When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (9 page)

It became clear that if they were to survive, they would have to eat their dead loved ones. It was a decision that was not taken lightly. Many of those aboard the plane were strict Roman Catholics who had serious reservations about resorting to cannibalism. But they also knew they had little choice. Unless they ate, they would die.

Among the crash survivors was Roberto Canessa, a young medical student. He was convinced that a small party should try to hike over the mountains and seek help. This would involve a gruelling trek over some of the world's most inhospitable terrain. They would have to climb peaks of almost 5,000 metres. They would also face extreme temperatures with no winter clothing. Worse still, they would have almost no food.

After waiting eight weeks for the temperatures to rise a little, Roberto Canessa and two comrades, Nando Parrado and Antonio Vizintin, set off on their long march. It was 12 December.

The lack of oxygen was their first hazard. The constant climbing left them dizzy and desperately short of breath. The cold, too, was hard to endure. They had made a makeshift sleeping bag, but the nights were nevertheless bitter.

Parrado was the fittest; he reached the peak of the first high mountain before the other two. From the top, he got the shock of his life. He thought they'd crashed just a few miles from the Chilean border and was expecting to see some distant signs of civilization. Instead, he saw nothing but a barren vista of ice-bound mountains and valleys stretching for as far as the eye could see.

Only now did the men realize that they'd crashed in the middle of the High Andes and were a vast distance from the nearest human habitation.

Aware that the rescue hike would be even more arduous than anticipated, Vizintin chose to head back to the crash site. The others continued on their long trek. For day after day they crossed lonely peaks and valleys. They were freezing at night and constantly starved. But they eventually found a stream that led them out of their frozen hell. After nine days of gruelling marching along the banks of the Rio Azufre, they saw cows – a sure sign of human habitation.

As they prepared to make a fire that evening, Canessa looked up and noticed a man on the far side of the river. He shouted and waved, trying to show that they desperately needed help. Over the roar of the water they heard him shout ‘tomorrow'.

The two survivors slept soundly that night, aware that their ordeal was almost at an end. On the following day, the Chilean horseman brought them some bread and hurled it across the river, along with a pen and paper. They wrote down what had happened and flung it back.

The horseman went back to raise the alarm and get help for Canessa and Parrado. Shortly afterwards they were finally rescued and given much needed shelter, food and water.

That same day, 22 December, two helicopters set off for the crash site. Despite atrocious weather they eventually plucked the remaining survivors from the mountain. They were in a desperate state: cold, starving and suffering from extreme malnutrition.

But sixteen of them had survived seventy-two days without food and supplies in one of the bleakest spots on earth.

 

PART VIII

I'm a Celebrity

‘One of Captain Loewenstein's secretaries came into my cabin and handed me a piece of paper on which I read: Mr Loewenstein has fallen out of the plane.'

PILOT DONALD DREW, INTERVIEWED BY
THE TIMES
, JULY 1928.

 

22

The First Celebrity Kidnap

At around 10 p.m. on 1 March 1932, nursemaid Betty Gow went to make a final check on twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh, son of the famous aviator of the same name.

To her surprise, she found that baby Charles was missing from his cot. She went straightaway to seek out his mother, Anne, to see if she had taken him.

Anne didn't have the baby, so Betty went to see Charles, who was in his study.

He didn't have the baby either and he was alarmed to hear that Charles junior was missing from his crib. He rushed up to the nursery to check for himself. Betty was right. The baby was missing.

As he looked around the room his eyes alighted on a white envelope that had been left close to the windowsill. Written in poor English it read:

Dear Sir! Have 50.000$ redy 25.000$ in 20$ bills 15.000$ in 10$ bills and 10.000$ in 5$ bills After 2–4 days we will inform you were to deliver the mony.

The letter also warned him not to notify anyone of the abduction.

Lindbergh ignored the last warning and immediately called the police. They arrived twenty minutes later.

A thorough search of the kidnapping scene revealed smudged footprints underneath the nursery window. Two sections of ladder had been used to reach the window; these were found near the house.

