Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  The Chesapeake Ripper

  As a young man, Hannibal returns to the forest lodge where his family died, unearths his sister Mischa’s remains, and buries them properly. He then traces one of her killers, Enrikas Dortlich, and murders him, eating the cheeks of his dead body in revenge for his sister’s murder. Hannibal also drowns another member of the group, Zigmas Milko, in formaldehyde, and eviscerates a man named Grutas by carving his sister’s initial into his body, again and again. Popil pursues Hannibal brings him into custody. He wants Hannibal to be brought to justice, but there is little motivation for the authorities to do this, since all of his victims appear to be war criminals.

  When Hannibal is released, he sets out on a campaign of evil that defies belief. He travels to Montreal, and there kills another member of the group, Bronys Grentz, before settling down to practise psychiatry in Baltimore. He becomes wealthy and is celebrated as a world-renowned psychiatrist. However, he has also become a serial killer, known as the ‘Chesapeake Ripper’, and has nine victims to his name. Many of these are clients who have come to him for advice, sometimes as part of a court order for various crimes. Molson Verger, for example, is a successful businessman who raped his sister. In revenge for this, Hannibal drugs Verger and persuades him to cut parts of his face off and feed them to his dogs. He then tries to hang Verger, but Verger survives, hideously disfigured and in need of a life-support machine. Another victim, Benjamin Raspail, is a flautist who has dared to irritate Hannibal by playing badly with the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra. Hannibal kills Raspail and then serves his heart, pancreas and thymus to the orchestra’s board of directors.

  Lurid experiments

  Lecter is eventually caught in 1975 by FBI detective Will Graham, but it proves difficult to charge him. One of the reasons for this is that Lecter is ahead of the game when it comes to psychological tests; he remains impossible to classify, and as a result becomes more and more dangerous. At one point, he is admitted to hospital only to bite a nurse’s tongue off and tear out her eye. Lecter and the hospital’s director, Chilton, have a mutual loathing for one another, although Lecter gets on well with his immediate captor, Barney Matthews. During his stay at the hospital, Lecter helps to solve four FBI murder cases, one involving Will Graham, whom he double crosses, and one involving FBI trainee Clarice Starling. Eventually, he manages to escape, making a ‘mask’ from the torn-off face of a police officer and pretending to be a victim.

  The next phase of Lecter’s life takes place in Florence, where he becomes Doctor Fell and has plastic surgery. He also has a distinctive sixth finger removed from his hand. In Italy, he continues his career of disembowelling and cannibalising his enemies, performing ever more lurid experiments on them. He attempts to brainwash Clarice Starling into thinking she is his dead sister, but Starling resists; however, in the end she seduces him. More adventures follow, but Lecter remains at large, an ever more terrifying presence whose perversity and appetite for violence know no bounds.

  In the films based on the Thomas Harris novels, Lecter develops from being a sociopath into a more mythical monstrous character. Some explanations for his psychology are given, such as that he saw his sister being decapitated at the moment when he prayed to God for her survival, but in the end it is made clear that Lecter’s evil streak is a mystery: ‘they don’t have a name for what he is,’ says Clarice Starling. Lecter reiterates this, responding to attempts to explain his behaviour by saying, ‘Nothing happened to me. I happened.’

  Real-life inspiration

  The first movie actor to play Lecter was Brian Cox in Manhunter. After this, the role was taken by Anthony Hopkins, in Silence of the Lambs and a remake of Manhunter, filmed under the title Red Dragon. Although Harris’ novels were successful, Hopkins’ film portrayal of Lecter made the character world famous, and he became the archetype of the modern-day serial killer.

  Harris is thought to have taken his inspiration for Lecter from real-life serial killers such as the infamous cannibals Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo and Jeffrey Dahmer. However, since the author rarely gives interviews, there is little information available on his sources for this most memorable of literary and screen monsters. What is clear is that Lecter’s appeal lies in the contradictions of his nature. He is at once a charming, educated, sociable man with a concern for others and a tender affection for family members, such as his sister, and others, such as Clarice Starling, who later becomes his lover, and his jailer Barney Matthews. He has a brilliant mind, and is scathing about the lower intelligence of the many police officers and psychologists who try to typecast him. At the same time, he is a primitive savage who enjoys torturing his enemies and inflicting horrific violence on others, and who also indulges in the basest of human activities such as eating body parts.

  Lecter’s creator, Thomas Harris, gives us some pointers to the reasons behind his character’s behaviour, such as Lecter’s traumatising childhood experiences (in particular, his sister being killed and cannibalised in front of him). However, Harris makes it clear that, in the end, nobody can understand Lecter, and shows that, despite Lecter’s superior intellect, he is not able to understand himself and must remain unable to contain or control his baser impulses. The inference is that, no matter how clever our psychologists become, some human beings are subject to unfathomable evil, and at the heart of humanity lies a mystery that we can never solve. Only by trying to put ourselves in the place of the evil-doer – as Clarice Starling and others do – can we hope to understand what makes a killer, and that is a dangerous game indeed to play.

