking Black criminal.

The World’s Most Arrested Man, a Kentuckian who has been busted more than 1500 times over the past four decades, will spend another Thanksgiving in jail, records show.

Henry Earl, 64, is locked up in the Fayette County Detention Center–which one day should bear his name–following his arrest last month for public intoxication.

Earl was collared outside a fast food joint by Lexington cops, according to jail records.

Seen at right in his most recent mug shot, Earl is due in court for a December 5 pretrial conference and a probation revocation hearing.

Earl, whose arrests almost uniformly have involved alcohol, was first nabbed in Fayette County in July 1970, when he was 20, for carrying a concealed weapon. He would rack up 33 more arrests that decade, while adding 230 collars during the 1980s (most of which involved public drunkenness and/or disorderly conduct).

Remarkably, Earl’s arrest rate increased in the following decades, in part because he rarely spent more than a couple of days in custody before being released (to offend again). Over the past year, however, Kentucky judges have been less lenient on Earl, who has begun spending two to three month stretches in custody per conviction.

For the third time in the past five years, Earl will spend Thanksgiving behind bars (where he celebrated his 64th birthday on October 24). Earl, who has used the alias “James Brown,” has spent a total of nearly 6000 days in custody.

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Mugshots from just some of his arrests.