Introduction
In this book you will read about some of the most ruthless criminal masterminds ever to walk the face of the earth: Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Arnold ‘The Brain’ Rothstein, Lucky Luciano, Carlos the Jackal, the thirties’ art forger Han van Meegeren and Frank Abagnale Junior, the con man and high-school dropout who managed to persuade the world that he had qualifications to practise as pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, among other professions. Along the way, we take a look at some of the female fiends of history, such as Countess Bathory, the sixteenth-century Slovakian murderess, who tortured hundreds of peasant girls to death in her castle, after indulging in her sexual perversions with them. There are also murderers, outlaws and thieves of the eighteenth century, like Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, who terrorised the population of London, and when they were finally brought to justice and imprisoned, managed to escape repeatedly from high-security prisons. And there are the double agents of the Cold War years in the twentieth century, such as Kim Philby and the Cambridge Spies, the upper-class Englishmen whose apparent political allegiances to the Soviet regime are still not fully understood.
Moral bankruptcy
Then there are the outlaws who have gained a popular reputation over the years as romantic Robin Hood figures, like the Australian bushman Ned Kelly, who brought the plight of rural poverty among the settlers in the country to the authorities’ attention, and who managed to evade capture for years but who finally met his end in a shoot-out with the police. Less romantic, but equally fascinating, are the accounts of nihilistic terrorists such as Abu Nidal and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who sought to undermine the very fabric of Western democracy, for reasons that are hard to fathom. Like the Cambridge Spies in the UK, who colluded with the Soviet government against the West, these groups appear to have started out as politically motivated, only to degenerate into violence and moral bankruptcy.
Also included in this book, just for fun, are the most satisfyingly evil, devious criminal masterminds of all: those of the world of fiction, such as Blofeld, the James Bond villain; Fu Manchu, the evil genius of China and Fantomas, the ubiquitous, elusive French super-thief. In these fictional creations, we see the archetypal criminal masterminds – characters who are imagined as highly intelligent, gifted individuals, but whose ingenuity and cunning is used to wreak their revenge on mankind.
It is this aspect of criminal masterminds, whether real or fictional, that seems to fascinate us: that an individual can be intelligent, brilliant, a genius even, yet completely lack any moral sense that would encourage him – or her – to use their talents for the good of humanity. Indeed, there seems almost to be a popular fear that extreme intelligence may almost be supernatural, or at least unnatural; and that a high level of culture, sophistication and learning may sometimes go hand-in-hand with a desire to destroy lesser mortals in the service of a higher plan. The facts of human history seem in some ways to bear this out. Many of the leaders of the Nazi party in the Third Reich were highly intelligent, cultured individuals who greatly appreciated the art, music and learning that had characterised Germany over the centuries. Similarly, the leader of the terrorist group Shining Path in Peru, Abimael Guzman, was at one time a professor of philosophy and a highly respected political thinker. In addition, one can point to the Cambridge Spies as some of the most highly educated people in the UK, members of a class elite that traditionally held conservative views. Yet all these individuals used their gifts of native intelligence, education and social position, to ignore the dictates of decency, to treat their opponents without mercy, to behave like the most common, violent street thugs, with no feeling for humanity. One can’t help but ask ‘Why’?
Social background
In a sense, the answer is blindingly obvious. Most criminals act out of a combination of greed, self-interest and lack of concern for others. The gains – and the risks – are clear enough. As Willie ‘The Actor’ Sutton allegedly put it, when asked why he robbed banks: ‘Because that’s where the money is!’ Yet the picture that emerges from these stories is actually a rather more complex one.
As one would expect, the social milieu in which a criminal grows up usually has a major part to play in their career choice. For example, during the period of Prohibition, career opportunities in the legal world of business were few and far between for immigrant youngsters raised on the mean streets of North America’s big cities, whether Jewish, Italian or German. No wonder that the more ambitious and ingenious among them, such as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Schultz, turned to bootlegging, drug running and the like to make their fortunes, rather than spend their lives working for a pittance in the same kind of dead-end jobs that their parents had to work at. For example, Meyer Lansky’s father was in the New York garment trade, an exemplary immigrant who worked extremely hard for a living, yet who barely managed to feed his family. His son, a bright, ambitious boy, was determined not to follow in his father’s footsteps, and thus turned to a life of crime from an early age as a way of improving his prospects. Unlike some of his contemporaries, such as his friend Bugsy Siegel, later on in his life, Lansky had the intelligence to steer clear of directly involving himself with violence and mayhem, thus ensuring that he had a long and successful career in organised crime.
Emotional history
However, even with the mobsters, there are the exceptions. Arnold Rothstein, for example – perhaps the most famous criminal mastermind of all and the man whose legendary wealth and habit of carrying around large wads of cash gained him the nickname ‘the Big Bankroll’ – was the son of a wealthy New York Jewish businessman. The young Arnold could easily have chosen from a range of middle-class careers. So why did he choose to become a gangster instead? Perhaps it was for financial gain. Before he met his violent end, Rothstein had become an immensely wealthy man. However, his personal history shows that there were emotional reasons why he may have chosen to become a gangland criminal rather than a respectable businessman. From an early age, he had been rejected by his parents and felt that they favoured his brother. It may be that he took to crime as a form of rebellion against the family who had mistreated him, and against the Jewish culture that they were part of.
Certainly, this history is common enough among criminals from well-to-do families; although, here, once again, the picture is not always simple. In some cases, such as that of George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly, one can’t help feeling that, no matter what the circumstances, here was a young man bent on a life of violent crime, for whatever reason. Complex emotional needs and mental imbalance, also appear to drive much other criminal behaviour, from that of fantasists like Frank Abagnale Jr to that of lone killers such as the Unabomber.
