The World's Most Evil Gangs

by Nigel Blundell

  Unaware of this, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Kasabian and Watson entered the grounds of 10050 Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon, shortly before dawn on 9 August, to begin a horrific slaughter. Sharon Tate and a group of friends were partying at the mansion when the self-styled ‘Angels of Death’ stealthily made their way towards the house. Linda Kasabian acted as lookout while the other three, wielding knives and uttering frenzied war cries, set upon the partygoers. Within a couple of hours, they had completed their grisly task and, in an explosion of mind-numbing violence, five innocent people had been butchered.

  No one will ever know the extent of the terror and suffering the victims endured before the gang smeared the mansion walls with bizarre messages in the victims’ blood. The scene police later encountered showed evidence of unbelievable brutality. The body of Steven Parent, the 18-year-old guest of the house’s caretaker, was discovered slumped in his car in the driveway. Parent had encountered the raiders as he drove from the house. They had flagged him down and then shot him four times.

  Their next find was the body of Abigail Folger, heiress to a coffee fortune, lying on the lawn. She had been cut to pieces as she tried to flee. Inside the house – which had the word ‘Pigs’ scrawled in blood on the door – they found the body of Hollywood hair stylist Jay Sebring. He had been stabbed, and then finished off with a gunshot. Polish film director Voytek Frykowski had been battered with a club by Watson, while repeating the mantra: ‘I am the Devil come to do the Devil’s work’. Frykowski had then been finished off by Atkins, who stabbed him six times with a knife.

  The most sickening sight was the pathetic body of Sharon Tate. The 26-year-old actress had begged to be spared for the sake of the child she was carrying, due in just a month’s time. Her pleas for mercy had been greeted with derision and she suffered 16 stab wounds, killing both her and her unborn baby boy. A nylon rope was knotted around her neck and slung over a ceiling beam and the other end tied around the hooded head of Sebring.

  Despite the gory proof that there was no limit to the powers he wielded over his followers, Manson was displeased with the night’s events at the Tate residence. He felt he had not achieved his aim to spark a race war. There was more bloody work to be done, and this time he wanted to be in on the action himself.

  The night after the slaughter, the four Tate murderers were again summoned, along with Steve Grogan and Leslie Van Houten, a former college queen and youngest member of the cult. Linda Kasabian was dispatched to murder an actor friend of hers – a plan that she thwarted by knocking on the wrong door. The others cruised the better neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in search of potential victims before settling on the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, who owned a small chain of supermarkets. Manson burst into the couple’s Waverly Drive mansion, tied them up and left them to the mercy of three of his cult slaves: Watson, Krenwinkel and Van Houten.

  A sword, knives and forks were used in the barbaric slaying. Police found a fork protruding from Leno LaBianca’s body, with the word ‘War’ carved into his stomach. He had been stabbed 26 times and symbolically hanged, with a bloodstained pillowcase used as a hood. A cord around his throat was attached to a heavy lamp and his hands were tied behind his back with a leather thong. Rosemary’s nightdress had been pushed over her head and her back and buttocks were covered in stab wounds. She too was hooded by a pillowcase and had been hanged by a wire attached to a lamp. The word ‘war’ had been cut into her abdomen. On the walls, written in blood, were the words ‘Death to the Pigs’ and ‘Rise’. The killers had misspelt ‘Healter Skelter’ on the fridge door.

  Los Angeles police did not initially connect the two raids, and it was only the arrest of Susan Atkins in another investigation that brought the cult members to justice. She was picked up in connection with the slaying of musician and drug dealer Gary Hinman at his Topanga Canyon home ten days before the mass murders. He had been tortured to death and his blood used to scrawl the words ‘Political Piggy’ on a wall. Police were also investigating the disappearance of another man, Donald ‘Shorty’ Shea, a part-time movie stuntman who had mysteriously vanished from Spahn Ranch.

