World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (30 page)

In the period between 1989 and 1995, AUM hit the news in a variety of ways, mostly as a public nuisance. But the locals who protested its setting up of yoga schools and retreats in remote rural areas didn’t know the half of it. For during these years AUM – which attracted many middle-class professionals – began using them to stockpile the raw materials used in making nerve agents: sarin and its even more deadly cousin VX.

Then on the night of June 27th 1994, in the city of Matsumoto 150 miles west of Tokyo, a man called the police complaining of noxious fumes, and subsequently became so ill he had to be rushed to hospital. Two hundred others became ill and seven died. Twelve days later, this time in Kamikuishikimura, a rural village three hundred miles north of Tokyo, the same symptoms reappeared in dozens of victims. And though this time no one died, the two attacks had something sinister in common. For the Matsumoto deaths, it was discovered, had been caused by sarin, hitherto unknown in Japan; and the village casualties by a by-product created in its manufacture.

The villagers were convinced that the gas had come from an AUM building nearby; and by the beginning of 1995, the newspapers – if not the police – had begun to put two and two together.

Still the police took no action. Nor did they move when in February a notary, a well known opponent of the sect, was abducted in broad daylight in Tokyo by a van that could be traced to AUM. In early March, passengers on a Yokohama commuter train were rushed to hospital complaining of eye irritation and vomiting; and ten days later the method in which they’d probably been attacked was found. Three attaché cases – containing a liquid, a vent, a battery and small motorised fans – were discovered dumped at a Tokyo station.

Perhaps forewarned of a coming police raid, AUM took preemptive action. At the height of the morning rush hour on March 25th, cult members released sarin on three subway lines that converged near National Police headquarters. Twelve died and over five thousand were injured. There was panic all over Japan. But, though the police did raid some AUM facilities the following day, they still failed to find Asahara and his inner circle.

The price they paid was high. For on March 30th a National Police superintendent was shot outside his apartment by an attacker who got away on a bicycle. A parcel bomb was sent to the governor of Tokyo; cyanide bombs were found and defused in the subway system; and when a senior AUM figure was finally arrested, he was promptly assassinated.

Asahara was arrested, hiding out in a steel-lined room at AUM’s compound at Kamikuishikimura, almost two months after the Tokyo attack. And it was only very slowly, that his motives and the extent of his crimes were unravelled.

The ex-masseur had started AUM Supreme Truth, it seems, for the money he could make and he early recruited members from another sect who knew the religion business.

But then he’d become infected by his own propaganda; and when sect members ran in national elections in 1990 – and lost in a big way – he decided to bring down the government in preparation for a final Armageddon that would take place in 1997. In an atmosphere of obsessive secrecy, he organised bizarre initiation rituals and assassinated or abducted anyone who stood in his way. He demanded that members give up their worldly goods to him and had them killed if they refused. He operated prostitution clubs, made deals with drug syndicates, and instigated break-ins at government research laboratories.

Asahara was sentenced to death by hanging on 27 February 2004 after being found guilty on 13 of 17 charges, but the sentence has never been carried out. Meanwhile, his cult continues – under a new name Aleph. It’s still remarkably popular.

The Rise of Scarface

Al Capone, a.k.a. Scarface, is perhaps the most famous of all gangsters. His name sums up an era when organized crime looked set to take over America. This was the 1920s when Prohibition created a huge money-making industry under the control of criminal gangs, giving them unimaginable wealth. Nowhere was the wealth and power more obvious than in Chicago, where the mob’s front man was Al Capone. For many years, he appeared to be above the law, murdering his enemies while the police looked the other way. The legend of Scarface became known across the world, and such was his fame that he became the subject of many books and films.

Remarkably, more than half a century after his death, his name remains a byword for the urban gangster, vividly remembered today while most of his contemporaries are forgotten. The reason? Perhaps it is the mixture of calculation and brutality that he embodied. Al Capone was both a conscientious book-keeper and a man capable of beating another human being to death with a baseball bat: in short, the ultimate gangster.

An Equal Opportunities Gangster

There was little in Al Capone’s childhood to suggest such an outcome. He was born Alphonse Capone in New York on 17 January 1899, the fourth child of Gabriele and Teresina Capone, Italian immigrants from a small town near Naples who had arrived in New York five years before. The Capones were hard-working people, better off than many of their fellow immigrants. Gabriele was a barber by trade and able to read and write: he got a job first as a grocer and then, once he had saved some money, he opened his own barbershop. Soon after Alphonse was born, the family was able to move out of the Italian ghetto where they had initially lived to a more prosperous multi-ethnic area. Growing up in such a neighbourhood was no doubt responsible for the fact that, later on, Capone was unusual among Italian gangsters for his lack of ethnic, or even racial, prejudices.

Al Capone did reasonably well at school until the age of fourteen when he had a fight with a teacher. He was expelled from school and started to hang out on the streets, where he came into the orbit of local gangster Joseph Torrio. Capone joined Torrio’s outfit, the James Street Gang, and later went on to become part of the Five Points Gang, along with a childhood friend, and fellow future mob boss, ‘Lucky’ Luciano.

Torrio moved his operation to Chicago in 1909 and, for a time, Capone worked at regular jobs until Frankie Yale, a friend of Torrio, offered Capone a job as bartender in the Harvard Tavern on Coney Island. While working there, Capone got involved in a dispute with a gangster named Frank Gallucio that ended with Capone getting cut three times across the face. These were the wounds that led to his nickname: Scarface.

