The Most Evil Secret Societies in History

by Shelley Klein

  In the same year that St. Leger wrote this report, another mass murder also took place, this time on the road between Nagpur and Nerbudda. A large group of approximately 350 Thugs befriended a party of travelers, joining them on their journey between the locations mentioned above. Regaling their companions with stories and other entertainments, the Thugs easily manipulated their new friends into believing them to be nothing more than fellow travelers. With their defences down the travelers made easy prey. One night having eaten and drunk around the campfires, the Thugs rose up as one at a given signal and strangled their companions en masse. Rather than ritual murder for the purposes of religious worship, it was most certainly money that lay at the heart of this crime, for the Thugs made away with 17,000 rupees, a small fortune in those days and far and away a large enough sum to guarantee this crime stood out from numerous others. Twenty years later, the murder was still at the forefront of public consciousness, making it one of the very first that Captain William Henry Sleeman decided to investigate.

  Born on August 8, 1788 in Stratton, Cornwall, to a military father, from a very young age William Henry Sleeman had always wanted to join the army. An able student, he had studied both Arabic and Hindustani in England before he went to work for the army of the Honorable East India Company in 1809. Initially Sleeman was posted to the 12th Native Infantry at Awadh before being appointed in 1819 as Junior Assistant to the Government Agent in the Saugor and Nerbudda Territories, during which time he continued to study Oriental languages and made it his duty to familiarize himself with the often confusing complexities of the numerous sects and cults of India. Sleeman became fascinated with the Hindu practice of worshiping the goddess Kali, Shiva’s consort, who it was said haunted burial grounds and fed off human blood.

  In 1816, following the accounts given by Major-General St. Leger (of which Sleeman must have been well aware,) there appeared an article in the Madras Literary Gazette written by a Dr. Robert C. Sherwood who had also grown increasingly fascinated by tales of a mysterious society of assassins murdering travelers in the name of Kali. Sleeman’s resolve was set: his life’s work was to be the eradication of the Thuggee and despite initial reservations of his superiors, Sleeman was eventually appointed magistrate in charge of the Nursingpore District. Now he had the power to realize his dreams.

  The work, however, was very slow. Sleeman had to travel from one small town to the next hearing cases while at the same time methodically gathering information from those willing to talk. Not an easy task when the majority of people were far too frightened of the Thugs to stand as witnesses against them. Even then, as Sleeman wrote, he was still not convinced that the secret society of Thuggee even existed.

  While I was in charge of the district of Nursingpore in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824, no ordinary robbery or theft could be committed without my being acquainted with it; nor was there a robber or thief of the ordinary kind in the district with whose character I had not become acquainted in the discharge of my duty as magistrate; and if any man had then told me that a gang of assassins by profession resided in the village of Kundelee – not four hundred yards from my court – and that the extensive groves of Mundesur – only one stage from me – was one of the greatest beles or places of murder in all India … I should have thought him a fool or madman.

  As time passed, however, Sleeman began to assemble a detailed picture of Thuggee and its practitioners. Thuggee, he discovered, was primarily a hereditary system associated with Hindus and Muslims that transcended both religion and caste. Although the cult revolved around the fanatical worship of the goddess Kali, not all Kali devotees were Thugs. Sleeman estimated that there were at least 5,000 Thugs in India. The cult was obviously ancient, and Sleeman suggested that a cryptic mention by Herodotus of a people (the Sagartians) in central Asia proficient in strangling with a cord might possibly refer to a source of Thuggee more than two millennia earlier. The Thugs themselves believed that their activities were depicted in eighth-century cave temple carvings at Ellora, Maharashtra, but such carvings have never been found. What has been established is that during the Sultan of Delhi’s (Jalal-ud-din-Khilji) reign in the thirteenth century, approximately one thousand so-called Thugs were detained and afterwards deported from Delhi to Bengal. Sleeman worked tirelessly, gathering historical facts, interviewing suspects, and traveling from town to town listening to stories; yet it wasn’t until 1826 that he first had the opportunity to bring any of the Thugs to justice.

