In other towns crimp gangs only shanghaied sailors as the need arose. If a ship pulled into port and the captain let it be known that he needed seven men to fill out his crew, the crimp gangs went out and kidnapped seven men. But Portland’s crimp gangs outfitted the Shanghai Tunnels with makeshift prison cells, which allowed the gangs to kidnap people, then hold them captive underground for weeks at a time. Then, when a ship needing men sailed into port, the crimp gangs were ready. They slipped drugs into their victims’ food and dragged them through the tunnels to the waiting ship. By the time the drugs wore off, the victims were out to sea with no hope of escape. They had only two choices: work or get thrown overboard.
Some captains paid their shanghaied sailors nothing; others paid a nominal wage but then charged the victims for their food and necessities and even deducted the crimp gang’s kidnapping fee from their pay. Either way the result was the same: After everything was totaled up, the sailors were essentially working for free.
NOBODY’S PERFECT
Crimp gangs and sea captains weren’t the only ones who benefited from the shanghai system; that was why it lasted as long as it did. Kidnapping waterfront riffraff and sending them off to sea lowered the crime rate (excluding kidnapping, of course). If you had lent someone money and they refused to pay it back, you could arrange to have them shanghaied. Likewise, if you owed someone money and didn’t want to pay it back, you could have the lender shanghaied, too. Not many people concerned themselves with the plight of shanghaied sailors or even noticed when they disappeared—most were transients with few ties to the community.
San Quentin, Leavenworth, and Sing Sing prisons were all built by inmates.
The crimp gangs protected their interests by being active in the political machines that dominated government in cities such as Portland and San Francisco. In California, two crimps named Joseph “Frenchy” Franklin and George Lewis even managed to get themselves elected to the state legislature, where they succeeded in blocking laws that attempted to outlaw shanghaiing.
PULLING INTO PORT
In the end it wasn’t a legal or moral crusade that ended the cruel shanghai system, it was steam: Steamships didn’t have sails, and could get by with less than half the crew of a sailing ship. By the time Max DeVeer and his friend woke up on their sailing ship as it was headed out of the Golden Gate, steamships were already overtaking sailing ships and the age of shanghaiing was drawing to a close.
* * *
SEEING IS BELIEVING
Even though the age of shanghaiing may be over, Portland’s Shanghai Tunnels are still in existence, and parts of them are even open for public tours. Want to check them out yourself? You can find the information online, or contact the city’s tourist bureau for details. Reservations are required, and it’s a good idea to book well in advance—the tours are popular and frequently sell out. Just make sure you tell your loved ones where you’re going first, because if you don’t come back, the oceans are a mighty big place to search for you.
Largest diamond heist: The 2003 Antwerp Diamond Center job. It netted $100 million.
THE KILLER VS.
THE KING
When you’ve been around as long as Uncle John has, you’ll probably start to assume you’ve heard every story there is about pop music. Wrong! Here’s one that was new to all of us.
OLD FRIENDS
Elvis Presley was the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll”; Jerry Lee Lewis was the first person to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They were both hugely influential in formulating the sound of rock ’n’ roll music—both were raised singing gospel music in the Pentecostal church, and they both got their start at Sam Phillips’s famous Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. Presley and Lewis were good friends early in their careers, and were even known to go on motorcycle rides and double dates together.
During one of Lewis’s recording sessions in late 1956, Presley, who had moved on to record for RCA, stopped by to see his old friends at Sun. Rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins was also hanging around, and a jam session broke out with the three. Sam Phillips quickly called his other big star, Johnny Cash, to join in, and the star-packed session became known as the “Million Dollar Quartet.” As Presley’s and Lewis’s careers took different paths, double dates and motorcycle rides gave way to gold records and international tours. They never again had the same day-to-day friendship they had during the Sun Studio years, but their relationship was still amicable.
“THE KILLER” IS COINED
In 1957, while Presley was selling millions of records and starring in movies, Lewis made the headlines by marrying his 13-year-old third cousin (and the daughter of his bass player), a move that virtually ended his rock ’n’ roll career. In 1973 he rose from the ashes to become a successful country music performer, but bad publicity from his erratic behavior continued to dog him.
