Moriarty The Life and Times of a Criminal Genius

by Michael Charton

  Still I always wanted to do something more intellectual on top of my street schemes. I also wanted to have various people dependent on me especially with Holmes closing in. colin

  • Chapter Fourteen

  • Money Earning Blackmailing Schemes

  I started with Oscar Wilde. He was an easy mark, because of his disgusting lifestyle and friends. I paid him a little visit.

  Wilde seemed to be genuinely repelled at my appearance. "My, you are Darwin's missing link," he purred, more like a woman than a real man. "What could I possibly want with such an ugly, hunched creature such as you?"

  "Wilde, you will write treatises on Irish suffering and independence or I shall expose your disgusting lifestyle and worse shall befall you! I shall bring the wrath of God down upon you!"

  "Oh sir, I don't know who you are, but I am not afraid. I have been threatened by the best. Do your worst, peasant! Now leave sir, your ugly body repels me."

  "I shall make my exit Wilde, but you have not heard the last of me!" I stormed out. I was so angry I had to control myself. I wanted to kill him right then and there but I had to try other things to "deal" with him.

  Two weeks later, a Saturday night, I broke up one of Wildes "soirees."

  All sorts of decadent disgusting young men were in attendance. If Wilde thought I was ugly and a missing link, I had one hundred of my brawniest ugliest men converge on the fancy house in Bloomsbury where the party was held. I had them come in small groups so as to not arouse suspicion of one hundred rough-looking men marching down the street together. All I had to tell these good Catholic men were the disgusting practices at these parties.

  My men enjoyed breaking up Wilde's little orgy. They delivered a beating to the boys there. I call them boys. I really hesitate to call them men. My men enjoyed slugging and beating them.

  I had several of my lads come and drag Wilde and some of his boys off to one of my East End warehouses for a little more evening's' entertainment. They were thrown into cabs working for me and taken away across London in the dead of night.

  I read about eunuchs in China. I had two of the boys castrated in front of Wilde. Maybe now they can join a boys choir. Another "beautiful" boy was uglier than Wilde thought I was by the time my men finished their labors on his face.

  "Do you see, Wilde, I can make men ugly," I smiled. I couldn't keep an arrogant smile from my face.

  Wilde sobbed like a baby. I would have been punished as a child for sobbing like that. My wife and young children did not sob like that. Wilde's weak crying made me realize how much my wife was like my mother and how tough both were. They were stronger than this supposed man. Bullying the quivering disgusting creature in front of me was actually fun. "Let's go in the office and have a frank discussion," I leered.

  Wilde followed me, moping like a wounded puppy. It turns out he hated Ireland because of spurned loves, and he saw it as nowhere near as civilized as London. I realized I could not depend on Wilde to write what I wanted. I could make him support Ireland and my cause by making him pay. The paying and my smiling about that would not stop.

  I flung him into a broken old chair, still leering. I really was enjoying this too much.

  "What do you want?" Wilde sobbed.

  "You will pay me regularly. Anyone attending one of your filthy parties will pay my organization. Is that clearly understood?"

  "Yes," Wilde said between choked sobs.

  I now had hundreds paying me blackmail. It grew into a major new racket. Some money went into my pocket and that of people working for me, but many thousands of pounds went to support the Irish people. These human animals could hardly go to the police. What they were doing was against the law. I had them!

  Scum such as Wilde were a good permanent source of income, but it was also time to get hold of the politicians of this benighted land.

  I'll start with Disraeli. He was easy. He entered Parliament because he was deeply in debt and Parliamentarians could not be arrested and thrown in prison. He went further in debt paying me off, rather than sponsoring Irish bills which would have ruined his Tory career.

  Prime Minister Gladstone, the Liberal leader supported Irish Home Rule. He was known for taking London prostitutes home. I heard he was trying to get them to quit the racket. Enough prostitutes were in my organization to keep tabs on him. I also made it clear it could be said he was doing more than converting them. I kept files on other Members of Parliament, even the Irish ones.

