Uncle John’s True Crime (39 page)

CRIME:
In July 1996, 37-year-old Willie King snatched a wallet from the coat of an old woman on a street in Greenwich Village, New York City.

INSTANT JUSTICE:
The woman was 94-year-old Yolanda Gigante. Who’s that? The mother of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, reputed head of the Genovese crime family, one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations. King was caught a short time later, and as soon as he realized who he’d mugged he agreed to plead guilty to grand larceny. Sentence: 1½ to 3 years in prison. “My client admitted his guilt at the earliest opportunity, because he wants to put this incident behind him,” King’s lawyer told the judge. “He hopes the Gigante family will, too.”

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“Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.” —
Will Rogers

Most common crime in America: Shoplifting. Two million people are arrested for it every year
.

When we left the case of the Mad Bomber (
page 176
), Dr. James Brussel, the original “profiler,” had just released his theories to the press, setting the game afoot. Here’s how it played out
.

F
OUND OUT

The Mad Bomber’s response to his case being made public: he took his terror a step further. The bombs kept coming and the letters got more brazen. “F. P.” even called Brussel on the telephone and told him to lay off or he would “be sorry.” Brussel had him exactly where he wanted him.

The final clue came when police received a letter revealing the date that began the Mad Bomber’s misery: September 5, 1931—almost 10 years before the first bomb was found. Brussel immediately ordered a search of Con Ed’s personnel files from that era. An office assistant named Alice Kelly found a neatly written letter from a former employee named George Metesky who had promised that Con Edison would pay for their “DASTARDLY DEEDS.”

The police traced Metesky to what neighborhood children called the “crazy house” on Fourth Street in Waterbury, Connecticut, just beyond Westchester County, New York. When they arrived, George Metesky was wearing...pajamas. He greeted them warmly and freely admitted to being the Mad Bomber. He even showed them his bomb-making workshop in the garage.

Bruce Springsteen got busted trying to climb over the gates of Graceland in 1976
.

They told him to get dressed for his trip to the station. He returned wearing...a double-breasted suit, buttoned.

DEDUCTIVE REASONING

So how was Dr. Brussel able to provide such an accurate description?

• It was pretty evident that the Mad Bomber was a man. In those days, very few women would have had the knowledge necessary to make bombs. Bomb-making is, moreover, a classic behavior of paranoid males.

• Because 85% of known paranoids had stocky, muscular builds, Brussel added it to the profile. Metesky had a stocky, muscular build.

• Male paranoiacs have difficulty relating to other people, especially women, and usually live with an older, matriarchal-type woman who will “mother” them. Metesky lived with his two older sisters.

• Another clue to Metesky’s sexual inadequacy, Brussel claimed, was his lettering. His script was perfect except for the “W”s—instead of connecting “V”s that would have been consistent with the rest of the letters, Metesky connected two “U”s, which Brussel saw as representing women’s breasts.

• Brussel concluded that Metesky was between 40 and 50 years old because paranoia takes years to develop, and based on when the first bomb was found, Metesky had to have already been well down the road. Brussel was close—Metesky was 54.

• What led Brussel to believe that Metesky did not live in New York City was his use of the term “Con Edison”—New Yorkers call it “Con Ed.”

• Metesky’s language identified him as middle European, too. His use of “dastardly deeds,” as well as some other phrases, was a sign of someone with Slavic roots. There was a high concentration of Poles in southern Connecticut, and Brussel connected the dots.

• Paranoids believe that the world conspires against them, so Brussel knew that something traumatic must have happened to Metesky. He was right. On September 5, 1931, Metesky was injured in a boiler explosion at a Con Ed plant. He complained of headaches, but doctors could find no sign of injury. After a year of sick pay and medical benefits, Metesky was fired. A failed lawsuit sent him over the edge, and he began plotting his revenge.

Despite what you see in Westerns, the phrase “stick ’em up” wasn’t coined until the 1930s
.

• Brussel also predicted that the Bomber would have a debilitating heart disease. He was close: Metesky suffered from a tubercular lung.

• How did Brussel know what kind of suit Metesky would be wearing when he was arrested? Simple: Paranoids are neat freaks, as was apparent in his letters and bombs. He would wear nothing less than the most impeccable outfit of the day—a double-breasted suit, buttoned.

AFTERMATH

George Metesky proudly explained everything to the police. In all, he had planted more than 30 bombs, but miraculously, no one was killed. Metesky said that that was never his intention. “F. P.”, he explained, stood for “Fair Play.”

On April 18, 1957, George Metesky was found mentally unfit to stand trial and was committed to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In 1973 he was deemed cured and was released. Metesky lived out the remainder of his days in his Waterbury home, where he died in 1994 at the age of 90. Dr. Brussel gained celebrity status for his role in the case; today he’s considered the father of modern psychological profiling in criminal investigations.

TRAGIC LEGACY

Although Metesky’s bombs never killed anybody, it was more because of strange luck than “Fair Play.” (Police called it a “miracle” that his theater bombs—planted inside the seats—never took any lives.) Even worse, Metesky may have helped pave the way for others who were more successful in their terrible exploits. According to investigators, both the “Zodiac Killer,” who killed at least six people—some with bombs—in the San Francisco area in the 1970s, and Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski, who killed three people in the 1980s and 1990s with package bombs, were inspired by George Metesky, New York City’s Mad Bomber.

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“One thing I can’t understand is why the newspapers labeled me the Mad Bomber. That was unkind.”

—
George Metesky

In the early 1800s, the Texas Rangers were paid $1.25 per day for their services
.