During Prohibition, half of all federal prison inmates were in jail for violating liquor laws.
“The Killer” was a nickname that Lewis lived up to—thanks to both his aggressive piano style and a number of highly publicized violent incidents. In 1958 on Alan Freed’s Big Beat Show, a dispute broke out between Lewis and Chuck Berry over who would close the show. When promoters decided that Berry would be the closer, Lewis protested by pouring a Coke bottle full of gasoline on the piano and lighting it ablaze after his finale—“Great Balls of Fire.” In 1976 at his 41st birthday party, he accidentally shot his bass player in the chest, later claiming that he didn’t know the gun was loaded. More tragedy: Lewis’s fourth wife drowned in a swimming pool in 1982, and the following year his fifth wife died shortly after their wedding from a drug overdose. But Lewis’s strangest incident of violence was aimed at his old friend, Elvis Presley.
GUNPLAY AT GRACELAND
At 2:50 a.m. on November 22, 1976, Jerry Lee Lewis unexpectedly pulled up to the front gate of Graceland in a brand-new Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce and asked to see Presley. The King’s cousin, Harold Loyd, was working the guard’s booth and told Lewis that Presley was sleeping. Lewis thanked Loyd and drove away, leaving Loyd puzzled by the event. Later that morning, Lewis was arrested for driving without a license, driving while intoxicated, and reckless driving after rolling his Rolls-Royce while rounding a corner in the Memphis suburb of Collierville. (Drunk and reckless driving must have been popular in the Lewis family—when Lewis was arrested and taken to Hernando Jail, his father Elmo was there on similar charges.)
RETURN ENGAGEMENT
Ten hours later, Lewis was out on bail and at it again. He was drinking at a popular Memphis nightspot called the Vapors when, for reasons that are still disputed between the King’s and the Killer’s camps, he left the bar and decided to make his way back to Graceland. He got there at 2:50 a.m., almost the exact time he’d arrived the night before, but this time he was driving a brand-new Lincoln Continental...and he was in a different mood.
“He was outta his mind, man. He was screamin’, hollerin’, and cussin’,” Loyd recalled. Lewis was angry, drunk, and armed with a Derringer pistol. “Get on the @#$%&* phone!” Lewis yelled at Loyd, waving the pistol. “I know you got an intercom system. Call up there and tell Elvis I wanna visit with him! Who in the hell does he think he is? Tell him the Killer’s here to see him!”
Why was Harry Longabaugh called the “Sundance Kid”? He served time in Sundance, Wyoming.
LITTLE SISTER
Lewis’s sister, Linda Gail, recalled that “Jerry was really havin’ one big party at the time,” that he admitted he’d been “partyin’ and drinkin’,” and that he was out of it. But Gail swears that Lewis just wanted to visit with Presley. Cousin Harold read the situation differently.
He went into the guard booth and called up to the main house. He was told to call the cops, which he did immediately. Then the King himself called down to the guard booth. Loyd remembered the conversation exactly, including how badly Presley would stutter when he was nervous. “Wh-wh-what the hell’s goin’ on down there, Harold?
Wh-wh-what’s that @#$%&* guy want? I-I-I don’t wanna talk to that crazy sonofab#$@%. Hell no, I don’t wanna talk to him. I’ll come down there and kill him! You call the cops, Harold. When they get there, tell ’em to lock his butt up and throw the key away. Okay? Thank you, Harold.”
JAILHOUSE ROCK
When Officer Billy J. Kirkpatrick arrived, he ordered Lewis out of the car, but the Killer wouldn’t comply. “[Kirkpatrick] had to pull him out of the car,” Loyd recalled. “He told him to keep his hands on the steering wheel where he could see ’em. Jerry said he just wanted to see Elvis, but Kirkpatrick told him to shut up. Now Jerry, he had tried to hide his pistol by puttin’ it in between his knee and the door. When Kirkpatrick opened the door, the damn gun fell out onto the floorboard. Kirkpatrick picked up the gun, and it was cocked and loaded!”