The thrill of the chase
If social and emotional pressures play a part, what else makes a criminal mastermind? Intelligence, one might say. Yet curiously, once one analyses a master criminal’s career, it becomes clear that in many cases, these individuals often avoid the most intelligent course of action open to them – to operate within the law, rather than outside it. Clearly, many of them have the brains to make their fortunes legally, or at least to ‘go straight’ once they have amassed money; but many choose not to do so. What emerges from many of these stories is that most high-profile criminals are not simply clever people prevented by their social or emotional background from becoming well-to-do citizens. It becomes clear that material gain is not the only aspect of crime that attracts them. They don’t just want money: they want excitement, adventure, the thrill of the chase. They are, in essence, thrill seekers.
Christopher Boyce, who became a spy, selling secrets to the Russians, perhaps put it most clearly when he was asked the motivation behind his actions. In response, he said that he had become a spy because he believed that the American government was wrong. He also said that he liked the idea of getting some extra cash but, above all, that he had ‘a lust for adventure’. This need for thrills is echoed by many other characters in the book: from drug barons like Ramon Arellano Felix to the 1960s bank robber Jacques Mesrine; from terrorists such as Carlos the Jackal to fraudsters like Frank Abalagne Jr. All of them, to a greater or lesser degree, are people who enjoy danger, who prefer to speed along life’s highway than to take the journey slowly and enjoy the view. Those like Meyer Lansky, who prefer to keep a low profile, who like a quiet life and who invest their ill-gotten earnings cautiously and sensibly as soon as they can, are the exception rather than the rule. Only Lansky and, perhaps, Mickey Cohen – both gangsters from the Prohibition era – come into this rare category of cautious criminal masterminds.
. . . And the kill
As well as the need to take risks, there is another, more disturbing, element to the make-up of a criminal mastermind. This is the need for another kind of thrill: that of the kill. The obvious examples here are the strangely charismatic killers who manage to attract their victims to them like moths to a flame. Men like Charles Manson, who showed signs of more than average intelligence and yet was a brutal psychopath with a list of horrifying murders to his name. In Manson’s case, not only was he a killer, but he managed to influence those around him to commit the most appalling acts of murder. Also in this category are some of the outlaws, such as Bonnie and Clyde, who seem to have got their kicks from killing. (Some commentators have argued that Bonnie Parker was not a murderess, yet regardless of whether she pulled the trigger, she was clearly closely involved in the murders that took place, and very much attracted to a milieu of men who liked to kill for a living.)
Bloodthirsty drug barons such as Ramon Arellano Félix and violent mobsters like Bugsy Siegel are also among the criminals who seem to get a kick out of violent crime. So are the terrorists, such as Abu Nidal and Timothy McVeigh, who cold-bloodedly murdered innocent victims for their own political causes. In fact, there are very few types of master criminals – with the possible exception of fraudsters – who are in no way involved with violence. Even those whose exalted position among the criminal fraternity removes them from the scene of the crime, who do not have actual blood on their hands, are often responsible for murder and violence in an indirect way.
The modern world
Thus, it seems that the psychological profile of the criminal mastermind is a highly complex one. Greed plays a part, as does intelligence, along with the individual’s social and emotional background; yet, more crucially, it is the need to take risks, and the thrill of the chase – of adventure, of danger and of violence – that seems to define the motivation of the master criminal. In this book, you will find out how the master criminals of the past and of the present responded to that urge.
What emerges is that most criminal masterminds don’t want to lead an ordinary, humdrum life like the rest of us. Even if they could have their wealth on a plate, one senses that they would probably reject it. Clearly, in today’s economy, in periods of economic boom there are many opportunities for sharp young men and women to make a great deal of money, whether in law, accountancy, business, the stock market, computers or any number of other growing enterprises in the modern world, without risking the penalties incurred by breaking the law. But even in the legal world of business, however, there seem to be some individuals who simply cannot resist the desire to risk everything, to see how far they can go before they are brought down.
Such is the case of Nick Leeson, who almost single-handedly caused the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995. Through a series of highly speculative deals on the international money markets, Leeson managed to lose over £800 million of the bank’s money before he panicked, as well he might, and went on the run. He was arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in a Singaporean jail for his underhand dealings on the Far Eastern money markets. Once in jail, in the most horrifying conditions, he contracted colon cancer. Amazingly, he survived near death, and on his release returned to the UK, where he married, had a family and began to write about how he had turned his life around.
What is fascinating about the Leeson story is the way in which the qualities of a good stock-market trader – strong nerves, with the ability to think fast, to handle huge sums of money and to play the market on a hunch without worrying about the consequences – are also those of a successful criminal mastermind. Not only this, the deals that Leeson was making, which involved buying and selling futures on the international money markets, were so complex that few of his bosses understood them, and when the case came to court, the lawyers found it hard to determine whether these deals were fraudulent or not (though hiding what was going on from his superiors was definitely unlawful). Many commentators have also pointed out that Barings Bank, as much as Leeson – or if not more so – were to blame for allowing a young trader with very little in the way of formal education or training to make such huge deals. The only reason they left Leeson to his own devices and turned a blind eye to what was going on, apparently, was that he made them such vast sums of money.
The Leeson case points out that, in the modern world, the line between what is criminal and what is permissible in the line of business is sometimes blurred. Today, with increasingly complex technology, especially in terms of communications, there are many forms of crime in the business world that offer a new kind of excitement – the thrill of the chase – without the necessity to commit violence or to harm anyone, except perhaps financially. The temptation is there for every sharp-witted entrepreneur, business person or accountant – and many succumb, not just to enjoy the gains that are to be made from doing so, but simply to make their lives more exciting. It is this desire for kicks, ‘the lust for adventure’, the thrill of the chase, that continues to characterise the criminal mastermind – whether mobster or accountant, drug baron or academic – to this day.