Justin Bieber narrowly avoided a grisly castration-and-murder plot by two hit men

In what is nothing short of a Christmas miracle, police have arrested two men involved in a strange, strangely elaborate plot to castrate and murder Justin Bieber around the time of his appearance last month at Madison Square Garden. Bieber—whose Christmas wish list most definitely did not include being castrated and murdered by two mercenary ex-convicts—was the intended target of a bizarre scheme concocted by Dana Martin, a convicted murderer and rapist whose obsession with Bieber extends to having a tattoo of Bieber on his leg.

Martin's Bieber infatuation took its deadly turn when Martin recruited his then-fellow inmate Mark Aaron Staake—who then recruited his nephew Tanner Ruane—to carry out a series of four murders and castrations in total, all of them ending in Martin's "calling card" of strangulation with a paisley tie. Two of those victims were intended to be Bieber and his bodyguard, with Staake and Ruane set to receive $2,500 apiece for each one of Justin Bieber's severed testicles, a bounty that is as terrifying in its matter-of-factness as it is its paltriness. Fortunately, Martin had an inexplicable "change of heart" and alerted authorities to his own scheme, and Ruane was subsequently arrested by New York police, who found "murder tools and pruning shears" on him. Merry Christmas, everyone. [via The Hollywood Reporter]