100 Most Infamous Criminals

by Durden-Smith, Jo

  Through all this, Asahara and a number of his ministers were in almost daily touch with selected press. In fact he wasn’t arrested, hiding out in a steel-lined room at AUM’s compound at Kamikuishikimura, until almost two months after the Tokyo attack. And it was only very slowly, even then, that his motives and the extent of his crimes were unravelled.

  The ex-masseur had started AUM Supreme Truth, it seems, for the money he could make and he early recruited members from another sect who knew the religion business. But then he’d become infected by his own propaganda and when sect members ran in national elections in 1990 – and lost in a big way – he decided to bring down the government in preparation for a final Armageddon that would take place in 1997. Everything he undertook from then on was bent to this single purpose. In an atmosphere of obsessive secrecy, he organized bizarre initiation rituals and assassinated or abducted anyone who stood in his way. He demanded that members give up their worldly goods to him and had them killed if they refused. He operated prostitution clubs, made deals with drug syndicates, and instigated break-ins at government research laboratories. . .

  The full extent of his crimes is still not yet known. For the trials and appeals of both Asahara and his high officers continues. Meanwhile, so does his cult – under a new name Aleph. It’s still remarkably popular.

  Jacques Mesrine

  President Giscard d’Estaing regarded the failure to catch Jacques Mesrine as a national disgrace. Much of the rest of the population were delighted. For they sneakingly saw Mesrine as a combination of D’Artagnan, Robin Hood and Errol Flynn: a glorious example of France’s daring and ingenuity. True, he might have killed a few times – and that was regrettable. But his wit! His escapes! His nerve! Besides, he was the most famous criminal in the world – and he was French! When he finally died in a police ambush in Paris in 1979, the police may have hugged each other and danced in the street. But there was something in the heart of every true Frenchman that mourned.

  Mesrine was born in Paris in 1937 – and from his earliest years he seems to have been in love with danger. As a schoolboy he was laid-back, fond of argument and good with his fists; as a teenager, he hung out with other tearaways and played hookey to go joyriding. For a while he tried marriage, but he couldn’t settle down, and when he was conscripted into the army he specifically asked to be sent to Algeria, where the French army was fighting a ‘dirty war’ against Muslim anti-colonialists.

  He was demobbed with a Military Cross for bravery. But life as a civilian – after seeing action – seemed to bore him. He committed his first burglary, on the flat of a wealthy businessman, in 1959 – and it bore all the hallmarks of what was to come. When a drill snapped as he was boring his way into the safe, he simply left, broke into a hardware store for more and came back to finish the job. He escaped with millions of francs.

  His reputation rapidly spread in the underworld – and among the police. In 1962 he was arrested on his way to a bank job and sentenced to three years in prison. Out a year later, he tried to go straight: he got married again and apprenticed himself to an architect. But after showing real aptitude, he was made redundant, and he went back to the high-wire daring and near escapes of crime. Within four years he was the most wanted thief in France; the police were infuriated by his audacious antics. So, after one last major job at a hotel in Switzerland, he took himself off with his latest girlfriend, Jeanne Schneider, to Canada.

  They were soon employed, as chauffeur and housekeeper, by a Montreal millionaire. But after rows with other staff, they were sacked. So Mesrine and Jeanne simply kidnapped the millionaire and held him for $200,000 ransom. Unfortunately they were caught and charged both with the kidnap and with the murder of a rich widow they’d befriended in the small town of Percé nearby.

  From the beginning Mesrine was outraged: he insisted they’d had nothing to do with the widow’s murder. (They were both eventually acquitted.) But he engineered his and Jeanne’s escape from the Percé jail; and after they were caught again, and tried and sentenced for the kidnap, he organized another spectacular escape from the ‘escape-proof’ St. Vincent de Paul prison at Laval. (He later tried to go back to free the rest of the prisoners, but got into a gunfight with the police along the way.)