  Parnell was also on my list because of his shameful relationship with Katherine O'Shea.

  My blackmail division had grown so drastically I had to hire a clerk to organize my blackmail files. I took a page out of Dr. Watson's writings about Holmes' filing system. My clerk, a clever woman named Donna Hanrahan organized the files with cross references. For example, they were filed depending on types of person: politicians in one area, Wilde and his vile friends in another. I had on the cards that they were, what I had on them, and amounts to pay. Therefore each person had several cards depending on how I wanted them looked up. Donna did a wonderful job keeping this up. She also had careful penmanship, which was important. Donna was the daughter of famine survivors and I was able to play on her hatred of what happened to her family. She was fortunate enough to get some education and proved to be very talented at pulling various strands together to keep things organized. I was also reaching out to other criminal organizations.

  • Chapter Fifteen

  • Sunny Italy and Allies There

  I decided to travel to the Holy Land. I wanted to see Jerusalem as a good Catholic. One day I would bring my beloved family. I went to Rome. My influence with the church in New Mexico got me an audience with Pope Pius XI. I first met the Pope on my return to London from New Mexico. The Pope was saddened at the loss of the Papal States in Central Italy to that meddler from Nice, Giuseppe Garibaldi.

  I paid hotel bellmen in Napoli and Palermo to introduce me to the Mafia and Camorra. When I returned to Italy to call on the Pope again, I had another problem. It was becoming too obvious to have Irish killers committing murders in London. I proposed an idea with monetary backing to these very suspicious Italian crime groups. My idea was to have Irish killers in Italy and Italian killers in London. The assassinations would be carried out, and the killers would flee, leaving the local police baffled, (though with the London Metropolitan I daresay that was not difficult). I first tried this successfully with the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania, only there the killers were coming from another county, not hundreds of miles away. Iwon over the Mafiosi near Palermo by setting up businesses to buy lemons and oranges from Sicily and transport them to London.

  Because Camorra members had been employed as policemen and soldiers when the Bourbon Dynasty ran Southern Italy, I found I was able to hire an instant group of trained fighters. The new unified Italian government was suppressing them. I now had my crew of Southern Italian killers.

  The Irish killers I sent to Italy were men I made sure could look, sound, and act like English gentlemen. They would be seen as just more wealthy tourists taking the Grand Tour. The difference was that I would have one of my ships bring the man to Italy; he would commit the deed and leave immediately. The Italians would be taken in and out of London the same way. I provided safe houses for them in the East End, where they hid, did what they had to do, and leave to go back to Italy in the middle of the night. By the time the police began investigating, the killer was long gone. Local suspects would be rounded up, to no avail.

  My Italian contact, a former Bourbon soldier named Ruggiero, carefully chose the men for me. I was going to need them, for the fates were leading me toward the biggest game of all. Holmes!

  You may ask, why not just assassinate British political figures all the way up the ladder to Queen Victoria? Holmes represents the British establishment and is the only one who can best me, that is why!

  I have one advantage over Holmes that I can think of immediately. I let few know me. Holmes is known to the entir
e British public thanks to Dr. Watson, and he is considered a national British Hero. Endgame in this chess match will come, though. Please allow me to show you an example from the Strand where Watson's writings are posted.

  "Really, Holmes. Does this Moriarty really exist? Holmes I fear your narcotic forays are having more serious effects on you than I realized."

  "Watson, he most certainly does exist! He is the Napoleon of Crime -- all that is evil in London."

  "Then why have the police not heard of him?

  "Watson, you know of our dealings with the police?"

  There you have it. I once had the advantage of being in the shadows. I am in the shadows no longer. I am past intellectual games with Holmes. Why not blackmail? I thought. As you have seen, I have blackmailed hundreds. I had one of my Irish newspapers publish the following article: Sherlock Holmes an Enemy of the Irish:

  Who is this Sherlock Holmes? A genius to be respected for his intellect, but still another member of the hated British establishment. That immediately makes him an enemy of all right thinking Irish men and women. We need not feel threatened. His mind is addled by drugs. The great British public" should know that their hero is a drug addict. He is a regular denizen of the Chinese opium dens in Limehouse. I can publish the list, this is no idle threat.