The Rise Of Scarface

Not long after this incident, Capone met a girl called Mae Coughlan from a middle-class Irish family. In 1918 they had a child, Alphonse Jr (known as Sonny) and married the following year. Once again, Al straightened out and got a job as a book-keeper in Baltimore. Then, in November 1920, his father Gabriele died, which seemed to prompt Al to give up any pretence of living the straight life.

Capone moved to Chicago and hooked up with Johnny Torrio. The Chicago boss at the time was a man named Big Jim Colosimo, whose main business was running brothels, but now that Prohibition had come into force, Torrio could see that the big money was in illicit liquor. Colosimo was not interested in pursuing this line of business. As far as Torrio and Capone were concerned, this meant that he was in the way. Torrio arranged alibis for himself and Capone, and hired his old friend Frankie Yale from New York to shoot Colosimo down in his own nightclub on 11 May 1920.

As a result of this take-over bid, Torrio was now the big man in the Chicago rackets, with Capone as his right-hand man. Over the next few years, their gang made huge profits through bootlegging, but they also made many enemies among rival mobsters, notably Dion O’Banion, leader of the Irish North Side Gang. Once again, Torrio and Capone called upon the services of Frankie Yale, who shot O’Banion down during 1924. This inevitably provoked a backlash and, when Torrio himself was badly wounded in an assassination attempt the following year, he decided to give up the business. He passed control of his businesses, which by then amounted to thousands of whorehouses, gambling joints and speakeasies, to his protégé Al Capone.

St Valentine’s Day Massacre

Despite being only twenty-five years old, Capone relished the new responsibility. He was an effective leader, able to build bridges with other gangs thanks to his lack of prejudice against working with Jewish or Irish gangsters. However, those who did try to challenge him paid very high penalties. One vendetta was with an Irish gang led by Bugs Moran and culminated in the so-called St Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Capone’s plan was to lure Moran and his gang to a meeting where they expected to make a deal for some bootleg whiskey. Fake police would then show up and disarm the Moran gang, then shoot them dead. Everything went according to plan: seven of the Moran gang were tricked by the fake officers, who lined them up against a wall and machine gunned them, killing six on the spot. The only flaw was that Moran himself arrived late to the meet and thus escaped.

Capone was not personally involved in the massacre but soon after, when two of the gangsters used on that occasion, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, were suspected of changing sides, Capone was very much present at their execution. The two men were invited to a grand banquet in their honour. At the end of the meal, Capone was presented with a gift-wrapped parcel containing a baseball bat. While his bodyguards restrained the two men, Capone used the bat to beat them both to death.

Caught… For Tax Evasion

Such excesses could not carry on indefinitely. Up to this point, Capone had avoided prosecution by paying off police and politicians alike. In the Chicago township of Cicero where he lived, he had his men elected to run the place. However, the FBI, now under the direction of the legendary Elliot Ness, had a new weapon that they were starting to use against gangsters: charging them with tax evasion on their ill-gained funds. Eventually, with the help of informant Frank O’Hare, Ness managed to make a case against Capone. It took years of skirmishes between the two men, but in the end Ness won.

In 1931, Capone was convicted of several charges of tax evasion and sentenced to eleven years in prison. Much of this was spent in the notorious Alcatraz.

By the time he was released from prison in 1939, Capone was a broken man, his health – both physical and mental – ruined by jail and the effects of long-untreated syphilis. He retired to his Florida mansion, and died on 25 January 1947.

The classic look of the mobster Al Capone.

The Scottish Cannibals

The Scots are rightly famous as engineers, but deserve more than a mention for their pioneering work as cannibals. When Roman Britain was invaded from the north in
AD
367, one of the sundry groups involved was an allegedly cannibalistic tribe from Argyll called the Attacotti. They later changed sides, but whether their new Roman overlords encouraged them to eat the imperium’s enemies is unknown. Back in Scotland meanwhile, their habits lingered on. The Moss Troopers of the border country were said to be fond of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of their enemies, and to have boiled one noble opponent for soup. One individual, the fearsomely named Christie o’the Cleek, was renowned for his love of human flesh, and the hooked axe or ‘cleek’ with which he yanked his victims from their ponies. Most famous of all, however, were Sawney Beane and his prodigious brood.

The facts about Sawney Beane are hard to pin down. According to some sources, he was active in the early fifteenth century; according to others, it was as late as the early eighteenth century. The account of those who eventually arrested him – and noticed pistols in his cave – suggests the latter date.

Everyone agrees that this Mr Beane was born near Edinburgh. He married a local girl – ‘a woman vicious as himself’ – and earned a living digging ditches and cutting hedges. Work was not really what he had in mind, though. He and his wife wandered south-west, finally settling in a rent-free cave complex on the coast of Galloway. But how to earn a living? The nearby coast road was not exactly busy, but it did boast enough traffic to support at least one highway brigand. For the next ten years or so Beane and his wife raised a growing family on the proceeds of murder and robbery.

Their reasons for moving into cannibalism are not known. The most likely was the simple attraction of free meat. The bodies were available, and sometimes they must have been hungry. It might even have occurred to them that in eating their victims they were also disposing of the evidence.