100 Most Infamous Criminals (24 page)

Bruns, now back in Tucson, led the police out to what remained of the two girls; Smitty, John Saunders and the girlfriend, Mary French, were all arrested. As the case unfolded in court, parents were horrified at what their sons and daughters had got up to. There was talk of teenage prostitution-rings and orgies fuelled by drugs and booze, and Smitty later boasted about teaching a string of teenage paramours ‘a hundred different ways to make love.’

Tried for the murder of Alleen Rowe, Mary French, who’d stayed in the car while Alleen was raped and killed, was sentenced to four to five years in prison; John Saunders, to life; and Charles Schmid, to death – commuted later to life after the banning of capital punishment. For the killing of the Fritz sisters, he received an extra fifty-five years.

His days of fantasizing, though, were not yet quite over. For in November 1972, he escaped from Arizona State Prison, along with another three-time killer, Raymond Hudgens. The two men held four people hostage on a ranch near Tempe, and then decided to separate. They were both picked up a few days later.

‘Dutch’ Schulz

‘Dutch’ Schulz wasn’t Dutch at all – he was German, and his last name wasn’t Schulz – it was Flegenheimer. His father kept a saloon and livery-stable in what was known as Jewish Harlem, but deserted his family in 1916, and that was enough for son Arthur. After coming out of jail at the age of 16, from an 18-month stretch for burglary, he borrowed the name of a legendary member of the old Frog Hollow Gang, and got down to business.

A chorus girl once said that he looked like Bing Crosby with his face bashed in. Dutch certainly was no beauty – but then he didn’t have to be. For by the mid 20s, after riding shotgun on Arnold Rothstein’s liquor-trucks, he’d put together the toughest gang in New York. They ran protection for some of the toniest uptown restaurants. They were into slot machines and the numbers racket; liquor, restaurants, labour unions, gambling, and fixing any horse-race or boxing-match they could. By the beginning of the 30s, Dutch – who had a reputation for miserliness – was said to be making $20 million a year.

He didn’t get to the top by any subtlety. He simply beat up or got rid of anyone who stood in his way. He out-muscled his competition – he arrived in the numbers racket, for example, by simply calling a meeting, laying his .45 on the table and saying, ‘I’m your partner.’ When ‘Legs’ Diamond had to get out of New York after killing a drunk, Dutch took over his liquor trucks; and then, when Legs objected, had him killed.

He avoided arrest in the usual way, by paying off the police and providing campaign funds and votes to all the politicians who mattered – particularly district attorney William Copeland Dodge. But a noose of prosecutions gradually settled round his neck. He beat the rap on a tax-evasion charge in Syracuse in 1933, but in 1935 he faced another, this time put together by special prosecutor Thomas Dewey. His lawyers eventually succeeded in having the trial moved to a little upstate town, but the consensus was, in Lucky Luciano’s words, that ‘the loudmouth is never coming back.’

Dutch, though, spent months in tiny Malone, New York, before the trial, schmoozing the inhabitants, dressing modestly and even converting to Catholicism in the town’s little church. When he got off, he told reporters: ‘This tough world ain’t no place for dunces. And you can tell all those smart guys in New York that the Dutchman is no dunce.’

The ‘smart guys in New York,’ though, didn’t want the Dutchman on their turf any more. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia sent a message warning him not to come back, and started literally breaking up his gambling empire – he had himself photographed on barges taking a sledgehammer to Dutch’s slot-machines. Thomas Dewey started preparing another case, this time against his restaurant rackets and his operation began to leak at the seams as other mobsters moved in on it.

He was exiled to Newark, New Jersey, where he set up his headquarters in a restaurant called the Palace Chop House. Then, sometime in late autumn 1935 – after having to kill one of his own lieutenants for conspiring with Luciano – he called a meeting of the Syndicate and demanded the assassination of Thomas Dewey. The Syndicate refused: it was far too high-profile. He said, fine, he’d kill Dewey himself – and so signed his own death warrant. In October, with his lieutenants, he was gunned down in the Palace Chop House by assassins from Murder Incorporated. He was 33.

‘Bugsy’ Siegel

B
enjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was there right at the beginning of the new-look New York Mafia. He was in the jail-cell where ‘Lucky’ Luciano first got together with Meyer Lansky. He was one of the four gunmen who murdered Giuseppe Masseria; and one of the four ‘internal-revenue agents’ who were in at the kill of Salvatore Maranzano, the ruthless would-be
Capo di Tutti Capi
of the city’s underworld. He was also appointed to the board of the Unione Siciliana, one of the first attempts at a commission to guide the power of the Mafia nationwide. He may not have understood much about the politics – he started out as a small-time car-thief and driver of booze-trucks, after all – and he left that sort of thing, in any case, to Luciano and Lansky. But he knew all the right people; he was presentable; and in 1935, he must have seemed the ideal choice to spearhead the New York families’ expansion of operations to the West Coast.