  I hoped to bring the curtain down on Mr. Sherlock Holmes with no violence, but that was not to be. We are just stupid micks to them, so no one believed us. The British populace just saw the cartoons of the American cartoonist Thomas Nast of the Ugly Leprechaun. I had always wanted to pay that bastard a visit in his Morristown, New Jersey, home. He may get his due soon.

  Since blackmail did not work on Holmes, I was going to have to raise the temperature on the boiling pot of water.

  I was going to pay a visit to Holmes' corpulent, non-mobile brother, Mycroft.

  • Chapter Sixteen

  • My visit to the Diogenes Club

  Sherlock Holmes' fat disgusting brother Mycroft was a member of the Diogenes Club. This was a group of men who sat and read all day. Club rules forbade speaking in the drawing rooms.

  I knew I wasn't bloody well welcome there. I used a ruse to get Mycroft to see me by sending a card saying Holmes was in danger.

  The unpleasant porter guided me into a room where conversation was allowed. Mycroft was waiting for me there. His mouth, surrounded by his fat, bulbous cheeks was barely visible. His piggish eyes were deep in his fat, overfed face. The Irish people starved, and you had fat gluttonous swine such as this. Oh, to prepare him for the slaughter. Oh, if only he were really a pig and not a human being, since cannibalism is a major sin. It was people like him who allowed Ireland to starve forty years earlier. If I didn't have a use for him, I would kill him. Stabbing him through his blubbery belly would be hard work for any man.

  We glared at each other at first. Finally, I saw his lips move and push up his cheeks. He blurted out, "Moriarty, criminal and traitor." Therefore, he had Holmes' power and figured out who I was.

  I took a page from my father's book in quoting William Wallace. "I cannot be a traitor. I am occupied by your foreign empire. I never swore allegiance willingly to you."

  Mycroft rose as much as he could, like a bear trying to intimidate me. "How dare you sir," he exploded. "You are a British subject living quite well by choice in the greatest city mankind ever had! How dare you sir!"

  "No!" I barked. "How dare you occupy me? I live here as a termite eating away at this rotten city you call great. I look forward to bringing this rotten empire down, and then I will have eaten my fill of it."

  "Does this mean the Punch and Judy cartoons are true and the Irish want to be peasants living in hovels on the moors?" Mycroft sneered.

  At that moment, I would have enjoyed killing Mycroft then and there in the club like something out of an opera. My God, would I like to be Don Jose killing Carmen in front of the bullring. I wanted to try to work on Mycroft one last time.

  "Mycroft I don't want any harm to come to your brother. I leave that part up to you."

  "What do you want, Moriarty? My God, if I had known it was you coming to see me, the police would have been waiting to arrest you."

  "I took that into account. If I do not return to my headquarters by a certain time, my men are to kill you, your brother, and Dr. Watson. Now that you know who I am you are the only men in the world capable of stopping me and for that coup, I tip my hat to you, Mycroft. I am willing to have us come to an understanding. Mycroft, I expect you in your role in Her Majesty's Government to provide me with secrets I will request..."

  I did not get to finish the sentence. Mycroft reached across and punched me in the face. I fell over the chair, my jacket creased, my pants splitting, and I tasted blood in my mouth. By this time, Mycroft had summoned porters.

  "Gentlemen, take this person and throw him into a cab." The porters laughed at my disheveled state. One took each arm and guided me to a cab in the street laughing all the way. They opened the door and flung me in calling to the cabbie, "Take this person where he wants to go." They threw him some money, and the cab took off at a high rate of speed. I was just getting up from the floor of the cab. "Where to, sir?"

  "Whitechapel Road." When we arrived at the Tower of London, he stopped and threw me out. Some wardens of the Tower were watching and laughing.