  In custody, Susan Atkins was still ‘high’ on the experience of the headline-making, but still unaccounted for, butchery on Cielo Drive. She bragged about her role, sickening cellmates with her claims of drinking Sharon Tate’s blood. ‘I was there,’ she boasted. ‘We did it! It felt so good the first time I stabbed her. When she screamed at me, it did something to me, sent a rush through me, and I stabbed her again. I just kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming. It was like a sexual release, especially when you see the blood. It’s better than a climax.’

  In December 1969, the ‘family’ were rounded up and the incredible story of messianic Manson and his so-called ‘witchlets’ was flashed around the world. Charles Manson, the short, scraggy ex-con who had spent more than half his life behind bars, was charged with nine murders: the Tate and LaBianca massacres and two other slayings. But he was suspected of orchestrating as many as 25 other killings from his desert ranch. Suddenly Manson became the most talked-about criminal in the annals of Californian law enforcement.

  At his sensational trial, Manson cut a terrifying figure as he spoke of his weird band of disciples. He said: ‘These children who come at you with knives, they are your children. I didn’t teach them. You did. I just tried to help them stand up. You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are, and then you say how bad and even killers your children are. You made your children what they are. I am only what lives inside each and every one of you.’

  On 29 March 1971, guilty verdicts were returned on all counts against the Manson gang. Looking at the jury who had convicted her, Susan Atkins warned them to lock their doors and to watch their children. The hearing had taken 38 weeks and was then the longest criminal trial in American history. It cost $1.25 million and 31,176 pages of transcript were taken. Sentencing them, Judge Charles Older said: ‘It is my considered judgment that not only is the death penalty appropriate but it is almost compelled by the circumstances.’ The sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 when California’s death penalty was banned by the courts as being ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.

  Leslie Van Houten succeeded in gaining two retrials because her lawyer, Robert Hughes, had disappeared during her initial trial. His remains were later found in the mountains, and members of the Manson cult were suspected of his murder. Van Houten failed to win her freedom and was again sentenced to life imprisonment.

  The years that rolled by following the court cases failed to dull public fascination with the abhorrent slayings, particularly the sadistic butchery of pregnant Sharon Tate. It became clear that Manson’s gang had been ordered to kill completely different victims and that Sharon and her friends had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact that record company boss Terry Melcher had once sneered at Manson’s attempts to get a recording contract with him appeared to have sealed the fate of a group of totally unconnected people. There was also media speculation that the murdered Voytek Frykowski and Jay Sebring were known drug dealers and that Manson had wanted to take over their business.

  The unanswered question remained, however, as to how one deranged man could mesmerise seemingly ‘normal’ young people to the extent that they could enact mindless massacres. Linda Kasabian, who, fearing for her own and her daughter’s lives, escaped Manson’s clutches and testified against him in court, winning herself immunity from prosecutors, once said: ‘I can never accept that I was not punished for my part in this tragedy.’ And in an attempt to explain how a mother could temporarily turn murderess, she recalled the night she was acting as lookout while her friends brutally murdered Sharon Tate and four others. ‘I felt like I was dead,’ she said. ‘There was no emotion, no feeling. It just didn’t register.’

  The horrific story of the Manson gang’s vile crime has resurfaced at regular intervals. In 1994 a ‘Free Susan Atkins Campaign’ was launched, her supporters
proclaiming that the one-time church choir singer was now rehabilitated. However, after hearing evidence from Sharon Tate’s sister, Patti, her appeal was refused and Atkins died of cancer behind bars in 2009. Patti, who was only 11 years old when Sharon was murdered, said: ‘Every year up until her death, my mother would attend parole hearings of the murderers and she had to come face to face with them. That used to make her mad because one of these people knew Sharon and they were totally indifferent to what they had done. They just destroyed their blood-soaked clothes, washed their hands with a neighbour’s watering can and walked down the street to kill more people.’

