100 Most Infamous Criminals (9 page)

During the mayhem in downtown Oslo, Breivik changed into a fake police uniform, made his way some 40 km (25 miles) to the shores of Lake Tyrifjorden, and caught a ferry to the island of Utoya. His destination was a summer camp that was held annually by the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party. By the time he arrived – 4:45, one hour and 23 minutes after the Oslo blast – news of the tragedy had already been announced to the camp staff and roughly 600 teenagers on the island. Breivik appeared as he presented himself: a police officer who had come to ensure that the 26-acre island was secure. After first asking people to gather around so that he could speak with them, Breivik opened fire. He shot indiscriminately, apparently intent on killing as many people as possible. Breivik’s bullets even struck people as they took to the lake, hoping to swim to safety.

It wasn’t until 32 minutes after the shooting began that police on the mainland were aware of something taking place on Utoya Island. Their delayed response became a matter for investigation. They waited until the Beredskapstropen, a special counter-terrorism unit, arrived from Oslo, before making the crossing. The boat that they sailed on was so overloaded that it nearly sank before reaching the island. Even before they left shore, Breivik placed a phone call to surrender, only to change his mind. The killing continued until 6:26 pm – one hour and 24 minutes after it had begun – when the gunman made a second call. He was apprehended by the Beredskapstropen eight minutes later.

In all, Breivik killed 69 people on Utoya Island and its surrounding waters. Many of the survivors escaped with their lives by swimming to areas that were only accessible from the lake, while others hid in a schoolhouse, which the gunman chose not to enter. Some survivors played dead, even after being shot for a second time. Still others were rescued by vacationers and by those with boats, who risked coming under fire from the shore.

Breivik claimed a total of 77 lives with his two attacks; a further 153 people were injured. The dead ranged in age from 14 to 61, with a median age of just 18 years. He’d killed 55 teenagers.

Anders Breivik has acknowledged that he committed the bombing in Oslo and the shootings on Utoya, but has denied guilt. In his words, both events involved ‘atrocious but necessary actions’. These four words came from his lawyer; at time of writing Breivik has not yet stood trial. Much of the gunman’s motivation can be gleaned through
2083 A European Declaration of Independence,
the 1,513-page document that he released to the world just 90 minutes before setting off the Oslo bomb. In this collection of writings, much of it plagiarized from others, Breivik argues against feminism and for a return to a patriarchy that he felt was lacking in his own upbringing. The murderer rails against multiculturalism and what he sees as opening the door to the Islamization of Europe. Portraying himself as a knight, Breivik calls on other white Europeans to wage a religious war against Muslims and Marxists. His ultimate goal, as reflected in the title of the document, was the deportation of all followers of Islam from Europe by 2083.

‘A majority of the people I know support my views,’ he writes, ‘they are just apathetic. They know that there will be a confrontation one day, but they don’t care because it will most likely not happen within the next two decades.’

In court Breivik alluded to himself as the future regent of Norway. He said one of his tasks would be to carry out executions of ‘category A, B and C traitors,’ while enlisting selected Norwegians for breeding purposes on special reservations. The authorities have yet to decide whether he can be held responsible for his actions.

Image of Breivik from his personal website

United States

Alberto Anastasia, the notorious boss of Murder Inc.

Anastasia lived and died by violence

Alberto Anastasia

I
n 1957, nothing became Alberto Anastasia’s life so much as his leaving of it. For he lived by violence – and he died by it. The boss of Murder Incorporated, New York’s so-called ‘Lord High Executioner,’ was ultimately executed by those he’d once served. He had, to use a later expression, by then passed his sell-by date. The days of the gun-toting street-fighter were over.

Alberto Anastasia seems to have arrived in New York from Sicily as an illegal immigrant during the First World War. But he was soon cutting his criminal teeth – like so many other future Mafia leaders – in the gang of Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, a New York labour-union racketeer. Orgen’s assassination in 1927 split the gang into factions, and Anastasia soon threw in his lot with the three men who were to reshape and reorganize the Mafia on a national basis: Meyer Lansky, Vito Genovese and ‘Lucky’ Luciano. He became one of their strong-arms and hit-men, alongside ‘Bugsy’ Siegel; when the New York Commission – or National Criminal Syndicate – was finally set up, he became the founding father of its enforcement arm, taking responsibility for long-distance contract killings.

In 1940, though, Abe Reles, one of Anastasia’s killers-for-hire, turned stoolie and started giving detailed evidence about dozens of murders in which Anastasia was implicated. He went underground and only re-emerged in November 1941 when Reles had an unfortunate ‘accident,’ falling six floors to his death from the hotel in which the Brooklyn District Attorney had hidden him, under supposed police protection.