One of the sections was split, suggesting that the ladder had broken during the descent. There were no bloodstains in or about the nursery, nor were there any fingerprints.

The Lindberghs were understandably distraught and desperate to get their baby back. Charles Lindbergh gave the police investigation every support, but he also made contact with a number of underworld characters in the hope they'd be able to trace his child. Two of these, Salvatore Spitale and Irving Bitz, immediately offered their services. But they also approached the
New York Daily News
in the hope of selling advance information on the baby-snatch.

On 6 March, five days after the kidnapping, Charles received a second ransom note. This increased the ransom demand to $70,000. It was followed by a third and fourth ransom note, at which point a trusted local ex-headmaster named Dr John F. Condon offered his services. He suggested trying to make direct contact with the kidnapper by placing a series of adverts in local newspapers. If the kidnapper responded to his adverts, he could act as an intermediary in any ransom negotiations.

It was a long shot but to everyone's surprise it worked. The kidnapper responded and, from this point on, all his notes were sent directly to Dr Condon.

One of these contained instructions for him to meet with an unidentified man called ‘John' at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York. Dr Condon duly went along, met with ‘John' and discussed payment of the ransom money. In return, the stranger handed Dr Condon the baby's sleeping suit, proof enough that he had little Charles. When the Lindberghs saw the sleeping suit, they immediately recognized it as belonging to their baby.

After an exchange of yet more notes, Dr Condon once again met with ‘John'. He handed over $50,000 and was told that the kidnapped child could be found on a boat named
Nellie
near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. An extensive search and rescue mission failed to find any boat of that name.

On 12 May, almost ten weeks after the kidnapping, the body of a baby was found, partly buried and decomposed, some five miles from the Lindberghs' home. Its head was crushed, there was a hole in the skull and the left leg and both hands were missing.

The body was positively identified as Charles Lindbergh and was cremated, at the Lindberghs' insistence, on the following day. The coroner concluded that the child had been dead for some two months and that the cause of death was a blow to the head.

The New Jersey State police were no nearer to finding the murderer, despite offering a ransom of $25,000. They knew that the most likely means of capturing the kidnapper was to ensnare him while trying to spend the ransom money, which had been paid in so-called gold certificates whose numbers had been noted by the police.

One suspicious gold certificate was spotted by a teller at a bank in the Bronx. It had a New York number plate, 4U-13-14-N.Y, pencilled in the margin. This helped police track the bill to a petrol station in Upper Manhattan. The station manager, Walter Lyle, recalled writing down the number because he thought the customer looked ‘suspicious'.

The number plate led the police to a blue Dodge owned by a certain Bruno Hauptmann, aged thirty-five, a native of Saxony in Germany. He was arrested and when police searched his home they found almost $2,000 in those same gold certificates.

They also found a great deal of additional evidence. There was a notebook that contained a sketch for the construction of a collapsible ladder similar to that found at the Lindbergh home and they found that the wood in his loft was identical to the wood used to make the ladder. They also found Dr Condon's telephone number in his house.

The trial of Hauptmann began in January 1935. He was charged with extortion and murder. The evidence that had been found in his home, together with handwriting samples from the ransom notes, quickly secured his conviction. Although the defence appealed, the verdict was upheld and Hauptmann was electrocuted at 8.47 p.m. on 3 April 1936.

There have been many attempts to prove that he was duped, framed or otherwise innocent, but the most authoritative recent account, written by the former FBI agent Jim Fisher, concludes that ‘Hauptmann is as guilty today as he was in 1932 when he kidnapped and killed the son of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh.'

 

23

Sir Osman of Hyderabad

His personal fortune was said to be more than double the annual revenue of India and he owned enough pearls to pave Piccadilly from one end to the other. His jewels alone were worth a staggering £400 million.

Sir Osman Ali Khan, autocratic ruler of the princely state of Hyderabad, was once the richest man in the world and also a contender for one of the richest people in history.

