100 Most Infamous Criminals (6 page)

The trial was a formality, consisting almost entirely of Kürten’s detailed confessions to the nine murders and seven attempted murders he’d been charged with. Yes, he’d drunk blood. Yes, he was a sadist, an arsonist, a rapist, a vampire. He was sentenced to death nine times. On July 1st 1931, before his walk to the guillotine, he asked the prison psychiatrist whether he’d be able to hear, if only for a second, the gouting of his own blood as the blade cut through his neck. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be the greatest of all pleasures.’

Henri Landru

H
enri Landru was a conman and a fraudster, specializing in lonely widows and spinsters; by 1914, when he was 45, he’d already been in prison four times for swindling and abuse of confidence. In 1914, though, he was in the dock again, and this time for something more serious: business fraud – for which he could expect four years in jail, followed by banishment to a faraway penal colony as a habitual criminal. So he went on the lam and changed his name, and seems to have made one more important decision: from now on, he’d kill his victims, rather than leave them alive to give evidence against him.

His first victim of this new resolution was a thirty-nine-year-old widow and her eighteen-year-old son. Calling himself Monsieur Diard, he moved them into a villa on the outskirts of Paris, where they both disappeared.

Another widow, this time Argentinian, soon followed them, bringing all her worldly possessions. She lasted five days.

By this time Landru had started placing lonely hearts advertisements in the newspapers of Paris, claiming to be a widower of 43, with ‘a comfortable income,’ ‘moving in good society’ and desirous ‘to meet widow with a view to matrimony.’ From this and six other ads which were to follow, he got almost 300 replies, which he recorded meticulously in a black notebook. One of them was his next prey: a fifty-one-year-old ex-governess with a considerable legacy. When she disappeared, Landru, together with her legacy, moved to the Villa Ermitage near the village of Gambais – and this was to be the centre of his operations from then on.

The widows came – and went – over a period of almost three and a half years, leaving not even their identities behind them. But then the sisters of two of Landru’s victims began making enquiries; and both separately wrote to the local mayor about the Villa Ermitage, where both sister-widows had gone to visit a man called, variously, ‘Monsieur Dupont’ and ‘Monsieur Fremyet’. The mayor put the two of them together and a complaint was made to the police. Then, in April 1919, one of the sisters recognized ‘Monsieur Fremyet’ walking, with a young girl on his arm, in Paris’s rue de Rivoli.

‘Monsieur Fremyet’ was arrested and the police found on him, not only his black notebook, but also papers and identity cards belonging to some of the women on his list. In a stove at the Villa Ermitage, they later discovered fragments of human bone amongst the ashes – though they never managed to produce a corpse, however long and hard they dug.

Landru, once he’d been identified, said nothing, except to profess his innocence. His trial, though, when it came, was a sensation. For the police had put it about by then that he’d killed 300 women, perhaps more. He was tried for just ten of them, and for the murder of his first victim’s son, and was found guilty – via circumstantial evidence, proven motive and the evidence provided by the Villa-Ermitage stove – on all counts. On November 30th 1921, still maintaining his innocence, he walked to the guillotine with some hauteur, refusing the ministrations of a priest. But more than forty years later, the daughter of Landru’s lawyer found a confession he’d written and hidden on the back of a picture he’d drawn whilst awaiting his execution.

Henri Landru maintained his innocence right up until his execution

‘Lucky’ Luciano

M
ore perhaps than any other single man, ‘Lucky’ Luciano created the modern face of the Mafia: making vast profits from drugs, operating across borders, invisible; bolstered by international agreements and alliances and ruled by representative councils. An associate once said of him and his long-time friend Meyer Lansky:

‘If they had been President and Vice-President of the United States, they would have run the place far better than the idiot politicians.’

Salvatore Luciani arrived in New York with his parents at the age of 10 – and was almost immediately in trouble, for theft and later drug-peddling. Then, in his early twenties, he met and became the mentor of a young Polish immigrant called Maier Suchowjansky, better known as Meyer Lansky. By that time, Luciano was a member of the gang run by Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, a union and organized-labour racketeer, and was making himself a reputation as a hit-man. Lansky was soon co-opted into the gang as a strategist during the early days of Prohibition, though he’d have nothing to do with the brothels Luciano ran on the side.

It wasn’t long, however, before they outgrew Orgen’s gang and looked for new opportunities, together with a friend of Luciano’s called Vito Genovese. Prohibition made the three of them increasingly powerful. Luciano later claimed that he personally controlled every New York police precinct and had a bagman deliver $20,000 a month to Police Commissioner Grover A. Whelan. He also boasted about the company he moved in: the politicians and stars he met at parties and the gatherings at the Whitney estate. The politicians, even presidential candidates, courted him for campaign funding and help at election time. The beautiful people wooed him for World Series baseball tickets, girls, dope and drink.

There remained one major obstacle, though, to Luciano’s assumption of absolute power. For the most important criminal power-brokers in New York, even during Prohibition, were two old-style Mafia bosses, Salvatore Maranzano and Giuseppe Masseria. Luciano favoured Masseria, but he soon changed his mind when Maranzano had him picked up, strung up by his thumbs and tortured. The final inducement to change allegiances was a slash across the face from a knife held by Maranzano which needed fifty-five stitches. The reward? The Number Two spot in the Maranzano outfit if Luciano first killed Masseria.

