100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  Ed Kemper picked up hitch-hikers before brutally slaying them

  A month later, he picked up two more students after a particularly vicious row with his mother. He shot them both in the head and drove their bodies back, only to find that his mother was still home. Unable to wait, he decapitated both bodies in the trunk; the next morning, after his mother had gone, took the headless corpses upstairs and had sex with at least one of them. Then, after cutting off the hands of one of the students and getting rid of both heads, he dumped the bodies in Eden Canyon, Alameda – where they were found nine days later.

  Kemper’s killings can be seen to have been caused – at least in part – by his hatred of his mother; and on Easter Day, 1973, he went to the source: he killed her in her bedroom with a hammer and cut off her head with ‘the General’. Then he invited one of her woman friends, Sara Hallett, to dinner, knocked her unconscious, strangled, decapitated and had sex with her. The next morning, after sleeping in his mother’s bed, he took the money from Mrs. Hallett’s handbag and drove off in her car, expecting that the police would be after him.

  In the end, when nothing happened, he gave himself up, after finally persuading the police that he really was the so-called ‘Co-Ed Killer’. Now there could be no doubt. He’d cut out his mother’s larynx, he said, and tossed it into the garbage,

  ‘because it seemed appropriate after she had bitched me so much.’

  Kemper was found sane and despite his request to be executed, was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

  Meyer Lansky

  Meyer Lansky, born Maier Suchowjansky in Grodno, Poland, is the most shadowy and indistinct of all the great American Mafia bosses of the twentieth century. But it was he more than anyone else who was responsible for creating the structure and outreach of the modern Mafia – first by masterminding the alliance between New York’s Italian and Jewish mobs that created the central commission, the Syndicate, and then by expanding the Syndicate’s reach and influence across the United States and beyond. It was he, the grand strategist, who moved the Mafia’s money and power into Las Vegas, movies and legitimate businesses all across the country. He said in the 1970s – and only he perhaps knew:

  ‘We’re bigger than US Steel.’

  In about 1918, sixteen-year-old Lansky arrived in New York and seems to have taken a job as an engineering apprentice. But he was soon part of the rough-and-tumble of the Lower East Side’s streets, running with the Jewish gangs and fighting for both territory and survival. The turning point came when he met and outfaced another tough street kid called Charlie Luciano, who took him under his wing. Many of the underground rackets in the city were then run by Jewish gangsters, and Lansky became in time Luciano’s bridge to their operations and muscle. ‘We had a kind of instant understanding,’ Luciano later said.

  ‘It may sound crazy, but if anyone wants to use the expression “blood brothers”, then surely Meyer and I were like that.’

  Meyer Lansky masterminded the alliance of the Jewish and Italian gangs in New York

  Both Luciano and Lansky in due course made it to the big time: they went to work for the visionary Arnold Rothstein, the first great bootlegger of the Prohibition era – and the first man, it’s said, to recognise the potential of dope. Rothstein – Lansky is said to have met him at a bar mitzvah – taught both men a good deal about style, and gave Lansky his first taste of what was later to become his main operation: casino gambling.

  Rothstein was assassinated in 1928 and left the field open to the fastest learners among his apprentices, Luciano and Lansky. They largely sat out the score-settling wars that followed. But then, in 1931, Lansky organised the Jewish hit-men who disposed of the first self-styled Capo di Tutti Capi, Salvatore Maranzano, who’d set himself up the ultimate authority over what came to be known as ‘the five families.’ He and Luciano took over Maranzano’s five-family structure, but instead of appointing a boss of all bosses, they created a board of directors, the Syndicate, backed by the enforcement arm of Murder Incorporated. Both sat on the Syndicate board, and met every day they could, it’s said, for breakfast at a delicatessen on Delancy Street. Luciano and Lansky: they were the real power.