Kirkpatrick also found that the front passenger window of Lewis’s car was smashed out and that Lewis had a deep gash on his nose, which he concluded was due to “broken glass resulting from [Lewis] attempting to jettison an empty champagne bottle thru the closed window of his ’76 Lincoln.” Kirkpatrick and four other policemen arrested Lewis and took him to jail, ironically, just as Lewis’s father, Elmo Lewis, was being bailed out. The elder Lewis arrived at Graceland just as the wrecker arrived to tow away Lewis’s Lincoln. “Ha! Ain’t this some crap, man?” Loyd remembered Elmo saying when he arrived on the scene. “I just got word that they’ve taken my son to jail. I just got me outta the Hernando Jail, and Jerry done gone ahead.”
The Latin capere means “one who catches.” That’s where the term “cop” comes from.
SUSPICIOUS MINDS
Word soon got out that “the Killer” was trying to kill “the King,” but Lewis’s sister Linda Gail believes that Presley called Lewis at the Vapors and invited him to come to Graceland, that Harold Loyd never told Presley that Lewis was there, and that Lewis became belligerent because he thought Presley would get mad at him if he didn’t take the invitation seriously. “I believe, really and truly, that the people who were associated with Elvis at that time were trying to manipulate him,” Gail says. “He was supporting all of them financially, and it was in their best interest to keep him isolated. If him and Elvis had started runnin’ the roads together, can you imagine what that would have been like? It probably would have been more than Memphis could handle.”
LAST MAN STANDING
After the incident, the Killer and the King’s friendship was never the same. When Elvis Presley died in 1977, Lewis said, “I’m glad. Just another one outta the way. What the @#%* did Presley ever do except take dope I couldn’t get ahold of?” Then after Johnny Cash died in 2003, the 71-year-old Lewis televised an all-star tribute concert called Last Man Standing, a reference to his being the last surviving member of the “Million Dollar Quartet.”
* * *
SMART CROOKS (for a change)
How do you make sure the police won’t interrupt your burglary? Fix it so they can’t even leave their headquarters. That’s what happened in 2001 in the Dutch town of Stadskanaal. Thieves simply padlocked the front gates of the high fence that surrounds the police compound, then robbed a nearby electronics store. That set off a burglar alarm in the police station, but there was nothing police could do about it—they were all locked in. As the crooks made off with TVs and camcorders, Stadskanaal cops had to sit and wait for reinforcements to arrive from the next town. A police spokesman said, “It’s a pity all our officers were at that moment in the police station. Normally most of them are on patrol.” They’ve since taken precautions to make certain it never happens again.
According to the FBI, 75% of bank robbers use the stolen money to buy drugs.
THE KING SHOOTS
THE PRESIDENT
In the history of the United States, thirteen people have tried to assassinate the president. Here’s the story of the first one.
JUST A SHOT AWAY
On the rainy morning of January 30, 1835, Richard Lawrence sat on a chest in a shop in Washington, D.C., clutching a book and laughing maniacally to himself. Suddenly he stood up, dropped the book, and said, “I’ll be damned if I don’t do it!” Lawrence grabbed two pistols, put them in his coat pocket, and headed for the U.S. Capitol. There, he waited behind a pillar for President Andrew Jackson to emerge from the funeral of Congressman Warren Davis. After a few minutes, the 68-year-old president hobbled into view, leaning on the arm of the U.S. treasury secretary. Lawrence leaped from behind the pillar, pointed a pistol at Jackson, and pulled the trigger.
The gun misfired.
Undeterred, Lawrence pulled out the second pistol and fired one more time at point-blank range.
That gun also misfired.
Enraged, Jackson struggled to get away...from his companions who were holding him back. The elderly president swung his cane wildly at Lawrence, shouting, “Let me alone! Let me alone! I know where this man came from!” Jackson had assumed that his would-be assassin had been sent by one of his political opponents. Jackson assumed incorrectly.
NUTTY AS A FRUITCAKE
Born in England in 1800, Richard Lawrence moved to the U.S. when he was 12 years old and lived an uneventful life as a house painter in Washington, D.C. But then something changed. In 1832 Lawrence suddenly decided to go to England, but only got as far as Philadelphia. When he returned to D.C., he complained that all the newspapers in Philly had attacked his character. As he raved on and on, his family was shocked. That was, by all accounts, Lawrence’s first psychotic episode.