  The escape made Mesrine a national celebrity in Canada, but his reputation darkened after he shot to death two forest rangers who’d recognized him. So finally, after some extraordinarily insouciant bank hold-ups – he robbed one bank twice because a cashier had scowled at him on the way out the first time – he decided to take the money, and a new mistress, to Venezuela.

  In 1973, though, Mesrine was back in France and up to his old tricks. After a string of armed robberies, he was finally arrested. But he again escaped, this time from the Palais de Justice in Compiègne. By now, he was deep into his gentleman-thief, Robin-Hood role. When, during a bank robbery, a young woman cashier accidentally pushed the alarm button, he said,

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear. I like to work to music,’

  and calmly went on gathering the money. On another occasion, when his father was in hospital, dying of cancer and closely watched, he simply dressed up as a doctor – with white coat and stethoscope – and went to visit him.

  Mesrine was eventually shot dead by Parisian police

  When he was finally arrested and then held in Santé Prison, he whiled away the time writing his autobiography. Then, when his case, after three and a half years, came to trial, he gave a demonstration in court that was to seal his reputation. After saying that it was easy enough to buy a key for any pair of handcuffs, he simply took out a key from a match-box hidden in the knot of his tie and opened his own handcuffs.

  A year later, after being sentenced to twenty years, he escaped yet again, and continued his bizarre adventures. He walked into a Deauville police station, saying he was an inspector from the Gaming Squad and asked to see the duty inspector. When told he was out, he took himself off and that night robbed a Deauville casino. He also invaded the house of a bank official who’d testified against him at his trial, and forced him to withdraw half a million francs from his own bank. He gave an interview to Paris Match, the first of several he gave to journalists; and he even then attempted to kidnap the judge who’d tried him. Though this went badly wrong, he escaped by telling the police whom he met on their way up the stairs: ‘Quick, quick, Mesrine’s up there.’

  By the time he was finally caught up with, he was living with a girlfriend in a luxury apartment in Paris; and the police were in no mood to compromise. They staked out the apartment, and then when the couple came out and climbed into his BMW, they were soon hemmed in by two lorries. Unable to move, he was then shot – in effect, executed. The police thereupon kissed each other and danced in the street – and President Giscard d’Estaing was immediately informed of their triumph.

  Dr. Marcel Pétiot

  Dr. Marcel Pétiot’s crimes, among the most grisly in European history, were motivated by nothing but greed. As he walked to the guillotine in Paris on May 26th 1946, he is said to have remarked:

  ‘When one sets out on a voyage, one takes all one’s luggage with one.’

  This was not a privilege given to any of his more than sixty victims. For at his trial two months before, the jury had been shown forty-seven suitcases that belonged to the men and women he’d murdered – containing over 1500 items of their clothing. All had been found at his death house on the rue Le Sueur.

  Pétiot, born in 1897 in Auxerre, was, it later transpired, a childhood sadist who stole from his schoolmates, and while serving at a casualty clearing-station in World War I, started out on another career: selling drugs. He qualified as a doctor in 1921, and soon set up shop in the village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where he made a reputation for himself as a drugs-supplier and provider of illegal abortions. As a result of dogged canvassing on his part, he was elected mayor in 1928, by which time he’d married. But question marks began to gather about the doctor. He was caught stealing twice – an
d there was worse. Screams were heard coming from his surgery late at night. His housekeeper became pregnant and then disappeared. Later a woman patient was robbed and killed; another patient, who persisted in accusing the doctor of being responsible, suddenly died – of ‘natural causes’, wrote the doctor on the death certificate.

  All this persuaded Pétiot to up sticks to Paris, where he took up what came to be a successful practice in the rue Caumartin. Outwardly, again, he was respectability itself, with a wife and child; and no doubt it was this that enabled him to survive charges, once more, of shoplifting and drug-dealing, for which he received only fines. He was popular with his patients, and no one seemed to pay any attention when, after the German occupation of Paris, he bought another house on the rue Le Sueur and started having it rebuilt to his own specifications.

