by Gordon Kerr
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE: KILLERS FOR THE MOB
AI Capone
Bugsy Siegel
Vito Genovese
Joe Colombo
Carmine ‘The Snake’ Persico
Anthony ‘The Ant’ Spilotro
Roy DeMeo and the Gemini Crew
Nicodemo Domenico Scarfo
John Gotti, ‘The Dapper Don’
Joey ‘Big Joey’ Massino, The Last Don
PART TWO: OTHER AMERICAN KILLERS
Fung Jing Toy, ‘Little Pete’
George ‘Bugs’ Moran
Vernon C. Miller
Louis ‘Two Guns’ Alterie
James ‘Whitey’ Bulger
James Burke
PART THREE: SICILIAN MAFIA KILLERS
Michele and Giuseppe Greco
Salvatore Riina
Bernardo ‘The Tractor’ Provenzano
Benedetto ‘The Hunter’ Santapaola and Family
PART FOUR: WILD WEST KILLERS
Jesse James
Billy the Kid
PART FIVE: GREATEST HITS
The Collingwood Mansion Massacre
Albert Anastasia
Jimmy Hoffa
Roberto Calvi
PART SIX: KILLING ALL OVER THE WORLD
Christopher Dale Flannery (Australia)
Carl Williams and Family (Australia)
Pablo Escobar (Colombia)
Jacques ‘Jacky le Mat’ Imbert (France)
Charles Sobraj (France)
Adolf Eichmann (Germany)
Phoolan Devi (India)
Veerappan (India)
Aleksandr Solonik (Russia)
PART SEVEN: KILLER GANGS
Thuggee
Egan's Rats
The Bonnot Gang
The West End Gang
PART EIGHT: BRITISH KILLERS
Jimmy Moody
The Curse of the Brinks Mat Millions
Desmond Noonan and the Noonan Family
Nicholas van Hoogstraten
The Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate
PART NINE: WOMEN KILLERS
Belle Gunness
Griselda Blanco, the Black Widow
Te Rangimaria Ngarimu
Introduction
Killing for a living is a very specialised profession. If you were to run an ad in a newspaper for a hitman, there are some specific qualities you should be looking for.
Firstly, and probably, most importantly, you would be looking for someone without a vestige of conscience or emotion. He or she kills coolly and calculatedly without stopping to think. It’s just a job, after all. The moment a contract killer stops to consider the implications of a hit, or thinks too hard about his victim, his career is effectively over.
The most successful professional killers are people who kill without compunction – men like Bugsy Siegel, leading light in the Bugs and Meyer Gang that terrorised New York in the 1920s. Bugsy was a sociopath and probably also a psychopath. He was part of the infamous Murder Inc., an independent killing machine operating under the umbrella of the Mob. Mobsters could keep their hands clean by employing Bugsy or one of the other killers that made up Murder Inc. – calculating murderers such as Abner ‘Longie’ Zwillman, Lepke Buchalter and Dutch Schultz. Or Roy DeMeo and his Gemini Crew of hoodlums and lowlife who would kill anyone who had become an irritant and deal with the body with a ruthless efficiency a butcher would be proud of. They would dispatch the victim in a room above their ‘head office’ – the Gemini Lounge in Brooklyn, New York – drain the blood from it and dissect it before dumping the body parts. To do that, you could not have a conscience or any fear of the consequences of your act.
Philadelphia ‘Little Nick’ Scarfo had absolutely no qualms about killing. In fact, like Bugsy Siegel, he rather enjoyed it. So much so that even when he was boss he liked nothing better than to accompany his soldiers on hits. On one memorable occasion he and some of his men went after Vincent Falcone. He thought that Falcone, a partner in one of his businesses, was ripping him off. Falcone was invited to dinner at a gang hideaway where he was shot in the head, before being finished off with a bullet in the heart. In the midst of the killing, an excited Scarfo gushed to one of his henchmen, Phil Leonetti: ‘I love this!’
Of course, the Mafia once had a policy of only killing their own and many Mafia hitmen held fast to the philosophy that if somebody was to be killed, he probably deserved it. Hitman Jimmy ‘The Weasel’ Frattiano once said: ‘I didn’t have much feeling. I never killed nobody that was innocent. They were all gangsters. They were killers themselves. It might bother me if I killed an innocent person, somebody that didn’t deserve it. Guys that I fooled with, they were out to kill us. I couldn’t kill a woman, innocent people, kids. I couldn’t do that.’
Also on the list of pre-requisites in your job ad would be a capacity for relentless thoroughness and an eye for the smallest detail. The really good hitman does his homework, making a complete study of his victim, his habits, his friends and associates, the places he goes for a drink or to buy his morning paper. He will follow him for days and sometimes weeks, ascertaining what the victim’s routine is, searching out potential locations for the hit, and, of course, ensuring that there is an escape route to get him away from the scene of the killing as swiftly and as calmly as possible.