  Lansky was one of the first bosses to move the Mafia into dope smuggling

  They moved the Mafia into dope – it’s said that Lansky himself got hooked on heroin after his son was born crippled, and then did cold turkey in a hide-out in Massachusetts, watched over by a hood called Vincent ‘Jimmy Blue Eyes’ Alo, ever after a close friend. They became the ultimate authority in policy and peace, ruling Mafia activity nationwide. But then in 1936, Lucky Luciano was tried on a trumped-up charge of prostitution and sentenced to thirty to fifty years in jail. After that, Lansky more and more took to the shadows, living apparently quietly in a tract house in Miami, as he moved the Mafia into gambling operations in Las Vegas, the Bahamas and Cuba.

  Leopold and Loeb thought they had committed the ‘crime of the century’. They were wrong

  In 1970, after hearing that he faced taxevasion charges, Lansky, by now 68, fled to a hotel he owned in Tel Aviv, before being extradited, by order of the Israeli Supreme Court, back to the US. In the end, he was acquitted, and in the late-70s and early-80s, he could be seen walking his dog along Miami’s Collins Avenue or else having a meal in a diner with his old friend ‘Jimmy Blue Eyes.’ He died from a heart attack in 1983, at the age of 81.

  Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb

  It was called at the time the ‘crime of the century’, a ‘superman’ murder. But in reality the 1924 killing of Bobbie Franks by two young University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, was both senseless and lazy. Far from being the ‘perfect’ murder, a secret demonstration of how much ‘better’ and ‘less bourgeois’ they were than their friends and relatives, it only proved that even intellectuals can be supremely cack-handed.

  Leopold and Loeb were jailed for life, despite the best efforts of their lawyer, Clarence Darrow

  Fourteen-year-old Bobbie, the son of a millionaire, was abducted outside his school on May 21st 1924 and soon afterwards his mother received a call saying that he’d been kidnapped and that a ransom note would arrive through the post. The next day it came, demanding $10,000. But before anything could be done, the police announced that they’d found a body that matched Bobbie’s description. It had been discovered by maintenance men – strangled and with a fractured skull – in a culvert near the railway. Nearby lay a pair of hornrimmed spectacles.

  It took a week for the spectacles to be traced to a rich nineteen-year-old law student and amateur ornithologist called Nathan Leopold. Leopold immediately agreed that they were indeed his, and he claimed that he must have dropped them while bird-watching in the area some time before. But the spectacles showed no sign of having been left outside for long and when Leopold was asked what he’d been doing on the afternoon of May 21st, all he could come up with was that he’d been with his friend, fellow student Richard Loeb, and two girls called Mae and Edna. Loeb soon corroborated this, but neither man could give any sort of description by which the two girls could be traced. Besides, Leopold’s typewriter, when tested, was found to be exactly the same model as the one which had written the ransom note.

  It was, oddly, Richard Loeb – easily the more assured and dominant of the two men – who first confessed under questioning. But he was soon followed by Leopold, whose younger brother, it turned out, had been a friend of Bobbie Franks. The fourteen-year-old had been chosen as their victim, it transpired, not because of any particular enmity, but for a much simpler reason: he’d be easy to get into their car.

  Two months after the killing, defended by famous lawyer Clarence Darrow, they came to trial. Darrow did his best, claiming that both his clients were mentally ill, either paranoiac (in Leopold’s case) or schizophrenic (in Loeb’s). This defence probably saved their lives, but they were imprisoned for life for Bobbie’s murder, and given a further ninety-nine years’ sen
tence for his kidnapping. Twelve years later, Loeb was killed by a fellow inmate. But Leopold, who’d been throughout his term a model prisoner, was finally released in 1958. He moved to Puerto Rico, got married, and died in 1971 at the age of 66.

  Louis Lepke

  Louis Lepke, the boss of the Jewish arm of Murder Incorporated, is the only American Mafia chieftain to have been executed. After two years hiding out in Brooklyn, he gave himself up to the FBI, persuaded into doing so, it’s said, by Albert Anastasia. He, Lucky Luciano and the other members of the Syndicate wanted him dead.

