Uncle John’s True Crime (31 page)

The insanity defense is used in less than 1% of all court cases
.

PULP FICTION

Cheap adventure stories published in pocket-sized paperback books first appeared the mid-1800s. Publishing firms saved money by printing them on the cheapest paper available, made from pure wood pulp without any rag fiber (hence the term “pulp fiction”). The earliest were Western stories that featured frontier heroes, but as the Wild West was tamed, the cowboy’s urban counterpart began to emerge in the form of the streetwise detective. By the 1870s, the detective story had established itself as a genre. Serialized adventures of characters like Old Cap Collier, Broadway Billy, Jack Harkaway, and the mysterious Old Sleuth, Master of Disguise, helped to develop the style. These were hard-fisted, tough-guy heroes who inhabited a dark, urban underworld where violence seemed to be the only means of establishing order.

Crime fiction magazines and dime novels grew steadily in popularity through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. By the 1920s, there were more than 20,000 magazines in circulation in the United States. Pulp titles like
The Nick Carter Weekly
,
Detective Stories
,
Girl’s Detective
,
Doctor Death
,
Argosy
, and
Police Gazette
dominated newsstands during Prohibition, giving rise to a class of working writers who earned about a penny a word, some using several pseudonyms so they could publish more than a million words per year. Hammett wanted to be a part of it.

In late 1923 he arrived at
Black Mask
magazine, which printed “Stories of Detection, Mystery, Adventure, Romance, and Spiritualism.” Earlier that year, the magazine had published a story by Carroll John Daly called “Three Gun Terry,” considered the first authentic “hard-boiled” detective story. Yet although he didn’t invent the style, Hammett quickly dominated it. Over the next seven years he wrote more than 50 stories for
Black Mask
, becoming its premier writer, and helping it become
the
premier magazine of hard-boiled fiction. Hammett’s influence was such that other writers accused the magazine’s editors of forcing them to copy him.

DASHIELL HAMMETT, P.I
.

So how was Hammett able to bring such an impressive realism to his characters? Experience. Before becoming a writer, he had been a detective—he was an operative with the Pinkerton Agency from 1915 to 1922.
Hammett had had many jobs before that: newsboy, freight clerk, laborer, and rail yard messenger, but it was all just to help support his parents and his two brothers.

Women make up about 7% of the U.S. prison population
.

SMART KID

Born in 1894, Samuel Dashiell Hammett grew up between Baltimore and Philadelphia. He learned a love of reading from his mother, who was a nurse, and street smarts from his father, who was a farmer, gambler, occasional politician, and notorious womanizer. Although he never finished high school, young Hammett was a voracious reader. And after spending time on the road with his father, he was also streetwise. So when Hammett arrived at the Pinkerton office in Baltimore to take a clerk job, his bosses soon recognized that this 21-year-old kid would make a great field operative. They placed him under the wing of one of their best private eyes, James Wright, who taught Hammett the ins and outs of “tailing a perp and bringing him in.” Wright was the inspiration for the Continental Op, the hero of Hammett’s early stories.

Little is known about Hammett’s days as a Pinkerton operative. Most biographers agree that he embellished his tales to help create a mystique about himself. In his book
Shadow Man
, author Richard Layman says that Hammett “in a half self-serving, half playful manner, characteristically amplified his stories, rewriting, revising, even inventing accounts of his experiences.” What
is
known, however, is that Hammett was a master at tailing suspects. According to one colleague, Dash (as he was known to friends) once followed a man through six small towns without ever being detected. He was quickly rising through the agency ranks, primed to become one of Pinkerton’s best. Everything changed when he chose to fight in World War I.

A LIFELONG CONTRACT

Hammett enlisted in the army in 1919 and served as a sergeant in the ambulance corps, but was discharged a year later when he contracted first tuberculosis and then the Spanish flu. The diseases would plague him for the rest of his life, not only putting a halt to his detective and military careers, but also affecting his relationships with women. (While recovering, he married a nurse named Josephine Dolan, but because TB is contagious, in 1926 she was advised by doctors to take their two daughters and leave him.)