  The rebuilt house contained a new furnace in the basement beneath the garage, and an airtight triangular room with peepholes let into the door, ‘for my mental patients,’ said Dr. Pétiot. It was, in fact, for something a lot more sinister. For once the house had been finished, he put out word that he was in touch with the French Resistance, and could smuggle people out of Paris.

  Dr. Marcel Pétiot went to the guillotine in 1946

  He immediately had customers, among the first a rich Jewish businessman and his family, who paid him two million francs for his help. He treated them exactly the same as all the others who were to follow – Jews, Resistance fighters, those on the run from the Gestapo: he gave them an injection of poison – the injection was to protect them against typhus, he said – and watched them die behind the peepholes in the airtight room. He then treated their bodies in quicklime, bought in bulk from his brother in Auxerre, and burned what was left of them in the furnace below. In each case – and there were sixty-three of them – he kept scrupulous records, including of the furs, cash, jewellery and precious metals his ‘clients’ had brought with them to take into exile.

  It was the furnace which in the end proved Pétiot’s undoing. For in March 1944 a neighbour complained about the smoke that was billowing from it and called the police and the fire brigade. The police went off to find the doctor at his house on the rue Caumartin. But the firemen broke in, and soon found the furnace surrounded by dismembered corpses. The doctor, though, when he arrived at the scene, had a plausible and patriotic explanation: they were the bodies, he confided, of Nazi soldiers and of collaborators condemned to death by the Resistance, for which he was working.

  The French gendarmes, half convinced, returned to their headquarters without him; and he, his wife and seventeen-year-old son immediately fled before senior officers demanded – as they later did – a proper search of the premises. Once Paris was liberated a few weeks later, Pétiot became France’s most wanted man. But instead of leaving the country, he belatedly joined the Free French forces and handwrote a letter to a newspaper saying as much, adding that he’d been framed by the Gestapo. A handwriting check soon established who he’d become, a Captain Valéry serving in Reuilly. He was arrested and after seventeen months in captivity he came to trial, charged with murdering the twenty-seven people whose remains the firemen had found.

  One intriguing suggestion is that Pétiot at one time himself aroused the suspicions of the Gestapo – who arrested him as what he proclaimed himself to be: a member of the Resistance involved in smuggling people out of Paris. He was freed on the grounds that, in murdering Jews and people on the run, he’d simply been doing their work for them…

  Pétiot gave people hope before brutally murdering them

  Issei Sagawa

  The story of Issei Sagawa, a small, shy man who became a celebrity in his native country, is like the plot-line of a perverse Japanese movie. For Issei was a cannibal. On the evening of June 11th 1981, while studying in Paris, he invited a fellow student called Renée Hartevelt to his flat to help him with some translation. At some point during the evening, he asked her to have sex with him and when she refused, he calmly shot her in the back of the neck with a .22 rifle, undressed her and had sex with her corpse instead.

  Then, in what he called ‘an expression of love,’ he began to eat her. He cut slices of flesh from her buttocks and consumed them raw, shuddering with delight. Later he cut her body into pieces, taking photographs and reserving choice cuts of meat along the way, and finally stuffed what remained into two suitcases, which he set off by taxi to dump into a lake in the Bois de Boulogne.

  At the last minute, though, scared off by passers-by, he abandoned the suitcases and fled. The police were called; and soon found not only Renée’s mutilated corpse, but also the taxi driver who had driven him. Issei’s rifle – not to mention his photographs and his hoard of fresh meat – was quickly found in his flat, and he was arrested.

  His confession was ready enough. A game of Giants and Cannibals played by his father and uncle at birthday parties, he said, had left him as a child with a morbid fear of being eaten and this fear had been transmuted during adolescence into an obsession with the idea of eating a woman. But he never came to trial. Instead he was declared insane and held in a mental asylum in Paris until May 1984, when he was returned to Japan under an agreement between the two countries – an agreement which happened to coincide with the signing of a contract between a Japanese company of which Issei’s father was president and a French conglomerate.