He was worth more than £2 billion in 1940 and had an array of sumptuous palaces filled with rare and wonderful treasures: oriental carpets, priceless manuscripts and rare gemstones. He shared his wealth with his seven wives, forty-two concubines and vast numbers of children and dependants.

Every statistic about Sir Osman is eye-watering. He ruled a state that was just a fraction smaller than the UK and he held absolute power over the lives of 16 million people.

He had dozens of Rolls-Royces and owned the rare Jacob diamond, valued today at £100 million. He was also a fanatical ally of the British during the Raj and donated all the fighter planes that made up the Royal Flying Corp's 110 Squadron in the First World War.

The British responded by awarding him with the titles ‘His Exalted Highness' and ‘Faithful Ally of the British Government'.

Sir Osman had succeeded his father as ruler of Hyderabad on the latter's death in 1911. Already fabulously wealthy, he expanded the family coffers by increasing the mining industry in the state of Hyderabad. The mines were a rich source of diamonds and other precious stones. The famous Koh-i-Noor diamond came from Hyderabad.

By 1941, Sir Osman had founded his own bank, the Hyderabad State Bank. His fiefdom became the only state on the subcontinent that issued its own currency, quite different from that of the rest of India. Often benevolent, and always erratic, Sir Osman spent much of the family fortune on education, railways and electrification. But there was plenty of spare cash for him to indulge his passion for racehorses, rare cars and regal uniforms.

Huge sums of money were also spent on a lavish beautification programme that included public buildings, a high court, hospitals and the Osmania University. But Sir Osman's real passion remained his palaces, which were scattered across his realm. The biggest were staffed by many thousands of servants, retainers and bodyguards, all jostling for position alongside scheming eunuchs and jealous concubines.

Sir Osman's favourite palace was said to be the Falaknuma, built on a hilltop above Hyderabad with a panoramic view across the city. Known as ‘Mirror of the Sky', it was constructed in the classical style out of imported Italian marble.

There was also the Chowmahalla Palace, another rambling edifice that had been started in 1750 and took another 120 years to complete. It became famous for its pillared Durbah Hall, a vast marble salon lit by chandeliers made of Belgian crystal. There were huge drawing rooms, courtyards and an elegant clock tower.

Sir Osman seemed to have had it all: a fortune, palaces and a peaceful dominion that managed to escape integration into the new Indian state. But everything was soon to turn sour. After months of failed negotiations with India, Sir Osman's fiefdom was invaded in 1948. There were five days of fighting before he reluctantly agreed to join the union. His autocratic rule was replaced by India's parliamentary democracy.

A quarter of a century later, Sir Osman's titles were abolished and he was subjected to crippling taxes.

His death in February 1967 was always going to result in a complex battle over inheritance. There were hundreds of would-be claimants to his land and property.

His grandson, Mukarram Jah, was his official successor, but he rapidly found himself in deep financial trouble. He inherited not only huge debts, but also an enormous number of servants, retainers and hangers-on. These included nearly 15,000 palace staff and dependants, along with the forty-two concubines and their numerous offspring.

The family's oldest and most prestigious palace, the Chowmahalla, still had 6,000 employees. Thirty-eight of them were employed solely to dust the chandeliers.

Thus began a complex and highly rancorous legal battle over Sir Osman's fortune, which had shrunk to a mere £1 billion at the time of his death. Mukarram Jah eventually tired of the wrangling and left India altogether. He divorced his first wife, the Turkish-born Princess Esra, and emigrated to Australia, where he became a sheep farmer.

And there the story ended, at least for more than twenty years. But in 2001, Princess Esra returned to India in a bid to sort out her grandfather-in-law's complex will. With the help of a gifted lawyer, the competing claims over the inheritance were finally resolved.

The beautiful Chowmahalla Palace was eventually re-opened as a museum and the Falaknuma became a luxury palace hotel. The many descendants of Sir Osman are now free to come back and reflect on the former glories of their once-noble family.