Hammett did go back to Pinkerton after he recovered, but he grew
disillusioned with the Pinkerton style of law enforcement after an incident in Montana. The story goes that he was offered $5,000 to kill Frank Little, a labor boss who was organizing miners. Hammett refused, but Little was ultimately captured by five men—allegedly Pinkerton
ops
(short for “operatives”)—and hanged from a railroad trestle in Butte. Hammett biographer Diane Johnson writes:

Miguel de Cervantes wrote
Don Quixote
while in prison
.

Not only was Hammett at odds with his Pinkerton bosses because of his idealism and growing distrust of authority, but his chronic TB made it impossible for him to endure assignments that often took place on long, cold nights. He left the agency in 1922 to find something that required less physical effort.

PEN IN HAND

Unemployed and disabled, Hammett took a job as an ad writer for a San Francisco jewelry store but found the work unfulfilling. He wanted to write about something that he knew, that he was passionate about. Being a fan of detective stories—but disappointed by their lack of authenticity—Dashiell Hammett decided to create the detective that he was never able to be in real life. “Your private detective does not,” he said, “want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner, he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client.” So Hammett started pounding out the dark characters and vigilante justice that expressed his cynical views of the world of crime and punishment. Just as he had impressed the Pinkertons with his skill and wit a few years before, he equally impressed the editors at
Black Mask
with his descriptive prose and tight storytelling.

Hammett’s adventure was just getting started. To read about his meteoric rise and tragic demise, hoof it on over to
page 280
.

To be a lawyer, you must pass the Bar, but there are no formal qualifications to be a federal judge
.

In 1990 the Italian police started rounding up underworld leaders all over Italy. But once the men were gone, the women took over... and proved that queenpins can be just as ruthless as kingpins
.

A
LL IN THE FAMILY
. In June 1999, police in Sicily arrested Concetta Scalisi, the Godmother of an area known as the “Triangle of Death.” She had ruled over her crime family’s dealings in heroin, extortion, and violence in three towns on Mount Etna in Sicily after the death of her father. She was personally wanted for three murders.

SHE’LL NEVER CHANGE HER SPOTS
. In December 2000, police arrested Erminia Giuliano, of the Camorra, Naples’ version of La Cosa Nostra. “The Godmother” had inherited the job when the last of her five brothers was arrested. Police claim she had ruthlessly and casually ordered numerous executions of rivals, and was ranked one of Italy’s 30 most dangerous criminals. When arrested, the 45-year-old made a special request of the police—she wanted to go to the hairdresser and be allowed to wear a leopard-skin outfit to prison.

MOB BOSS MADAM
. Erminia Guiliano’s rival in Naples was Maria Licciardi, who took over her family after her husband’s arrest. She built the family’s business by forging alliances with several other Camorra clans and by adding prostitution—regarded by old-school Mafia as an “immoral” business—to heroin trade and extortion. The alliances eventually broke down and between 1997 and 1998 she dragged her family through gang wars that killed more than 100 people. She was arrested on June 14, 2001.

BAD HAIR DAY
. On May 5, 2002, there was an argument in a Naples hair salon between Clarissa Cava and Alba Graziano. The Cavas and the Grazianos had been bloody rivals for 30 years. Several days later, Graziano and her two daughters, aged 21 and 22, drove up to the car occupied by Cava, 21, her two aunts and and her sister—and machine-gunned them. Cava and her two aunts were killed. The Graziano’s were later heard laughing and toasting the killings on police surveillance tapes.

Calling police “pigs” dates back to the early 1800s
.

We aimed for this page to be a high-caliber bulletin loaded with surefire origins of some famous “peacemakers.” Bull’s-eye!