  Lepke, short for ‘Lepkele’ or ‘Little Louis’, was born Louis Buchalter in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1897. His father, the owner of a hardware store on the Lower East Side, died of a heart attack when he was 13, and his mother moved soon afterwards to Colorado. Little Louis, then, came of age in the streets. He hung out with hoodlums, and was soon in trouble with the law. He was sent out of town to live with his uncle in Connecticut, and then to a reformatory, from where he soon graduated, around the time of his 21st birthday, first to New York’s Tombs prison, and then to Sing Sing, where he acquired the nickname ‘Judge Louis’.

  Back on the streets again in 1923, he went into the protection business with an old pal, Joseph ‘Gurrah’ Shapiro – they were known as ‘the Gorilla Boys’ and specialized in bakeries. But they didn’t hit the big time until they went to work for Arnold Rothstein, who dealt large in liquor and drugs. Soon they were moving into the union rackets, backing the workers against the bosses with goon squads, and then taking over from both. They started out in this with a real expert, ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, as their principal mentor. But by 1927, Orgen simply stood in their way. So on October 15th, they gunned him down in front of his clubhouse and by the beginning of the ’30s they ruled the labour roost: they controlled painters, truckers and motion-picture operators; they were expanding their drugs business; and they still took in $1.5 million a year from bakeries. They were now known, not as ‘the Gorilla Boys’, but ‘the Gold Dust Twins’.

  In 1933, with the setting up of the Syndicate, Lepke became a board-director and one of the founding members of Murder Incorporated, its enforcement arm of contract-killers, among whom was a Brooklyn thug called Abraham ‘Kid Twist’ Reles. That same year, though, Lepke was indicted by a federal grand jury for violation of anti-trust laws. And though he ultimately beat the rap on this one, the Feds began closing in with narcotics charges, and the Brooklyn DA’s office with an investigation into racketeering. In the summer of 1937, he – along with ‘Gurrah’ Shapiro – went on the lam; he soon became the most wanted man in US history.

  Louis Lepke, one-time boss of the Jewish arm of Murder Incorporated

  He did his best from hiding to silence the potential witnesses against him, but the heat on the streets became too great and, in August 1940, he gave himself up, with the understanding that he’d face federal narcotics charges rather than a state indictment for murder. He was sentenced to fourteen years and shipped to the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.

  Then, though, Abe Reles, ‘Kid Twist,’ one of the executioners he’d hired in the old days, began to sing. For six months Reles was held at a hotel in Coney Island as he gave evidence at trial after trial. On November 12th 1941, his body was found – apparently he’d jumped from a sixth story window – but it was too late for Louis Lepke. For Reles had already appeared before a grand-jury hearing to give evidence against him, evidence that could be – and was – used in court.

  Louis Lepke and two of his lieutenants, Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone, were tried for murder and condemned to death. They went to the electric chair in Sing Sing prison on March 4th 1944. The murder of Reles – which got Albert Anastasia and Bugsy Siegel off the hook – was probably arranged by Frank Costello.

  Timothy McVeigh

  It was one of the most devastating crimes in all US history. A hundred and sixty-eight people were killed and more than five hundred wounded, among them twenty-five children under 5. So on April 19th 1995, when the dust finally settled on what remained of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it was taken for granted that its bombing had been the work of international terrorists. It wasn’t – as those who recognized the symbolism of the date soon realized. For April 19th was Patriots Day, the anniversary of the Revolutionary War battle of Concord. It was also the second anniversary of the fiery and bloody end of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian sect at Waco, Texas. The bomber wasn’t Arab at all, but American: a twenty-seven-year-old ex-soldier from Pendleton, New York called Timothy McVeigh.

  McVeigh had been resourceful enough in gathering the materials that made up his huge bomb: a mixture of fuel oil, ammonium nitrate and fertilizer. But he was careless and stupid with everything else. For within an hour and a half of its explosion, he was stopped by a state trooper 75 miles away for driving his getaway car without a licence plate. The trooper then noticed a gun in the car and arrested him. He was taken to jail in Perry, Oklahoma.