California penal code bans the scattering of “cremains” from the Golden Gate Bridge.
THE KING AND I
In the months and years that followed, Lawrence drifted further into madness. He developed an extravagant sense of fashion. Decked out in exorbitantly expensive finery, Lawrence took to standing completely still in his doorway for hours on end so passersby could “bask in my presence.” He was no longer Richard Lawrence, he told people, but “King Richard III of England” (who reigned for two years in the 1480s). Lawrence quit his job painting houses; he assured his concerned friends and family that he would become wealthy as soon as the American government awarded him the money he was owed. (He claimed he owned two lavish estates.)
But the money never came. And who was to blame? President Andrew Jackson. Because he publicly opposed the national bank, Jackson was single-handedly preventing this transfer of funds. Lawrence came to the “natural conclusion”: Remove Jackson, and get the money he was owed. It made perfect sense, at least to Lawrence. That’s what led him to try to kill the president on that January day in 1835.
DEPOSED
Lawrence was defiant in his innocence. At one point during his trial, he angrily stood and announced, “It is for me, gentlemen, to pass judgment upon you, and not you upon me!” The prosecuting attorney, Francis Scott Key (the man who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”), pointed out that the only reason Jackson wasn’t killed was because the bullets and powder had fallen out of both guns in Lawrence’s pocket. (It was a humid day, and the shoddy pistols were affected by the moisture.) After that, Key didn’t have to work very hard to convince the jury that “King Richard” was mad. It took them only five minutes to deliberate. The verdict: Guilty by reason of insanity. (Historians theorize that the chemicals in Lawrence’s paints were what ultimately drove him to suffer from paranoid schizophrenic delusions.)
Lawrence lived out the rest of his life in the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C., where he died in 1861.
* * *
Police Blotter: “A woman reported Thursday that someone broke into her home on Summer Street and switched hardware in her computer with identical hardware that does not work. There are no leads.”
Step back, smartmouth: A cop can TASER you from 15 feet away.
COPS GONE CRAZY
We respect the police for keeping us somewhat safe in this crazy world. But as these stories prove, cops are only human.
ARE Wii HAVING FUN YET?
>
In September 2009, narcotics investigators in Polk County, Florida, searched the home of a known drug trafficker. While removing weapons, drugs, and stolen goods, several officers passed the time by taking part in a video bowling tournament on the suspect’s Wii videogame system. The cops competed fiercely, stopping their search when their turn came up. Little did they know their activities were being recorded by a wireless security camera that the drug dealer had set up to watch for intruders. A local TV station got hold of the footage and aired clips of the cops giving each other high-fives and distracting their fellow bowlers with lewd gestures. “Obviously, this is not the kind of behavior we condone,” Lakeland Police Chief Roger Boatner said. The impromptu tournament might even jeopardize the case against the career criminal, whose lawyer called the search improper. “Investigations are not for entertainment,” he said.
BETWEEN A GUN AND A HARD PLACE
MRI machines are huge, complex magnets; even the tiniest metal object can severely damage one. In 2009 Joy Smith, an off-duty deputy from Jacksonville, Florida, took her mother to get an MRI... and forgot that she was still carrying her police-issue Glock handgun. Smith walked into the MRI room and her gun was pulled from its holster; she tried to hang onto it, but her hand became stuck between the pistol and the machine—which made a horrible nose before shutting off. Smith sustained only minor injuries. The MRI center didn’t fare as well: Between repairs to the machine and a day’s lost revenue, the cost to the center topped $150,000.
GUILT BY ASSOCIATION
In September 2009, Dutch police officers raided a farm near Wageningen University in the Netherlands and destroyed an entire crop of what they called “some 47,000 illicit cannabis plants” with a street value of $6.45 million. However, according to university officials who cried foul, the plants were not psychotropic marijuana—which is illegal to grow—but hemp-fiber plants—which are perfectly legal to grow, and for which they had a permit. The plants had been part of a multiyear study to test hemp as a sustainable source of fiber. The project has been postponed while the school attempts to recoup the costs from the police department. “The street value from a drug point of view,” said a disappointed university official, “is less than zero.”
Uncle John’s True Crime Page 22