  One Manson ‘family’ member was released, however. Steve Grogan had been in prison since being convicted with Manson and another follower, Bruce Davis, of the murders of musician Gary Hinman and of Donald Shea around the time of the Tate massacre. Grogan was freed in 1985 after leading police to Shea’s body. Bruce Davis was still fighting for his release in 2013 after spending 40 years behind bars protesting that he had only been a bystander at the two slayings. When Manson prosecutor Stephen Kay heard of the parole application, he warned of the dangers of allowing a member of the cult back on the streets, saying: ‘Would you want to wake up and find Bruce Davis next door? I think not.’

  There is, of course, no chance of Manson ever being released. The crazed killer admits he would strike again if he was ever given his freedom. He ranted: ‘I was pretty upset for a long time. I was really mad at a lot of people. I’m still willing to get out and kill a whole bunch of people. That’s one reason I’m not too fast on getting out. Because if I got out, I’d feel obliged to get even.’

  In 1987 Manson was controversially allowed to give a television interview from jail. Dressed in prison uniform of blue smock shirt and trousers, he was then still easily identifiable, his hair and beard still black, wild and long, his ravings disturbing: ‘I can do anything I like to you people because that is what you did to me,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should have killed four or five hundred people that I might have felt better; then I would have felt I had offered society something.’

  In June 2011 prison authorities issued a new photograph of Manson. It could have been the image of any old lag: a 76-year-old grey-haired and bearded grandfather whose greater part of life had been spent in jail. But there was one distinguishing mark on the staring face that recalled the reality of whose cold, eerie eyes were staring out of the picture. The swastika was still clearly seen on his forehead – the chilling reminder of a gang leader whose ‘family’ were responsible for one of America’s most horrific acts of slaughter.

  CHAPTER 25

  SUPER-CROOKS WHO CARVED UP AN ENTIRE COUNTRY

  As Communism came to an end in the Soviet Union, freedom-loving citizens rejoiced – but so too did a sinister breed of super-crooks. And as the old regime dissolved, summit meetings took place across the nation to carve up big business in the newly promised free-market economy. It was then that the Russian Mafiya was born and is now among the world’s largest and most powerful criminal groupings. Never has organised crime become such a pervasive force so swiftly, and seldom has the violence been as extreme as in Russia.

  When the Soviet Union imploded at the end of the 1980s, the resulting vacuum allowed the Mobs to quickly seize immense power. With the old state structure discredited and the government unable to enforce the law, the grasping gangsters grabbed easy pickings from money laundering, racketeering, extortion, arms smuggling, art theft, cyber-crime, human trafficking, prostitution, drug trafficking, arson, fraud, counterfeiting and simple larceny.

  However, the biggest prizes were gained out of those businesses in the muddled process of changing from collectives to private ownership. The Mafiya penetrated almost every sector of the economy, from banking to energy to mining to heavy industry. Their net has now stretched worldwide. Of the estimated 6,000 separate Mafiya groups, more than 200 are said to have a global reach, having expanded to 50 countries and with a membership of up to 300,000. Combined they are labelled Russkaya Mafiya but singularly they are known as ‘Bratva’ (brotherhood), ‘Bragada’ (brigade) or ‘Vorovskoy mir’ (world of thieves).

  Despite the Mafiya’s massive growth, the Russian authorities appear to be in denial. In December 2009 the head of the Russian National Central Bureau of Interpol, Timur Lakhonin, asserted: ‘Certainly, there is crime involving our former compatriots abroad – but there is no data suggesting that an organised structure of criminal groups comprising former Russians exists abroad.’ A more realistic appraisal was given in response by prominent French criminologist Alain Bauer, who described the Mafiya as ‘one of the best structured criminal organisations in Europe, with a quasi-military operation’.

  So how did they become so powerful? The seeds of the present-day Russian Mafiya were sown in the gulags – the remote, brutal prison camps where dictator Joseph Stalin, attempting to wipe out the so-called ‘world of thieves’, had deported those he had not executed. They became a prison elite and, when after Stalin’s death 8 million inmates were released from the gulags, they returned to the cities of Soviet state as the toughest warlords in the underworld.

  Criminal activity flourished, a black market boomed and corruption began to spread throughout the government. When in the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev loosened restrictions on private business, the Soviet Union was already beginning to collapse. More gangs emerged, exploiting the unstable governments of the former Republics, and at its highest point even controlling as much as two-thirds of the Russian economy.