No one was ever charged in Reles’s death. But the case against Anastasia, with him out of the way, collapsed; and he was free to play his part, after the war and the exile of ‘Lucky’ Luciano to Italy, in the vicious mob battles for control of Luciano’s gambling, prostitution and drugs operations in the US. He emerged as head of the Mangano family. But his style of doing business – and his increasing ambition – didn’t sit well with the bosses of the other clans. So on October 25th 1957, when Anastasia went down to the basement barber’s shop in Manhattan’s Park-Sheraton Hotel for his regular haircut, two men followed him and shot him to death with automatic pistols as he sat in the barber’s chair. Then they threw down their weapons, went back up to street-level and disappeared.

Ten years later, a Mafia soldier called Joe Valachi claimed that the killing had been ordered by Anastasia’s old associate, Vito Genovese, on the grounds that Anastasia had been invading his turf. The members of the Commission had agreed. In the old days, of course, at this point they would have got in touch with Murder Incorporated – and Alberto Anastasia himself.

Joe Ball

J
oe Ball was a large man, over six feet tall, with a big appetite and lots of muscle. He was also an expert with guns; he kept alligators – and he scared people. He scared the ranchowner next to his hooch house in Elmendorf, Texas so badly that he moved his family to California even before he sold up. His third wife took off in the same direction and for the same reason, and when a neighbour came calling one day to complain about a foul smell from a rain barrel near the alligator pool, he learned never to complain again. Even the cops weren’t immune. When one of them asked in passing why so many of the waitresses at Ball’s saloon, The Sociable Club, seemed just to stay for a while and then vanish, he got a gun in his face and a death-threat for his pains – and not even he took it any further.

Ball was born a rich kid in 1894 – his family had cattle and were big in business. But, after spending time at the University of Texas, he just didn’t seem interested in anything his parents had to offer. Instead he went to the bad and made a small fortune of his own as a bootlegger, doing most of his business from bed. His clients said that he didn’t even bother to look up much as he busied himself with whichever young girl was currently occupying it. Just so long as he got his money.

In the late 1920s, with Prohibition on the wane, Ball opened The Sociable Club and the stream of young women coming through his door and into his bed kept on flowing: this time waitresses and barkeepers. Sometimes he married them, sometimes he didn’t; but his reputation as a good ol’ boy kept spreading. He bought himself five alligators, which he kept in a cement pool behind the club; he took favoured customers out there to watch him toss them fresh meat, just to see them thrashing. He also had a pen by the pool which he filled with live stray dogs and cats. The very privileged were allowed to see the fun as he tossed them in too.

Then in 1938, the relatives of one of his waitresses, twenty-two-year-old Hazel Brown, told local police that she’d disappeared. She’d previously been seen around town with Ball; they were obviously lovers. But no one had seen her leave Elmendorf and none of the money in a bank account she’d opened had been withdrawn. So on September 24th Texas Ranger Lee Miller went out to see Ball, and as a precaution took some other law-enforcement people with him.

Ball seemed unfazed at first by their arrival and by the questions they asked. But then he went behind the bar, took a revolver out of the cash register and, as he stood in front of the cops, blew off the top of his own head. His terrified handyman was then interviewed at length, and led them to the remains of Hazel Brown in the rain barrel. There were still traces of blood in the alligator pool.

The handyman later admitted that Ball had killed many young women, including two of his wives, one of whom he’d seen chopped up and fed to the alligators. Then came more witnesses: his third wife, found in California, admitted she too had witnessed a murder; the ranchowner from next door said he’d come across Ball cutting up another woman’s body and feeding it to the ’gators. Both had fled for their lives.

Ball seems to have killed up to twenty young women, most of whom he’d made pregnant. They were disposed of simply because they became a nuisance with their constant nagging about marriage. The handyman, Clifford Wheeler – who also claimed to have been terrified of Ball – was sentenced to four years as an accessory to murder; and the alligators? They were sent to a zoo in San Antonio, where they entertained visitors for many years…

Ma Barker

M
a Barker and her boys were a crime wave on the hoof, a close-knit and mobile Murder Incorporated. With their chief partner-in-crime Alvin Karpis, they executed anyone who was suspected of betraying them or selling them short; they did mail-robberies, held up banks, organized kidnaps, and shot down anyone in uniform who happened to cross their path, including, on one occasion, employees of Northwest Airways. There’s no evidence that Ma herself had ever committed much in the way of crime before 1932 when the gang first hit the headlines. But with her sons along, she was a fast learner.

She was born Arizona Donnie Clark in the Ozarks, the wild mountainous backwoods of Missouri, of Scots, Irish and Indian blood; and all her sons, one way and another, went to the bad. By the beginning of the ’30s, ‘Doc’ was in the Oklahoma State Pen for killing a nightwatchman; Hermann was doing twenty-five years in Leavenworth for mail-robbery; and Fred was just coming to the end of a stint digging coal in the State Penitentiary in Kansas, where he’d become friends with a killer called Alvin Karpis.