On
page 207
, we told you about Britain’s Great Train Robbery of 1963, one of the largest hauls ever taken from a railroad—but it certainly wasn’t the only one. Here are five more notable train hiests...some greater than others
.

1. THERE’S GOLD IN THAT THAR TRAIN!

When you think of train robberies, you probably think of the Old West. But the most lucrative train robbery of the 19th century took place in England, and it didn’t involve horses or blazing six-guns. Instead, the robbery was the culmination of great planning and execution. Edward Agar and William Pierce masterminded the plot, recruiting a couple of railroad employees and others as needed. They knew that, on May 15, 1855, three boxes of gold would be traveling by train across England. For the robbery, they boarded the train and, with keys made from wax impressions, were able to open the railroad safes, remove 200 pounds of gold from sealed boxes, fill the boxes with lead shot as a decoy and seal them up again, and then saunter off the train at the Dover station, making their escape. For a year they remained uncaught and may have gotten away with the crime, except for one problem: Agar had been arrested for writing bad checks and sentenced to serve time in an Australian penal colony. He instructed Pierce to pay the mother of his child £7,000 (almost $750,000 in today’s dollars); when she didn’t get the money, the woman went to the railroad managers and told them what she knew about the robbery. Agar corroborated her story and turned state’s evidence, resulting in long sentences for his co-conspirators. Authorities were able to recover only £2,000 worth of gold. The rest is still missing.

2. JESSE JAMES: THE FIRST ROBBERY

As Confederate guerrillas, brothers Frank and Jesse James engaged in looting, killing Union soldiers and civilians, and destroying property during the Civil War. After the war ended, they formed a gang and turned to bank robbery, sometimes killing bystanders in the process. (In letters sent to sympathetic newspaper editors, they claimed that they were avenging the South’s defeat.) In 1873 the gang turned to robbing trains, and their first heist took place near Adair, Iowa. Wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes, they derailed a train, which killed the engineer, and then they terrorized
the dazed and wounded passengers into giving up their valuables. Between that and the train’s safe, the gang netted $2,337, which was more than enough to inspire them to try again. Despite cultivating an image as modern-day Robin Hoods, the James brothers kept most of their ill-gotten gains for themselves.

According to a study by Visa, most identity thefts are perpetrated by someone the victim knows
.

3. WANT A LITTLE MONEY WITH YOUR DYNAMITE?

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have been a part of American folklore for more than a century. The first movie to tell of their exploits was released in 1903, but it was the 1969 movie starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman that immortalized the pair. The real Butch (Robert Leroy Parker) and Sundance (Harry Longabaugh) headed a gang called the Wild Bunch, who robbed banks and trains mostly in Wyoming. They started out in 1896 as small-time hoods, often wearing cloth napkins pilfered from local restaurants. When they discovered the magic of dynamite, they began to use it with increasing regularity to open safes, create shock and awe among train crews, derail trains, and destroy cars and engines. On June 2, 1899, they got a little too explosion-happy after commandeering a Union Pacific train. When mail clerks refused to open the door, the gang blew it open, leaving the clerks too deafened and dazed to remember the combination to the train’s safe. So the impatient gang decided to blow open the safe. Unfortunately, they also blew up the walls and ceiling of the train car, launching $20,000 skyward and damaging many of the remaining bills in the $30,000 that they escaped with.

4. AN ACTUAL
TRAIN
ROBBERY

On April 12, 1862, conductor William Fuller and his crew had just sat down for breakfast at a stop called Big Shanty outside Atlanta, Georgia, when he saw his train rolling out of the station. Fuller couldn’t send a telegram ahead to stop the train—the little outpost didn’t have a telegraph station. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The thieves were 22 Union army spies led by James Andrews, a Kentucky smuggler who also did espionage work for the North. The men, posing as passengers, had boarded the train in small groups. Their mission was to cut telegraph wires, dynamite bridges, and sabotage tracks to keep the Confederate army from sending reinforcements and supplies as the Union army marched toward Chattanooga, Tennessee.

For more than 80 miles, Andrews and his men did what they could to
throw off the chase, but Fuller and his crew switched trains to get around obstacles and followed on foot. Near the end, they barreled along the tracks full speed in a train going in reverse. Andrews and his men ran out of fuel a few miles from Chattanooga, and they scattered into the woods, hoping for escape. Eventually, they were all caught (as were two conspirators who missed the train because they’d overslept). Andrews and seven others were hanged and buried in an unmarked grave, six were traded to the North as prisoners of war, and eight escaped from their prison camp to safety. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton awarded Medals of Honor to six of Andrews’s men—some of the first such medals ever given out in U.S. history.

Folsom was the first prison in the world to have electric power
.

5. BEZDANY RAID

“I haven’t got money and I must have it for the ends I pursue.” So wrote Józef Piłsudski in a letter to a friend on September 26, 1908...right before his team of Polish revolutionaries embarked on a daring train robbery. Their target? A mail train carrying tax money from Warsaw to St. Petersburg, Russia. (Russia, Prussia, and Austria had conquered and divided up Poland in the late 1700s, and Piłsudski was leading a charge to free his people.) That evening, the 16 men and four women boarded the train in two waves. Then at the tiny station in Bezdany, Lithuania, they sprang into action—one group captured the station and cut telecommunications wires; the other assaulted the train with guns and bombs. Using dynamite, they ripped open the fortified mail car and stuffed the money into cloth bags. Then they escaped in different directions and all got away. The haul was a spectacular 200,812 rubles, more than $4 million in today’s dollars—a fortune in impoverished Eastern Europe. It kept Piłsudski’s paramilitary organization in good stead for many years. In 1918 Poland became one country again, and Piłsudski was its first leader.