  "I ain't goin no furvver," the cabbie said. "I ain't takin' you to Whitechapel." I got up and tried to pull him off the cab. The Wardens of the Tower had fun pulling me off the cab and beating me as it sped away.

  "Oh, come now sir," one of them laughed. "You assaulted him, and we was protectin' im. You can hardly go to the police about this. You've been a very naughty boy, guvnor." After beating me, they kicked me in my arse and propelled me on my way. I walked into Whitechapel, injured and humiliated. It is I who do the humiliating of my enemies not the other way around. This outrage must be repayed tenfold!

  Mycroft will die, of that I have no doubt. By my order, but not by my hand. I am too exposed and in too much danger to do it myself. I have been seen too many times now. Now is the time to import a killer from Italy.

  My Napolitano contact Ruggiero got me a sniper and a trained assassin named Gino Ercolano to do the killing. He was a short slim, firm man who was taken from Napoli to the East End docks on one of my ships. He carried forged papers saying he was connected to the Italian Embassy in London. He was introduced to me. He spoke little, mostly with nods and grunts. I was so sure the job on Mycroft would be done right. What I should have counted on, but did not in my over eagerness to have Mycroft out of the way, was that Mycroft was being shadowed, not just by the police, but also by the Baker Street Irregulars. Gino followed Mycroft across the street from the Diogenes Club to his rooms in Pall Mall. Gino's plan was to push his way into the rooms behind Mycroft and stab him with the stiletto he carried. It was not to be. Gino got right behind Mycroft as planned, but then ten Irregulars came out of the foggy night like hateful apparitions. One was Wiggins, who whistled. Gino was cornered, fending them off with his stiletto, when ten Peelers materialized. I was watching from a distance down the street and knew I had to leave. Gino was captured, and I learned the Italian Embassy provided a translator. Gino kept silent and was told by the Embassy they would do nothing for him. Gino would be charged with attempted murder. I have blown my hand with Mycroft. It is time to confront Holmes.

  • Chapter Seventeen

  • My Philosophies in Full

  I wanted to use this to leave the world my legacy and what my thoughts have been. I have mentioned much of this before, but now I wanted to have my thoughts in one place.

  Would I have done any of this again? I am not sure. Having my father hanged, living through the Famine, I am not sure I can say how my life would have been different. I had too many traumatic situations that set me on a certain course.

  I would be lying if I told people there was not a selfish element in me. Everything I do for Irish people I am also doing for me and mine. There is
no denying that. I have never been able to shake the fear of being poor again. I do have to confess I enjoy using my intelligence for scheming. I have to smile internally when something I do works rather well. I admit I am not modest. I can only brag in these papers though. I cannot do what Dr. Watson does for Sherlock Holmes. You can read the latest installment all the time. Alas, I do not have that luxury. I can only be a hero to the few who know me and to the general public when Ireland has improved.

  I must admit, though, committing the acts in these pages became easier over the years. As I have already written, fate made the shotgun go off that killed McGrath. I felt nothing at first, then a sense of satisfaction. The more I killed, the easier it became. I will not lose sleep over a traitor or a member of the British establishment. I will kill them like swatting a fly. I will not even mention those in the confessional. I do not consider killing such enemies a sin.

  I am proud of the people who have worked with me. Some have disappointed me. It is not wise to do so.

  Ireland has a great history. As my mother always told me. my ancestors were great leaders of the Irish people and that I must claim my place in that hallowed pantheon. We are a warrior people. We have fought desperately and with no quarter against those from across the Irish Sea for these many centuries. They may think us inferior, but we will get the best of them. Ireland will be great again and next time forever!

  I have a vision for Ireland free from British oppression. An agricultural nation where her best and brightest are also taken care of. A literate nation. Literate in English out of necessity, but developing Gaelic as a living language. Celts once inhabited most of Europe. Time for a Celtic Renaissance!

  What about the Protestants in Ireland? That is simple. They must become Catholic or leave. Ireland must be a Catholic nation. There is no other way.