  Ram Luckum Sein, a hereditary Thug of Bengal, is depicted here with his bodyguard in an illustration for the Illustrated News of the World magazine in 1858.

  One day a group of thieves suspected of possessing a large number of stolen items were brought to the courthouse where Sleeman was working. Sadly for the prosecution, it was decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to hold the men and later that same day the group was released. Nevertheless, following an argument between two of the arrested men, one of them by the name of Kalyan Singh went to Sleeman begging for protection. In the ensuing interview Singh confessed that the group were Thugs and that they were planning yet another murderous escapade. Without hesitation Sleeman, together with a guard of mounted Sepoys, set off in search of their prey. Nor was it long before they found the men and put them under arrest. Once in custody Sleeman then interrogated one of the group, a man known only as Moti (Pearl) who finally confessed to having buried four victims in a spot near to where the group had been arrested. On returning to this location Sleeman found the bodies of three men and a young boy, all of whom had had their necks broken and their bodies pierced with knives so that the corpses wouldn’t bloat up. The following morning, more bodies were discovered, some of which were identified by neighboring villagers. But more appalling even than this – when the arrested Thugs were later interviewed it quickly became apparent that among their number were a government messenger and a police inspector. Sleeman realized to his shock that the Thug cult could count among its members not only ruffians and vagabonds, but also a fair quota of otherwise respectable citizens.

  The Thug, Moti, also gave a highly detailed account of further crimes he had committed, in particular the murder of a high-ranking clerk and his family during 1823. The clerk had been traveling the Nagpur road when Moti and his gang befriended him. For a time the group all traveled together until one evening while everyone was drowsing off to sleep Moti wrapped his ruhmal round the clerk’s throat. The clerk struggled with his attacker and managed to shout out the word ‘Murder!’ before Moti killed him. Alerted by her husband’s cry, his wife ran from her tent, but was attacked by one of Moti’s gang and killed, as was her oldest child, while the youngest one, who was still just a baby, was thrown into its parents’ grave and buried alive. Horrific as this murder seems, it was only one of numerous such incidents. James Paton, an officer who also worked in India during this period, produced many startling watercolours depicting Thug crimes, pictures that included Thugs gouging out the eyes of their victims, and strangling and dismembering bodies before throwing them into graves. Paton was not, of course, present at any of the incidents he illustrated and his pictures must, therefore, be viewed as ‘imaginings’, but they do stand as strong testimony to the fear that Thuggee culture produced.

  Sleeman was the antidote, a one-man Victorian crusade, battling against overwhelming odds although in 1828, with the appointment of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck as Governor-General of British India, he was finally afforded some moral support. Despite his exhaustive endeavors against the Thuggee, Sleeman still found time for a little romance in his life and in 1829 he married Amélie de Fontenne whom he had first met on Mauritius.

  Aside from his private life, week after week Sleeman aggressively pursued his mission of arresting Thug members, initially incarcerating them in Saugor Jail, until he began to find ‘approvers’ among them; men who would act as informers and point Sleeman in the direction of their victims’ graves. In exchange, these approvers would have their death sentences c
ommuted to life imprisonment. Suddenly, Sleeman was receiving a flood of information and every week more and more trials were held, with more and more executions for those found guilty.

  Doctor Spry, the governor of Saugor Jail, relates the fate of one group of convicts, who were to be put to death on the following morning:

  The night was passed by these men in displays of coarse and disgusting levity. Trusting in the assurance that, dying in the cause of their calling, Bhawani would provide for them in Paradise, they evinced neither penitence nor remorse. Stifling their alarm with boisterous reveling, they hoped to establish in the minds of their comrades, who could hear them through the wall, a reputation for courage, by means which at once proved their insincerity and belied their fortitude. Imagine such men on the last night of their existence on earth, not penitent for their individual errors, or impressed with a sense of the public mischiefs to which they had contributed, not even rendered serious by the dismal ordeal which in a few hours was to usher them into an unknown world, but singing, singing in the condemned cell, and repeating their unhallowed carols while jolting along in the carts that conveyed them to their gibbets!