  Don Vito Corleone

  Don Vito Corleone, otherwise known as The Godfather, is the fictional head of a New York Mafia family, both in the novel by Mario Puzo and the trilogy of films made by Francis Ford Coppola. The story follows the fortunes of the Corleone family, including Don Vito’s final death and the inheritance of his position by his youngest son Michael. It also chronicles the lives of Don Vito’s sons Santino and Fredo, his daughter Connie and his adopted son Tom Hagen, as well many other characters in the family. According to some sources, the character of Don Vito Corleone is based on real-life Mafia dons such as Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Nicanor Fulgencio and Joseph Bonanno. Both the novel and the films portray the life of a Mafia don as one of excitement, glamour and power but also stress the darker side of it, revealing the personal torments of the Don as he tries to build a stable family life in a world where murder, extortion and crime is the norm.

  The making of a mafia boss

  As Vito’s life story emerges in the Godfather saga, he was born at the turn of the twentieth century in Corleone, a small town in Sicily. His father, Antonio Andolini, and his older brother Paolo, are murdered by Mafia boss Don Ciccio. Ciccio now plans to kill Vito, still only a boy, but Vito’s mother calls on him and begs for his life. Ciccio refuses to let the boy go, reasoning that Vito will later seek revenge and kill him, whereupon Vito’s mother threatens Ciccio with a knife. Vito is able to escape from Ciccio’s house, but has to leave his mother to her fate.

  Vito then boards a cargo ship loaded with immigrants bound for North America. When he arrives on Ellis Island, New York, the immigration officers there give him the name Vito Corleone, since he comes from that town. In New York, the boy is adopted by the Abbandando family and works in the family grocery store. As a young man, he marries and has children, but loses his job in the grocery store because of intimidation by Mafia boss Don Fanucci, who wants his nephew to take over the job. Little by little, Vito learns that the only way to survive in his world is to become involved with the Mafia, and he embarks on a life of petty crime. He sets up an olive oil business, using it as a front for organised crime, and becomes rich – but at a price. He murders Don Fanucci, and later his father’s killer, Don Ciccio, in the process establishing the Corleones as one of the most powerful Mafia families in New York.

  Vortex of crime

  In his personal life, Vito is kind and generous. He is extremely loyal to his family,
and he expects the same loyalty in return. He has four children, one of whom, Michael, has excelled both at college in the army. His greatest desire is that Michael should escape from the ‘family business’ and succeed in a more respectable field. However, the fact is that the family fortunes are based on criminal activities such as bootlegging and gambling. Their deals are enforced by intimidation; murder and violence are their stock in trade. Before long, Michael too becomes sucked into the vortex of crime, and he eventually succeeds his father as Don.

  In Francis Ford Coppola’s film trilogy, Michael is the main character of the story, and he is memorably played by actor Al Pacino. (Marlon Brando plays Vito in The Godfather, and Robert De Niro in The Godfather II, where we meet Vito as a younger man.) Michael enrols in the army to get away from the family and fights as a Marine in the Pacific during World War II. However, when his father is almost assassinated, Michael murders the men in revenge, afterwards fleeing to Sicily. During his period of exile, his brother Sonny is murdered, and he returns to take his place as heir to Vito’s place as head of the family. When Vito dies, he becomes the new Don and begins a career as ruthless as his father’s, murdering many leaders of rival families. Moreover, unlike his father, Michael is unable to keep the peace within the Corleone family itself, and bitter rivalries surface, resulting in more deaths. Eventually, Michael’s beloved daughter Mary is murdered, and Michael retires to Sicily, heartbroken, where he dies of a stroke.

  Severed head

  The Godfather was released in 1972, The Godfather, Part II in 1974, and The Godfather, Part III in 1990. It received rave reviews, and has become a classic of modern cinema. It also engendered a certain amount of controversy over its violent depiction of life in the Mafia; in particular, a scene involving the severed head of a horse shocked the public. Director Coppola was criticised by animal-rights activists, and in his defence, insisted that the horse’s head had been destined for a dog food company and had not been killed for the purposes of the film. Coppola also came in for a great deal of criticism from the studio, Paramount Pictures, who questioned his decision to use Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in the lead roles, and almost replaced him as director several times. However, Coppola managed to defend his actors and direct the movie as he wanted to, with tremendously successful results. When the film appeared, it was hailed as a masterpiece and revived the ailing career of one of the US’s major stars, Marlon Brando.

  Brando’s performance as the elderly, mumbling, yet charismatic Vito Corleone was extraordinary. The Godfather as Brando portrayed him – with his often quoted line about ‘making an offer you can’t refuse’ – became an icon of popular cinema. Once more, Brando appeared to have rewritten the rules of performing, creating a character that was at once idiosyncratic and archetypal, as he had done in his younger days, both on stage and screen.