Bugsy Siegel, lording it on the West Coast in the late 1930s and establishing the Mob’s hold on the film and gambling businesses out there, was handed the contract to kill Harry ‘Big Greenie’ Greenberg, who had gone on the run from New York, firstly to Montreal in Canada and then to California. Murder Inc.’s Albert ‘Tick-Tock’ Tannenbaum was brought in to carry out the hit and Whitey Krakow, Bugsy’s brother-in-law, and West Coast fight promoter, Frankie Carbo, were enlisted to help. They began to carefully track Big Greenie’s movements, soon establishing that every evening, at exactly the same time, Greenberg would go out in his car, drive to a nearby store and buy a newspaper. The trap was set and, one evening, as he was heading for his car at exactly the same time as always, Tick-Tock was waiting for him, gun in hand. As Greenberg fell to the ground, blood oozing from several bullet holes, Tick-Tock was already on his way back to the East Coast, 2,500 miles away.
Method is critical and should be high on your list. Obviously, stab wounds or gunshot wounds make it pretty obvious that a premeditated killing has taken place. Arranged accidents are, without doubt, the best ways to dispose of someone without being caught. A preferred method of several professional killers involved that handy but deadly implement, the ice-pick. Normally used to break up ice, it is a simple tool, somewhat like a sharpened screwdriver. Used effectively – plunged into the victim’s ear and deep into the brain, for example – it can kill someone instantly and fairly bloodlessly. The other benefit of the ice-pick was that it was difficult to identify the means of death. Murder Inc. operatives such as Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles and Harry ‘Pittsburgh Phil’ Strauss made it their dispatching tool of choice and Reles became so adept with it that his victims’ cause of death was often wrongly attributed to a cerebral haemorrhage rather than an ice-pick in the ear. Fortunately, post-mortem techniques have vastly improved from the early decades of the 20th century or the ice-pick would probably be selling in greater quantities!
One last point for your ad for a killer to do your dirty work: it helps greatly if the perpetrator is not connected with you in any way. The Mafia were particularly good at this and even the St Valentine’s Day Massacre – probably the most famous hit of all – was carried out by a team mainly made up of hired guns from outside Chicago. Using hitmen unconnected to you can bamboozle the authorities and will confuse anyone who
wants to exact revenge on you for the hit. They are sure you did it, but, then again, why was Joe Schmo from that city 300 miles away involved? Did the victim have something else going on of which they were unaware? And while they puzzle, you walk away scot-free.
So, you have advertised for your professional killer. But, who is going to come knocking on your door in reponse to your ad?
There are a number of different types. Your applicants are more often than not going to be male. There have not been many female pros. Colombian cocaine queen, Griselda Blanco, undoubtedly the most ruthless female criminal in history, was an exception, an extraordinary woman who ruled an empire of drugs and death. The Indian bandit, Phoolan Devi, was another, but she was a killer taking revenge on society for the horrific abuses she had suffered. Britain’s only female contract killer to date, Te Rangimaria Ngarimu, was a rank amateur, killing a villain for the money to return to her native New Zealand. But the amateur is a category of professional killer to be avoided at all costs. More often than not, he will already be involved in criminality, probably of a low-level kind. This, in itself, presents several problems, making the likelihood of being caught all the more probable. Firstly, he is likely to be already known to the police for his other activities. With DNA and the other forensic techniques available these days, one small error, one tiny detail will be enough to bring the law down on him and, eventually, you. And that is the second point – mistakes. The amateur, by his nature, is not going to carry out the action with the cold efficiency of the professional and he is usually caught.
So, only hire the consummate professional. You will not have to do more than brief him, give him his money and wait. Within the time required to get it right, he will make his move, carry out his action and fade into the scenery as quickly as he emerged from it. He will be gone. Job done.
Part One: Killers For The Mob
Al Capone
Sometimes it is hard to remember that Al Capone really did exist and was not the work of a crime writer, so all-pervasive is he in the public consciousness. With his smooth suits, silk ties, fedora and gruesomely scarred face, he was the embodiment of the American gangster.
His beginnings were slightly different to those of many of the children of Italian immigrants. His father, Gabriele, arrived in America in 1894, from the village of Castellmare di Stabia, 16 miles south of Naples. Gabriele was a barber who could read and write Italian and he was accompanied by his pregnant, 27-year-old wife, Teresa, two-year-old son, Vincenzo and baby son, Raffaele. His ambition in the new world was to earn enough money to open his own barbershop.
The family started out in an apartment in a slum area of Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but Gabriele’s ability to read and write got him a job in a grocery store, while Teresa took in sewing work. Her third son, Salvatore, was born in 1895 and her fourth on 17 January 1899. He was named Alphonse Gabriel Capone.
When Gabriele eventually opened his barbershop, in Park Avenue in Brooklyn, he moved the family in above it. This area was more cosmopolitan than the one in which they had previously been staying and young Al, as he called himself, mixed with Irish, Germans, Swedes and Chinese, an international experience that benefited him later in life when he ran his crime empire.
Al went to school from the age of five, but at the age of 14 he was hit by a woman teacher and retaliated. He was expelled, bringing his formal education to an abrupt end. Crucially, around this time, the family moved to Garfield Place where Capone would meet some formative influences – his wife, an Irishwoman called Mae, and the mobster, Johnny Torrio.