  One of the West’s leading experts on the Mafiya is Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University, who specialises in Russian criminal organisations. In his books on the subject, Dr Galeotti lists five types of Mafiya grouping. At the lower end of the chain are gangsters dealing in traditional criminal enterprises such as prostitution, protection and robbery. The second category is that of specialists like money-launderers. Higher up the ladder are the white-collar criminals, whom the Professor describes as pseudo-businessmen, often forming conglomerates controlling an array of seemingly legitimate businesses. At the top of the Russkaya Mafiya hierarchy are the deal-makers and commissioners of crime, the equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia’s ‘Cupola’ or the US Mafia’s ‘Commission’.

  Operating in parallel with this hierarchical structure are the corrupt sections of the police and the military. The latter sell high-quality protection and weapons. It has been alleged that members of the army’s 16th Spestnaz Brigade have moonlighted as hitmen for the Mafiya. An entire working submarine was once sold to a Colombian drugs cartel. Corruption within the police is also endemic. In 1994 about 500 rogue police officers were arrested on corruption charges when it was discovered that Moscow’s Tenth District precinct were operating a vice ring, using police cars to take prostitutes to clients who rang the police station with their orders!

  Nationally, the largest gang in Russia is reckoned to be the Solntsevskaya, named after the Moscow suburb of Solntsevo. With about 5,000 members, it specialises in drugs, gun running and extortion. An American hotelier, Paul Tatum, complained to police in 1995 that Solntsevskaya heavies had threatened his life. He was shot dead the following year. The Solntsevskaya has overtaken the country’s former major player, the Dolgoprudnenskaya, which rose to prominence in Moscow’s Dolgoprudny suburb in the late eighties and quickly spread nationwide. Its main field of operations is prostitution and sleazy clubland. Smaller players are the Orekhovskaya gang, founded by former KGB agents, and Moscow’s Ostankino and Lubertsy clans. St Petersburg is dominated by the Tambov Syndicate.

  Oddly, in the same way that the US Mafia is dominated by Sicilians and Neapolitans, so the Russian Mafiya has Chechens and Georgians playing a disproportionately large role. The biggest Chechen crime gang is the Obshina, whose riches have come from kidnapping and bank robbery but who have also elbowed their way into the lucrative East European cigarette smuggling racket. Most of these gangs’ members identify themselves by a complex system of tattoos that can
give detailed information about the wearer and their gang allegiances.

  Thanks to these thuggish foot soldiers, extortion has become a way of life in Russia. Few victims dare speak out but one Canadian entrepreneur, Doug Steele, told journalists how owning a Moscow nightclub had cost him $1 million in pay-offs not only to Mafyia bullies but to police and city officials. He spoke out after foiling a kidnap attempt, saying: ‘You have to grease the palm or you won’t be in business. If it was not for the Mafyia there would not be an economy. They are a major driving force behind what goes on here.’ The Russian government appears to agree. In a leaked report, the security services estimated that criminal organisations control, either directly or indirectly, 60 per cent of state companies, 40 per cent of private business and 80 per cent of banks. Which might explain why, in a five-year period, almost 100 Russian bankers were murdered.

  A former manager of Moscow’s Prombank revealed how blatantly the local crime lords try to extort money from the banking system. He said: ‘They no longer come and ask for fixed sums of money. They demand something that allows them to gain control of your entire business. I told them I would not cooperate.’ The Mafyia do not normally take ‘no’ for an answer; the manager subsequently survived a grenade attack.

  Any institution with access to large amounts of money can expect a visit from the Mafiya. Even the Afghan Veterans’ Association, which has a welfare role similar to the British Legion, has been used to launder dirty money. Its head was murdered in 1994. After it split into two groups, the chief of one branch survived an assassination attempt the following year. In 1996 the leader of the other faction, his wife and 11 others were killed when a bomb exploded in a cemetery during a funeral.