How to Lead a Life of Crime (33 page)

Addendum

The following material was found on a flash drive that had been taped to the underside of a desk belonging to Marcos Lauder. A reporter for the
New York Times
, Lauder was reported missing on January 3, 2013.

Lucian Frederick Mandel

Born 1975 in Manhattan

Mother: Beatrice Mandel (b. 1942, d. 2007)

Father: Unknown

Sibling: Marjorie Mandel (b. 1973, d. 2007)

Rumor has it that the father of Marjorie and Lucian Mandel is a living graduate of the Mandel Academy. My sources believe that the man may have been employed by the school when Beatrice was first named headmistress. However, Beatrice never publicly identified the father of her children, and he appears to have played no role in his son’s life.

Lucian was enrolled at the Dalton School in Manhattan until November of his fourth grade year, when another child accused him of intentionally injuring a class pet. At that point, Lucian abruptly transferred to College Alpin Beau Soleil, a boarding school in Switzerland. Before the age of fifteen, he made regular trips to visit his mother in New York. The travel appears to have stopped in Lucian’s sophomore year. He did not leave Europe throughout his junior and senior years.

By all accounts, Lucian’s relationship with his mother became increasingly tense as he grew older. This seems to support the idea that she may have discovered his macabre habits. It’s also possible that Beatrice Mandel suspected that her son’s crimes were not limited to defiling the dead.

Lucian’s time in Switzerland coincided with the disappearance of at least five teenagers from the nearby city of Geneva. Most of the children were long believed to be runaways. However, the recent discovery of several jars of preserved organs in a wooded area not far from College Alpin Beau Soleil has proven that at least one of the teenagers met a grisly fate. There is no physical evidence to link Lucian Mandel to the crime, but the MO fits the one described by Henry Brennan.

Throughout his youth, Lucian Mandel made very few friends, but his money often bought success with girls. Those relationships, however, were extremely short lived. None of the ex-girlfriends I’ve located are willing to discuss him. Most seem to refuse not out of loyalty, but fear.

Mandel graduated from Harvard in 1995. Despite an unimpressive academic record, he was accepted to the John Hopkins School of Medicine where he earned an MD. In 2007 he was awarded a PhD in genetics.

Less than a week after Lucian returned to New York, Beatrice Mandel died of a cerebral aneurysm. Her daughter, Marjorie, died the following month in an automobile accident on the West Side Highway. Neither death appears to have been investigated. Autopsies were never performed.

“Gwendolyn”

Real name: Tiffany Hager

Mother: Rhonda Hager

In 2008, Tiffany Hager was a patient at the New Hampshire State psychiatric hospital. Her juvenile criminal records are sealed, but her mother’s name links her to this account from the
New Hampshire Union Leader
.

INVESTIGATORS CLEAR MOTHER, FOCUS ON DAUGHTER

Shortly after the body of an eighth man was pulled out of Spectacle Pond on Friday afternoon, Croydon police abruptly shifted the focus of their investigation. The woman who was the prime suspect in the killings has now been cleared of most charges. New information, including forensic evidence uncovered by the Sullivan County Coroner, appears to incriminate the former suspect’s underage daughter.

Computer records show that all eight victims had scheduled sexual liaisons at the home of thirty-year-old Croydon native Rhonda Hager on the nights they disappeared. However, security camera footage has placed Ms. Hager at a Sunapee drinking establishment on every evening in question, giving her a solid alibi for the times of death.

Police have not ruled out the possibility that Ms. Hagar may have helped dispose of the bodies, but the woman’s thirteen-year-old daughter has become the lead suspect in the case. Bite marks found on three of the bodies appear to match the girl’s dental impressions.

Sources close to the investigation are now beginning to doubt that the case will ever come to trial. The girl, herself a victim of abuse and neglect, has a long and well-documented history of psychiatric problems.

“Ella”

Real Name: Dorelle Duncan

Transcript of my telephone call with Jed McKinley, the zoo employee who discovered photographs that showed the assassination of Christopher Jones, the one-time Chicago drug lord. The photos were confiscated by the Illinois State Police. They cannot be located at this time. The police claim they are no longer in evidence.

Q: OK, the recorder is running. Can you please give me your name and the name of your employer?

A: My name is Jed McKinley. I work for the Lincoln Park Zoo.

Q: In Chicago.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you tell me a bit about the work you were doing in Marquette Park in 2011?

A: I was part of a project to assess the biodiversity of the Chicagoland area. We set up hidden wildlife camera traps in multiple parks across the city to see which species were present.

Q: You thought you’d be filming squirrels and birds and such.

A: Yeah. And coyotes and other animals that are pretty good at avoiding humans. That’s why we used cameras.

Q: So the cameras were well hidden and activated by motion sensors.

A: That’s correct.

Q: You ended up filming more than squirrels. Please tell me what you discovered on the morning of September 13, 2011.

A: I was checking the footage that had been taken in Marquette Park the previous night. There was a camera trap in an overgrown section of the park that would usually snap some great pictures of opossums and raccoons. So I went through those photos first. Halfway through the camera roll, I found about a dozen pictures of a middle-age man and a girl with a gun.

Q: Describe the two for me if you will.