  In Japan, where a book of his letters about the murder had been published, Issei quickly became a star; and after little more than a year, he was released from the Tokyo mental hospital to which he’d been confined, over the considerable objections of the hospital’s own deputy superintendent. In a magazine interview shortly after his release, he confessed that he still dreamed of eating another woman’s flesh – though this time, he said, with her consent. He went on to have a successful career as a journalist and television personality in Japan.

  Issei Sagawa’s cannibalism shocked the Japanese public

  Anders Behring Breivik

  On the afternoon of 22 July 2011, a curious compendium titled 2083 A European Declaration of Independence was emailed to over a thousand recipients around the globe. Its author was a complete unknown, but by the end of the day he would be famous – not for his writing, but as the worst spree killer in world history.

  Anders Behring Breivik was born on 13 February 1979 in Oslo, but lived most of his earliest days in London, where his father, an economist, worked as a diplomat for the Royal Norwegian Embassy. At the age of 1, his parents divorced, setting off a custody battle that his father lost. Still an infant, Breivik returned with his mother, a nurse, to Oslo. Although she was soon remarried, to a Norwegian Army officer, Breivik would later criticize what he perceived as an absence of the masculine in his childhood home. In his writings, he disparages his mother for his ‘matriarchal upbringing’, adding ‘it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminizing me to a certain degree.’

  Anecdotal evidence shows Breivik to have been an intelligent, caring boy, one who was quick to defend others against bullying. However, his behaviour changed markedly in adolescence. Over a two-year period, so Breivik claims, he engaged in a one-man ‘war’ against Oslo’s public transit company, causing £700,000 ($956,000) in property damage. His evenings were spent running around the city with friends, committing acts of vandalism.

  At 16, Breivik was caught spray-painting graffiti on the exterior wall of a building, an act that brought an end to his relationship with his father. The two have had no contact since.

  Though the stepson of an army officer, Breivik was declared ‘unfit for service’ in Norway’s mandatory conscription assessment. The reason for this surprising judgement has yet to be disclosed; Breivik told friends a story that he’d received an exemption to care for his sickly mother. However, a possible explanation is his use of anabolic steroids, a drug that he’d been taking since his teenage years in an effort to bulk up. Breivik was a man obsessed with his appearance.

  In 2000, at the age of 21, he flew
to the USA to have cosmetic surgery on his forehead, nose and chin. Unmarried at 32, Breivik considered himself a most desirable bachelor, and boasted frequently of his conquests, yet not one of his acquaintances can remember him ever having a girlfriend.

  ‘When it comes to girls,’ Breivik wrote in his journal, ‘I’m tempted – especially these days, after training and I’m feeling fantastic. But I try to avoid entanglements, because they may complicate my plans and put the whole operation in jeopardy.’

  The operation he referred to was part of a nine-year plan that culminated on that horrible day in July 2011. According to Breivik, work began in 2002 with the establishment of a computer programming business that was intended to raise funds. Instead, the company went bankrupt, forcing him to move back to his mother’s house. This humiliating setback seems to have brought on a period of relative inactivity. By 2009, however, Breivik was back in business. He set up a company, Breivik Geofarm, which was nothing more than a cover so that he might buy large quantities of fertilizer and other chemicals used in bomb-making without raising suspicions. The next year, after a failed attempt at buying illegal weapons in Prague, he purchased a semi-automatic Glock pistol and a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic carbine through legal channels.

  Breivik murdered with these guns, but his first victims on 22 July 2011 were killed with a car bomb planted in his Volkswagen Crafter. That afternoon, he drove the automobile into the government quarter of Oslo, taking care to park it in front of the building housing the Office of the Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice and Police and several other high-ranking government ministers. At 3:22 pm, the car bomb exploded, shattering windows, and setting the ground floor of the building on fire. Though Labour Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, thought to have been a chief target of the attack, survived without a scratch, the explosion killed eight people and left 11 more with critical injuries.