  It’s possible that he still might have got away – and disappeared – if the identification number of the 20-foot-long Ryder truck he’d armed with the bomb hadn’t been recovered. The FBI traced it to a hire-firm in Kansas where they were able to get a description of the man who’d rented it. Transformed into a sketch by FBI artists, this description was soon recognized by the owner of a motel in Junction City, who was able to pass on the name in his register – incredibly enough, McVeigh’s own. From that point on, it was plain sailing. The name Timothy J. McVeigh was logged into the National Crime Information computer, which revealed that he was under arrest in Perry on an unrelated charge. From there it just took a phone call.

  The question people came to ask, then, was no longer ‘Who?’, but ‘Why?’ And the answer travelled deep into the paranoid, poor-white underbelly of American power.

  Timothy McVeigh was a classic case of the angry, antisocial loser who blamed his own inadequacies on a conspiracy designed to keep him down. He came from a broken family; lived with a father who didn’t much care for him; and failed to be remembered at school. He enrolled for a while at the local community college, but soon dropped out for a menial job at Burger King. It was only when he applied for a gun licence and moved to Buffalo, New York, to become an armoured-car guard there, that he finally found what seemed to be the only passion he ever really had in his life: guns.

  McVeigh’s crime shocked America to its core

  That he then joined the army seems now, in retrospect, a natural enough progression. He trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he met two equally needy men who later became co-conspirators in his bombing: Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. It was they, perhaps, who introduced him to William L. Pierce’s fiercely anti-Semitic The Turner Diaries, one of the bibles of American white supremacists. The story concerns a soldier in an underground army who, in response to efforts to ban private ownership of guns, builds a fertilizer-and-fuel oil bomb packed into a truck to blow up the FBI building in Washington…

  McVeigh became a gunner and served with some distinction in the Gulf War. But when he failed in later tests to become a member of Special Forces, he left the army and became a drifter. He stayed for a while with his two army buddies, Fortier and Nichols, in Arizona and Michigan respectively. But mostly he lived out of his car, collecting gun magazines, attending gun fairs and railing against blacks, Jews and the hated Federal government. In 1993, he even went to Waco, Texas during the Branch Davidian sect’s initial standoff with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He sold bumper stickers there which denounced the government for trying to take away the nation’s guns.

  What subsequently happened at Waco was the trigger that set off the Oklahoma bomb. For McVeigh now determinedly entered what he called the ‘action stage.’ Together with Fortier and Nichols – and with The Turner Diaries as a guide – he mapped out his plan: to use a massive bomb against the federal government as revenge, warning and call to arms. Though Fortier, and later Nichols, both dropped
out of a final commitment, he didn’t care. He drove the Ryder truck to Oklahoma City and then left a sign on it saying that it had a flat battery, so that it wouldn’t be towed away.

  When arrested in Parry, McVeigh – true to form – insisted on calling himself a prisoner of war. He was tried and sentenced to death.

  Charles Manson

  From the age of 9 until he was 32, Charles Manson, born illegitimate, spent almost all his life in institutions, though he did spend enough time on the outside to be sent down for armed robbery (at 13), homosexual rape (at 17) and car stealing, fraud and pimping (at 23). In prison for this last set of offences, he became, by an odd coincidence, the protégé of another killer, Alvin Karpis of the notorious Barker Gang, who taught him the guitar well enough for him to be able to boast later:

  ‘I could be bigger than the Beatles.’

  In a way, of course, Manson was. For, let out of prison in 1967, the year of ‘the summer of love,’ he became the most hated and vilified figure in America, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong in the ’60s.

  Emerging from San Pedro prison with little more than a beard, a guitar and a line in mystic hocus-pocus, Manson was soon playing hippie Jesus on the streets of nearby Haight-Ashbury to a group of adoring disciples – most of them middle-class drop-outs who lived on a diet of hallucinogenic drugs and acted out their fantasies in sex orgies. It wasn’t long, though, before he decided his ambitions were too big for San Francisco. So he took his ‘Family’ south, picking up new acolytes on the way, and settled in the grounds of the Spiral Staircase club in Los Angeles, where he began to attract the attention of the wilder fringes of the Hollywood party scene: musicians, agents and actors looking for kicks or black magic – or the next big thing.