E
LIPHALET REMINGTON II (1793–1861)

The story goes that in 1816 young Remington needed a new rifle—so he made one at his father’s forge at Ilion Gulch, in upstate New York. That fall he entered a shooting contest with his new flintlock. He won only second place, but the gun was so good (and so good-looking) that before the day was over, Remington had taken orders for several more rifles. Suddenly he was in the gun business. By 1839 E. Remington & Sons was a booming company in Ilion. Though it’s no longer a family business, Remington still manufactures world-renowned rifles on the same site. (They also made typewriters and electric shavers.)

SAMUEL COLT (1814–1862)

At age 15, Colt left his father’s textile mill in Connecticut for a sailor’s life. Legend says he was at the ship’s wheel when he got his big idea—a pistol with a revolving cylinder. Colt received a European patent for the invention in 1835 and took it to the United States the following year. His fortune was assured when the U.S. army began supplying its officers with Colt revolvers during the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848. The Colt .45 Peacemaker became—and still is—a symbol of the American West.

GEORG LUGER (1849–1923)

The real name of Luger’s gun is “Pistole Parabellum.” Americans know it as the “Luger” because the U.S. importer in the 1920s, AF Stoeger & Co., marketed it under the German gun designer’s name. Georg Luger made the first Luger-type pistol for a German weapons manufacturer in 1898. The German military started buying them in the early 1900s; during World War II they were the official sidearm of the Nazis. The sleekly designed guns are prized by collectors today and are still used in competitions because of their accuracy. Why “Parabellum”? It comes from the Latin phrase
Si vis pacem, para bellum
—“If you want peace, prepare for war.”

The FBI & the National Bureau of Standards started the world’s first computerized fingerprint database in the 1960s
.

HORACE SMITH (1808–93) & DANIEL WESSON (1825–1906)

Smith was a Springfield, Massachusetts, toolmaker; Wesson was a gunsmith from nearby Northborough. They joined forces in 1852, introducing a groundbreaking invention: the self-contained, waterproof “cartridge,” or bullet. Before that, all the ingredients—gunpowder, ball, and primer—had to be mixed by hand. In 1869 they introduced the Smith & Wesson “Model 3 American” pistol. Customers ranging from the Russian army to Annie Oakley helped make it one of the most popular handguns in the world. Other Smith & Wesson notables: the .357 Magnum and the .44 Magnum, made famous by Clint Eastwood in the
Dirty Harry
movies.

DR. RICHARD J. GATLING (1818–1903)

Gatling was an inventor during the mid-1800s. Most of his inventions were agriculture-based, but in 1861 he came up with the fearsome Gatling Gun, a hand-cranked machine gun that fired 200 bullets a minute. A medical doctor, Gatling thought his gun’s super firepower would require fewer soldiers on the battlefield, resulting in fewer casualties. He was wrong; it just made soldiers more effective killing machines. After improvements were made in 1866, it be came a weapon of choice for armies worldwide for the next 40 years.

HIRAM MAXIM (1840–1916)

Legend has it that Maxim, an American expatriate, visited the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition, where he heard someone say, “If you want to make a lot of money, invent something that will enable Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.” Shortly thereafter, Maxim invented the first “automatic” machine gun—it reloaded itself automatically, firing more than 500 bullets per minute. The British bought it in 1889 (the United States turned it down), and by 1905 more than 20 armies and navies around the world were using the Maxim Machine Gun. Other Maxim inventions: the gun silencer and cordite (smokeless gunpowder). Knighted by the British in 1901, Sir Hiram died in 1916.

JOHN CANTIUS GARAND (1888–1974)

In 1934 Garand, a Canadian-born employee of the United States Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, designed what would become the mainstay of the American military, the M-1 Garand rifle. It was “gas operated,”
meaning that gas buildup behind an exiting bullet was routed to drive a piston that put the next bullet into place—very quickly. That made it semiautomatic, a huge advantage over Japanese and German rifles, which were still bolt-action at the start of World War II. Almost four million M-1 rifles were made during the war, and Garand didn’t make a cent off them—he worked for the Armory for 36 years and never received more than his standard pay.