Bugsy Siegel is commonly credited with creating the foundations of Las Vegas as it is today

A rather unglamorous end for the glamour boy of the Mafia

Teaming up in southern California with a local mob led by Jack Dragna, Siegel ran drugs and operated a string of gambling-clubs and offshore casino-ships on behalf of his New York bosses both before and during the War. With the help of his pal, actor George Raft – and with his rough edges smoothed off by a divorced millionairess called Countess Dorothy Di Frasso – he was at ease in the best Hollywood circles. He was on first-name terms with people like Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper – and a magnet to every starlet. He fitted right in. As he said,

‘Class, that’s the thing that counts in life. Without class and style, a man’s a bum; he might just as well be dead.’

Gambling and stars: it was this combination that was to lead to Siegel’s one major contribution to Mafia history. For in 1945, he suggested to his bosses the idea of building a casino and hotel in the Nevada desert at a place called Las Vegas. He put up $3 million, and the Commission soon organised a loan to match his investment. The place, he said, would be called The Flamingo – a name suggested by his girlfriend Virginia Hill– and there’d be a grand opening, with all of Hollywood’s royalty there.

Word soon got back to the centre, though, that money was disappearing during The Flamingo’s building, some of it salted away abroad, and a decision was taken at an informal meeting of bosses in Havana, Cuba that Siegel would have to repay with interest the East-Coast Mafia investment as soon as the hotel-casino opened. Trouble was, the grand opening that Siegel had planned turned out a disaster. Bad weather kept planes grounded at LA airport; the stars never showed. In two weeks, The Flamingo was closed after losing $100,000.

‘Bugsy’ couldn’t pay, and his old friends in New York could no longer protect him. It was a matter of business; an example had to be set. So on the night of June 20th 1947, Siegel was gunned down as he sat in the living-room of Virginia Hill’s Los Angeles house on North Linden Drive. The final bullet, the ‘calling card,’ was fired into his left eye. Just five people went to his funeral.

Richard Speck

I
n a nurses’ hostel in Chicago in the early hours of July 14th 1966, Richard Speck was responsible for what was later called ‘the most bestial rampage in the city’s history.’ If he hadn’t been so bad at counting and so expert at tying knots, the good-looking twenty-four-year-old sailor might never have been caught.

Just before midnight on July 13th, a twenty-three-year-old nurse called Corazon Amurao opened her door to find a strange man wearing a dark jacket and trousers and smelling of alcohol pointing a gun at her. He forced her at gunpoint into another room where three other nurses were sleeping. Soon nine nurses were gathered together and herded into a bedroom, where the unknown man cut bed sheets into strips with a knife as they lay on the floor, and then bound and gagged them. He said that he wouldn’t harm them, he only wanted money, but when that had all been collected, he sat on the bed looking at them, fingering his knife.

Then, one by one, he took seven of them out of the room to various parts of the building and knifed or strangled them to death. For the last one – or so he thought – he reserved special treatment: he raped and sodomised her where she lay for twenty-five minutes before killing her.

He’d forgotten, however, about Corazon Amurao, who’d hidden herself during one of his absences under a bunk bed. After he’d left and when she thought it finally safe to move, she managed to get outside to a balcony and scream for help.

When the police arrived, they found mutilated corpses, mayhem, bedrooms awash with blood. But they also had a witness who could give them a description. The killer, she said, was pock-marked; had a tattoo on his arm with the words ‘Born to raise hell’; and had talked about needing money to get to New Orleans. This – together with the square knots he’d used to tie up his victims – immediately suggested to the police that he might be a seaman. And half a block away was the hiring hall of the National Maritime Union.

Richard Speck went on a ‘bestial rampage’

They soon discovered that a man answering to Ms. Amurao’s description had visited the hiring hall enquiring about a ship to New Orleans, and had filled out an application form in the name of Richard E. Speck. There was a photograph and a contact number, which turned out to belong to Speck’s sister. With a positive ID from Corazon Amurao in hand, they called Speck’s sister with the offer of a job. But though Speck himself called back within half an hour, he never turned up for the ‘interview’. So detectives started scouring sailors’ haunts – hotels, flophouses and bars – across the city.

They quickly came across Speck’s tracks: a hotel where he’d picked up two prostitutes on the night after the murders; another he’d checked out from half an hour before they came. He was finally arrested only after they’d named him as their chief suspect and released his description and photograph to the media. For a surgeon at Cook County Hospital, examining an emergency patient who’d been admitted after slashing his wrists, remembered a tattoo he’d read about in his newspaper that day.