A: Well the man was Christopher Jones. They never released the girl’s name. She was African-American. Maybe sixteen or so. Pretty—but hard looking. Her hair appeared white in the photos. She had diamond rings on her fingers.

Q: How many photos did the camera take of the pair?

A: Six. It didn’t actually capture the girl shooting Jones. Just a few seconds before and a few seconds after.

Q: But there was no one else there who could have killed the man.

A: No.

Q: Anything else you remember about the photographs? Any details you think might be important?

A: The girl was crying.

Q: Crying?

A: Yeah. In every picture.

Glenn Sheehan

Congressman, Illinois, 14
^th
District

In January 2012, he called for a congressional inquiry into the development of Exceletrex. In March 2012, Sheehan withdrew his support for the investigation. The abrupt shift raised a few eyebrows in Washington.

There were rumors that Sheehan was conducting an extramarital affair at the time. Evidence of the relationship could have been used by Mandel alumni to blackmail the Representative. There may be no way to prove or disprove such speculation.

“Lucas”

Real Name: Brian Ascher

Born: February 18, 1985

Died: Date unknown, 2012

Lucas’s family history is well documented and easy to verify. His mother, father, and sister were killed on April 17, 2001, in the crash of Sunshine Airways Flight 2882 from Los Angeles to Atlanta.

The six-year-old boy had no remaining family, other than an aged aunt in a nursing home. He was made a ward of the state and placed in foster care.

In 2011, Lucas was arrested on charges of cyber terrorism. His black hat attack on Sunshine Airways’ computer systems had grounded the entire airline for almost a week. Sixteen years old at the time, Lucas was tried as an adult and sentenced to ten years in a minimum security prison.

There is no evidence that Lucas was ever incarcerated. His trail goes cold two days after his sentence was announced.

“Franklin”

True identity unknown and presence at the Mandel Academy impossible to verify. Alumni interviewed do not recall a student by that name.

Marm Mandelbaum

Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum was one of the most notorious criminals in nineteenth-century New York. A portly Prussian woman, she worked out of a store at 79 Clinton Street in Manhattan (a building that may still exist today) and made a living fencing stolen goods. She also planned and financed some of the most impressive capers in New York history. But Marm wasn’t a common criminal. She threw swanky dinner parties for the city’s finest citizens, and was said to be a stickler for good manners.

In the 1870s, Marm started the Grand Street School, an academy for young criminals. There were classes in pocket-picking, safe-cracking, blackmail, and confidence games. Children under the age of ten were welcome to apply, and those who graduated at the top of their class were hired by Marm herself.

The Butcher of Brighton Beach

Aka Vladimir Mingulov

Born: 1968, near Moscow

Currently at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, serving four consecutive life sentences.

Almost nothing is known about Mingulov’s early life in Moscow. He came to the US sometime in the late 1980s and settled in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood (known as Little Odessa for its large Russian population). By 1990, he was working as a hit man for Boris Ivankov, then a mid-level figure in the Russian Mafia. Ivankov’s brains and Mingulov’s brutality proved to be a potent combination, and the two men quickly rose through the ranks of the organized crime world.

Mingulov may or may not speak English. During his trial, he was provided with a translator. He never spoke a word of any language in court, leading some in the media to speculate that he might be mute. (He is not.) During the height of his career, Mingulov’s silence sent a powerful message. Everyone in Brighton Beach knew that when Vladimir Mingulov came to the door, he wasn’t there for a chat.

Over the course of twenty years, Mingulov murdered dozens of Boris Ivankov’s enemies. (Some experts claim the body count reached three digits.) He was said to be fast, efficient, and absolutely pitiless. Though he employed a wide range of weapons, he enjoyed using his bare hands whenever possible. Given his formidable size (6’6”, 235 lbs.), few of his victims would have been able to fight back.

Most of Mingulov’s victims vanished without a trace. It was rumored that he dismembered the corpses before disposing of them, earning him the nickname the Butcher of Brighton Beach. However, at Mingulov’s trial, it was discovered that his wife, Olga, deserved the title. For the Mingulovs, the murder business was a family affair. Vladimir (and often his son) would provide the bodies, and Olga would dispose of them.

When Vladimir and Olga Mingulov were finally arrested in 2011, the remains of their last four victims were discovered in a hidden sub- basement beneath their home.

“Ivan”

Sergei Mingulov

Born: 1995

Died: 2012 (unconfirmed)

Vladimir and Olga Mingulov’s only child. Sergei’s juvenile records are sealed. However, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that he had been actively participating in his family’s “business” for years before his parents were incarcerated. Only sixteen at the time, Sergei had already built a fearsome reputation among the Brooklyn Russian Mafia. It was said he had inherited both his father’s size and cruelty.

When the Mingulovs were arrested, Sergei was declared a ward of the state. He had dropped out of school at the age of twelve, and there is no sign that he ever returned. There is also no record of the boy being placed in a foster home.

I have contacted the Mingulovs. Neither has spoken with Sergei since 2011.

“Felix”

Aka Hector Guerra

Born: 1994?

Died: 2012 (unconfirmed)

Hector Guerra was one of the aliases used by a young man who was arrested for prostitution in Miami, Florida, three times between 2009 and 2011. He told police officers that he had come to America from Cuba with his mother. She died shortly after their arrival, and he began turning tricks to support himself.