  The above account is just one of many detailing the numerous executions resulting from William Sleeman’s arrests. It is believed that during the 1830s and 1840s Sleeman, together with seventeen loyal assistants and over 100 sepoys, captured and subsequently prosecuted approximately 3,000 Thugs of whom 470 were put to death by hanging. The others were either transported to different provinces or were imprisoned for life. But there was one name which kept cropping up in interviews with the ‘approvers’ that both fascinated and concerned Sleeman above all others: the name of Feringeea.

  Feringeea was said to be the Prince of Thuggee, the jewel in the tainted crown of Kali’s bloodthirsty cult. Knowing that in order to eradicate Thuggee altogether, Feringeea had to be arrested, Sleeman sent out a large party of sepoys to track him down only to be disappointed when they returned without their quarry. Instead, they arrested Feringeea’s mother, wife and child. This was a clever move, for a few days later Feringeea turned himself in and immediately begged to turn ‘approver.’ His offer was accepted and for long days and nights Sleeman interviewed this chief of Thugs, eliciting huge amounts of information on the nature of his crimes. But even Sleeman had his limits and, although he had proved to be stalwart in his campaign against terror, eventually either the pace of the work, or the nature of it, began to take its toll. In 1849 he was moved to a different post; this time as Resident in Awadh. Even here, however, Sleeman’s health suffered until, in 1854 he was told that if he didn’t leave India, he would undoubtedly die. Taking his doctor’s advice, he and his wife set sail on board the Monarch in January 1856, but as the ship approached the coast of Ceylon, Sleeman’s health deteriorated and on February 10 he died.

  Almost as a tribute to the massive effort he had expended in pursuit of the Thugs, others stepped forward to carry on Sleeman’s work until, having been more or less suppressed, the 600-year-old cult (possibly with far older links) of Thuggee eventually disappeared altogether. It was not a sad downfall, although given that one man was almost single-handedly responsible for it, it was perhaps a surprising one. In many ways Captain William Sleeman should be regarded as a true Victorian hero, battling as he did against one of the most evil secret societies ever known.

  THE CAMORRA – A SHADOW OVER NAPLES

  Naples is a Third World city with Third World politics. It’s superrich surrounded by a miserable hinterland sprawling back from the volcano and the bay, a dilapidated jungle of violence, half-finished buildings, motorways that lead nowhere, cocaine, primitive Catholicism and stinking dumped rubbish […] There is vast private wealth in the city – at night the downtown streets are crammed with new cars, mobile phones and fur coats – but this is illegal wealth, the result of the most important ingredient of the Neapolitan scandal: the Camorra.

  ED VULLIAMY, the Guardian, March 29, 1993

  Pre-dating the Mafia by several decades, some historians have argued that the Camorra is a direct descendent of an obscure, fifteenth-century Spanish secret society called the Garduna. A more convincing theory is that the Camorra first began operating some time between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, mainly in Naples, amongst the poorest sections of society who were nearly all illiterate, hence there being very few written documents recording the origins of this largely criminal organization. What isn’t in doubt is that Naples, because it was one of Europe’s largest cities during this period, was also one of its most over-populated. There wasn’t enough work to ensure everyone enjoyed a living wage, a situation which in turn bred extreme poverty and hardship for large sections of the Neapolitan population. But whereas the middle classes during this period banded together to form some of the most powerful secret societies known to history, such as the Freemasons and the Carboneria, for the majority of Neapolitans there was no such help at hand. Instead the rich grew richer, while the poor remained penniless; an economic reality exacerbated by the actions of the king of the region, Ferdinand II, who reigned from 1830 to 1859. However, Ferdinand was not a man of the people, particularly the poor whom he regarded as being the lowest of the low. Contemporary historian Marco Monnier wrote:

  He never considered for a moment raising the people up from their level of degradation; on the contrary, he wanted to keep them there until the end of time as he knew very well that, given the nature of the period we live in, an absolute monarchy is only possible if it rules over a degraded and exhausted populace.1

  Conditions were rife, therefore, for the emergence of an organization specifically tailored to the needs of the downtrodden, although the Camorra’s name doesn’t appear on any official documentation until 1820, when a written statute of a Camorra organization was made. This revealed a structured society complete with initiation rites, rules, regulations and funds, operating at the heart of the Neapolitan underworld.

  Initially the Camorra appears to have made its greatest inroads into society through small monopolies, which it set up within the prison system. Once again the historian Marco Monnier is invaluable by giving us a marvelous portrait of an inmate’s complicated relationship with the Camorra. Monnier states that the inmate would not be allowed either to eat, drink or gamble without the permission of a camorrista (a Camorra member), while a tenth of all the money an inmate received in jail – with which he could buy food and tobacco – had to be given to the camorrista. Failure to abide by these rules could result in the ‘risk of being clubbed to death.’ On top of this, the prison authorities would also pay the Camorra a fee for keeping the prisoners under control.

  It was all very lucrative and within the space of only a few years the Camorra’s influence grew to include money from gambling and theft as well as a substantial rake-off from all the goods being exported and imported through Naples. The Camorra also set itself up in the role of the police. This was especially true in the less salubrious neighborhoods of Naples where they wielded the greatest influence. In short, during King Ferdinand’s reign the Camorra made itself an integral part of city life, the only true representative of the city’s poor. It was, of course, in no way a political organization, simply one that existed to make money.

  All this was to change, however, when in 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in Sicily with one aim in mind; the unification of Italy under one ruler. As he moved from Sicily to southern Italy and onwards up the country, chaos broke out in Naples as the Bourbon king (by this time Francis II had taken on the role) attempted to quell the public’s enthusiasm for Garibaldi’s success, but to little avail. Soon, what few policemen there were left began breaking their ranks and joining the mob. The old order was collapsing, and on June 26 a state of siege was declared. A new Prefect of Police was elected, Liborio Romano, who immediately turned to the Camorra – one of whom, Salvatore De Crescenzo, had been convicted six times – to reinstate some sort of order over the masses. Crescenzo’s forme
r crimes (which included murder) didn’t seem to matter to Romano, as long as he and his colleagues could keep control over the city. The plan worked; order was brought to the streets and the king fled Naples prior to the arrival of Garibaldi.

  The Camorra were now in a semi-official position, acting as the city’s main police force, a position they quickly turned into a lucrative enterprise by moving into the contraband industry, often forcing shopkeepers to buy smuggled goods, albeit at incredibly low prices. This meant that the city’s tax revenue took a substantial plunge, but the shopkeepers were too frightened to refuse the Camorra’s offers.

  They chose the lesser of two evils. If they paid a tax to the sect [the Camorra] they only ran the risk of being discovered by tax inspectors and receiving a minor conviction; but if they paid the tax inspectors then they were certain of being caught by camorristi and given a good beating. So they paid a tax to the sect.’2

  Despite this, the new authorities in Naples did recognize that the Camorra had grown too strong, which was something they were determined to remedy, although by this point the organization was so deeply entrenched in Neopolitan society that it was impossible to destroy altogether. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1862 approximately 1,000 camorristi were rounded up and either placed under house arrest or imprisoned in the city’s jail. Over the next forty years the Camorra did experience a general decline as a secret society, mainly due to the city’s intolerance of corruption, but also because, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, mass migration took place that deprived the Camorra of their main power base – the urban poor.