Masseria was gunned down in the middle of dinner in a Coney Island restaurant, after Luciano, his dining partner, had left for the bathroom; Maranzano proclaimed himself the
Capo di Tutti Capi
at a meeting of the New York Mafia families, which he proposed to bring together under one roof as La Cosa Nostra. Luciano and Lansky, though, had other ideas. And a few months later, four of their men, posing as internal-revenue investigators, arrived at Maranzano’s Park Avenue headquarters, demanding to see both the boss and the books. Maranzano was stabbed and shot to death in his inner office.

Lucky Luciano is credited with forming the basis of the modern Mafia

In victory, Luciano took over Maranzano’s idea. He established the New York Commission – sometimes known as the National Crime Syndicate – and its enforcement arm, Murder Incorporated. He became, in effect, the boss of bosses; and even though he was jailed in 1936 for twenty-five to fifty years, on vice charges, he continued to exercise power. For after the United States entered the war, the government needed help, first against sabotage in the Mafia-controlled New York docks, and then with the invasion of Sicily.

Luciano agreed, in return for early release after the war ended. Pro-Mussolini Italian spies and saboteurs were flushed out; German spies were quietly assassinated; and when the US Army landed in Sicily, special units carried, not only the Stars and Stripes, but a special flag carrying the letter ‘L.’ The Mafia eased their path through the island, making sure that its members took over the running of the towns and villages they passed through. By the time the US Army moved onto the mainland, it had taken over virtually all of Sicily.

It was, in a way, Luciano’s greatest coup, and when released and deported to Italy in 1945 – after making a huge donation, it’s said, to the Republican Party – he took full advantage. After a brief interlude in Cuba, he settled in Naples, and from there organized in Sicily the setting up of the same sort of ruling Mafia commission he’d established in the United States. He also moved the Sicilian families into drugs; and is said to have established the so-called French Connection, an alliance between Turkish growers, the Sicilian families, Corsican gangster-processors in Marseilles and US Mafia importers and distributors.

His life finally caught up with ‘Lucky’ Luciano when he died on January 26th 1962 in Naples Airport after drinking a cup of coffee. He may have had a heart attack; he may have been poisoned. But it seems typical of the man that he was due to meet an American film producer who wanted to make a film of his life – and that there were Interpol agents, by report, keeping watch.

‘Count’ Victor Lustig

‘C
ount’ Victor Lustig, born in 1890 into a respectable Czechoslovakian family, was an inveterate Lothario with a passion for gambling. But he was also the most famous conman of the 20th century. For the ‘Count’ was the man who successfully sold the Eiffel Tower – and not once, but twice.

Whether Victor Lustig was actually his real name no one ever really knew. For in his wanderings across Europe in the first quarter of the twentieth century, he seems to have had twenty-two different aliases and to have been arrested forty-five times under one or other of them. It was as Victor Lustig, though, that he had his brilliant idea. One day in 1925, he read in a Paris newspaper that the Eiffel Tower was in desperate need of renovation, and that it might even have to be demolished. In short order, then, he got hold of some headed notepaper from the Ministry of Posts, which was responsible for the Tower’s maintenance, and sent out letters to five rich financiers, inviting them to a private meeting with the ‘deputy director-general’ of the Ministry at the Hotel Crillon.

At the meeting in a hotel suite, the financiers were told that the business they were about to discuss was top secret, hence the need for a discreet meeting with loyal Frenchmen at a venue outside the Ministry. The decision, regrettably, had been taken, he said, to pull the Eiffel Tower down, since it was now impossibly expensive to maintain. It was to be sold off for the value of its 7,000 tons of metal, he said; and he asked the five if they’d care to submit bids for it.

All agreed, but Lustig was only really interested in one of the bidders, a nouveau-riche scrap-metal merchant called André Poisson. So when the bids were in, he rang Poisson to tell him that his had been successful. Now, if he’d care to bring a certified cheque to the Hotel Crillon, the business could be concluded.

Poisson dutifully came to the hotel; whatever suspicions he might have had were allayed when Lustig apologetically asked for a further amount of money, in cash, to help smooth the wheels. Poisson immediately agreed and happily handed over the cheque, worth millions of francs, in return for a bill of sale. When a French ministry official asked for a bribe, after all, that clearly meant he was the real thing.

Lustig and a confederate he’d employed immediately left town, and stayed away until they realized that they’d got away with it: Poisson had been too embarrassed to go to the police. So they returned again to Paris, repeated the process, and sold the Eiffel Tower to another scrap-merchant. Though this dealer did finally go to the police, by that time they were already far away.

Lustig’s career as a con-man was not over now by any means, but he never reached such dizzy heights again. He worked the trans-Atlantic liners; sold a ‘banknote-duplicating’ machine to multi-millionaire Herbert Loller; and even tried to involve Al Capone in a Wall-Street investment scam. Then, in the early thirties, he went into counterfeit money. In 1934, he was arrested for producing $100,000-worth a month and thrown into New York’s Tombs Prison. He escaped and went to ground in Pittsburgh. But after some years of life as retiring Robert Miller, the police were tipped off and he was rearrested, on a charge of having distributed an awesome $134 million-worth of fake bills over his career. He was sentenced to twenty years, first in Alcatraz and then in Springfield Prison, Missouri, where he died in 1947.