Torrio was a new breed of hoodlum; something of a criminal visionary, and Capone noted carefully how he ran his affairs – numbers racketeering, brothels and prostitution – like a business enterprise. It was Torrio who would invent the concept of the National Crime Syndicate in the 1930s. He was a role model for local boys, including Capone who earned pocket money by running errands for him. He won Torrio’s trust and was given more to do. Meanwhile, Capone learned the art of appearing, like Torrio, respectable to the outside world while being involved in the world of organised criminality.
When Torrio moved to Chicago in 1909, other forces began to influence the ten-year-old Capone. He started running with street gangs, the South Brooklyn Rippers, the Forty Thieves Juniors and the Five Point Juniors, but there was no real sign yet of the criminal mastermind he would turn into in years to come. He lived at home and worked diligently to help the family, first in a munitions factory and then as a paper cutter. He was a quiet boy who did not stand out.
When he met Frankie Yale, a young man of Calabrian origin, Capone really began to change. Frankie was a tough nut who saw violence as the only way to get ahead in life. He had opened a bar on Coney Island and, on Johnny Torrio’s advice, took Capone on as a bartender.
Yale was ambitious and had his eyes on the Chicago criminal empire run by old-time gangster, ‘Big’ Jim Colosimo. In May 1920, he made his move, shooting Colosimo dead in his restaurant, but he failed to get his hands on the business and Johnny Torrio, who had been working for ‘Big’ Jim, took it for himself. Prohibition was adding a huge boost to criminal earnings and Torrio could add income from speakeasies to what he was already earning from thousands of brothels and gambling joints.
Torrio introduced the 22-year-old Al Capone to this world and, before long, he was his partner rather than his employee. He ran the Four Deuces, a combination speakeasy, gambling joint and whorehouse, and his brother Ralph arrived to work with him. Meanwhile, Al made friends with Jack Guzik who would become a lifelong friend. From a Jewish Orthodox family that earned its living through prostitution, Guzik was like a big brother to Al.
Married now to Mae, with a son called Sonny, he was going up in the world and bought a house for his family in a respectable neighbourhood. To his neighbours, he was a second-hand furniture dealer.
But things changed when Chicago’s corrupt mayor, ‘Big Bill’ Thompson, was succeeded by the earnest reformer, William E. Dever. Graft became more difficult, forcing Torrio to decide that they should move their operations out of Chicago. The suburb of Cicero seemed ideal. There they could easily buy up the entire city government and police department. Capone was put in charge of establishing the operation in Cicero and managed it with little opposition. His older brother Frank (Salvatore) handled the city government, Ralph managed the opening of a working-class brothel called the Stockade and Al put his energies into the gambling side of the business, investing in a new gambling joint, the Ship. At the same time he took control of Hawthorne Race Track.
On municipal election day in 1924, Capone’s men did what they could to stop opposition candidates having any chance of success, kidnapping workers, stealing ballot boxes and threatening voters with violence. News spread of their activities and the Chicago Police Chief decided to intervene. He sent 79 armed police officers in plain clothes and driving unmarked cars to Cicero. This convoy approached Frank Capone as he walked down the street. They recognised him and opened fire on him, riddling his body with bullets. They called it self-defence since Frank pulled a gun when he saw the cops approach carrying guns.
Al was furious but, in spite of the best efforts of the authorities, the day was won and Cicero was his. He threw the most lavish funeral ever seen in the town for his brother. The flowers alone cost $20,000.
For five weeks, Capone exercised restraint, but after Joe Howard, a small-time thug, assaulted his friend Jack Guzik when Guzik refused him a loan, Capone tracked Howard down in a bar. Howard was stupid enough to call Al a ‘dago pimp’ and Al, in a rage, shot him dead. William H. McSwiggin, known as ‘the hanging prosecutor’, went after Capone for the murder but witnesses seemed to develop memory loss as soon as the name Capone was mentioned. He got away with it, but the case gave him notoriety very different to the discreet anonymity sought by Johnny Torrio and his ilk.
Al Capone was now 25 and a powerful and wealthy man. He was also acutely aware that he was in the sights not just
of the law, but also of rival mobsters who wanted a piece of his action.
Dion O’Banion was one such. He had a growing florist and bootlegging business but was a dangerously unstable individual who killed on a whim. Torrio and Capone often had to make peace amongst rival gangs who were their allies and when O’Banion went to war with the Genna brothers, O’Banion provided Torrio with a solution. He said he would retire if Torrio would buy his brewery from him. Knowing that there was going to be a raid at the brewery, O’Banion arranged a meeting there with Torrio. During the raid, Torrio was arrested and O’Banion refused to give back the money Torrio had paid him. A big mistake.
Not long after Torrio’s arrest, a large funeral was taking place for the head of the Unione Siciliana in Chicago, Mike Merlo. When three gangsters walked into his florist shop, O’Banion thought they had merely come to collect a wreath. He reached out his hand to shake theirs and one of the men, knowing that the florist always kept one hand free to grab one of the guns he kept in three special pockets tailored into his suits, grabbed his free arm. Six gunshots later, O’Banion lay on the floor in a pool of blood. No one was ever charged with his murder.