  The ‘real’ Godfather

  Marlon Brando, the ‘real’ Godfather, was born on April 3, 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska. As a young man, he was expelled from military school, and then went to New York to become an actor. He studied the principles of Stanislavsky, known as method acting, in which the actors try to create an entire emotional picture of their character, immersing themselves in the part and attempting to identify with him or her in every way possible. Brando went on to perform on Broadway, creating a sensation with his role as Stanley Kowalaski in A Streetcar Named Desire. His brooding sexuality and emotional intensity were a revelation to the theatre world, and before long he became a screen idol too, with the film adaptation of Streetcar.

  During his long career, Brando gained a reputation as a rebel, both on and off screen. His portrayal of an angry young motorcycle gang leader in 1954’s The Wild One established him as a major Hollywood star. The same year, his performance as a former boxing star in On the Waterfront was hailed as a masterpiece. He went on to make many more movies and became one of the most respected actors in Hollywood. However, his reputation for taking risks, coupled with his difficult behaviour off stage, made many producers and directors wary of working with him. By the end of the sixties, after a series of unsuccessful movies, it seemed that Brando’s star was beginning to wane - until he took on the role of The Godfather in Coppola’s film.

  Family tragedy

  Brando’s performance in the title role was brilliant, and he received rave reviews. However, he angered the industry by refusing to collect his Academy Award, instead sending a Native American spokeswoman to the ceremony. She delivered a speech attacking the US government’s treatment of the Native American population. It turned out later that the woman, supposedly called Sacheen Littlefeather, was not a Native American at all, but a Hispanic actress hired for the occasion.

  Brando continued to court controversy with his next film, Last Tango in Paris, in which he gave another extraordinary performance as a depressed, lonely widower who becomes sexually involved with a much younger woman. In later years, he again drew criticisms, and confounded his fans, by making a number of unimpressive cameo performances, for which he was paid vast sums. Eventually, he retired to an island in the Pacific, where he became reclusive and overweight. Tragedy then struck when his son, Christian, killed the lover of his pregnant daughter, Cheyenne. Christian was found guilty of the murder and given a prison sentence, while Cheyenne committed suicide.

  In need of money, Brando returned to the screen in a number of movies. Stories of his bizarre behaviour on the set abounded, and it appeared that his mental health was deteriorating. In 2004, after an absence from the screen of three years, Brando’s physical health gave way, and he died of pulmonary fibrosis.

  Today, Marlon Brando is remembered as one of the greatest actors in the history of American cinema. His role as Mafia boss Don Vito Corleone was one of the high points of his career; moreover, certain aspects of his personal life – such as the murder that took place in his family and his eventual isolation – uncannily echo that of his screen persona as the Don.

  Fu Manchu

  The character of Dr Fu Manchu appeared in a series of novels by Sax Rohmer, whose first novel Pause! was published in 1910. Rohmer’s main character in the books, a fiendish oriental mastermind, was an immediate success, coinciding as it did with a wave of anxiety in Europe and the USA about the threat of Chinese immigration. The evil genius Fu Manchu came to embody the ‘Yellow Peril’ as it was known, with the supposed characteristics of cruelty, inscrutability and cunning ascribed by Westerners to the people of the East.

  Along with Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Fu Manchu became one of the earliest criminal masterminds in fiction, continuing to fascinate readers throughout the twentieth century and into the new millennium. To some critics, Fu Manchu represents an offensively racist caricature of Eastern culture, while others see him as an entertaining mythical figure whose exploits are the stuff of harmless, often rather silly, old-fashioned horror stories.

  The Devil Doctor

  Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, the real name of the creator of Fu Manchu, was born into a working-class family in Birmingham. Despite his lack of education, he rose to become a writer, earning his living by writing comedy sketches for performers in music hall. He also wrote short stories for magazines, some of which were serialised. In 1910, his first novel, Pause! appeared, but it was published anonymously. Two years later, a series of short stories were published under the name of Sax Rohmer, beginning with The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu. The series was an immediate success and Rohmer became one of the best paid and most successful writers of his generation, eventually moving to the USA, where he set up home in New York with his wife, Rose.

  Rhomer’s Fu Manchu character was the devilishly cunning leader of the Si-Fan cult, dedicated to destroying the Western world and ruling the entire planet in an Eastern empire. Fu Machu has an incredible mind and he has been able to extend his lifespan by means of chemical potions. The drug he uses to maintain his youth and strength is called Elixir Vitae, and he is also able to hypnotise his victim
s merely by looking them in the eye.

  As well as being a master of ancient Chinese arts, Fu Manchu is also able to Understand and utilise modern scientific inventions of all kinds. His Si-Fan devotees are extremely loyal to him, but his evil daughter Fah Lo Suee plots against him, creating all kinds of difficulties for him as she attempts to build her own sinister following. (A son, Shang Chi, later appeared in Marvel comic versions of Fu Manchu.) Known as The Celestial One and The Devil Doctor, Fu Manchu operates in China but has underground cells around the world’s major cities. In London, his organisation is situated in Limehouse, a working-class area of East London. Ranged against him, and representing the forces of Western civilisation, stiff upper lips and ‘decent values’, are Sir Denis Nayland-Smith, a British spy, and his assistant Dr Petrie of Scotland Yard, who engage in constant battles with the evasive, but ubiquitous overlord of the East.