Uncle John’s True Crime (32 page)

MIKHAIL TIMOFEEVICH KALASHNIKOV (B. 1919)

Kalashnikov was a Russian tank driver during World War II. After being badly injured in 1941, he turned to weapon design and produced the light, inexpensive, and extremely durable AK-47. The “AK” stands for Automatic Kalashnikov; the “47” comes from 1947, the year the new rifle was introduced. The gun became standard issue for the Soviet army in 1949 and was soon being used by communist armies and insurgents all over the world. It’s estimated that there are more Kalashnikovs worldwide—perhaps as many as 100 million—than any other gun in use today.

UZIEL GAL (1923–2002)

Gal was a young Israeli army officer who submitted a design for a new submachine gun to the military in 1951, shortly after the founding of Israel. The “Uzi,” as it came to be known, was small, powerful, cheap to manufacture, and easy to maintain. The most innovative part of Gal’s design: putting the magazine inside the pistol grip, making it easy for soldiers to reload in the dark. Today Uzis are used by military and police in more than 90 countries; the gun has made the Israeli munitions industry more than $2 billion. Gal died in 2002, and the Israeli military officially stopped using the Uzi a year later. Ironically, he asked that his name not be used for the gun. (The request was ignored.)

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In 1996 Redwood City, California, installed eight microphones around town to identify possible drive-by-shootings. Number of Redwood City drive-bys before the installation: 0. Number after: 0.

What is the #1 cause of wrongful convictions? Eyewitness mis-identification
.

We noticed that a lot of the most bizarre legal battles we’ve reported on over the years have come from behind bars
.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Frederick Newhall Woods IV, serving a life sentence for the infamous Chowchilla, California, school bus kidnapping

THE DEFENDANT:
The American Broadcasting Company

THE LAWSUIT:
In 1976 Woods and two accomplices kidnapped a bus driver and 26 elementary school students and buried them underground. When ABC aired a TV movie docudrama about the kidnapping in 1994, Woods was offended. He sued the network, claiming that the TV show “portrayed (him) as being callous, vicious, hardened, wild-eyed, diabolical, and uncaring.”

THE VERDICT:
Case dismissed.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Kenneth Parker

THE DEFENDANT:
Nevada State Prison

THE LAWSUIT:
Parker was an inmate, serving 15 years for robbery. He wanted to buy two jars of chunky peanut butter from the prison canteen. (Cost: $5.) But the canteen had only one jar of chunky peanut butter. When they had to substitute a jar of creamy for the second one, Parker sued for “mental and emotional pain,” asking for $5,500 and the imprisonment of a prison official.

THE VERDICT:
The case went on for two years before it was ultimately dismissed.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Richard Loritz

THE DEFENDANT:
San Diego County

THE LAWSUIT:
Loritz was imprisoned for three months in 1995. During that time, he says, he asked for dental floss and was refused. As a result, he developed four cavities. He sued for $2,000 in dental expenses.

THE VERDICT:
The case was thrown out of court.

Congress creates an average of 56 new federal crimes each year
.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Scott Gomez Jr.

THE DEFENDANT:
Pueblo County Jail, Colorado

THE LAWSUIT:
In 2007 Gomez tried to escape—he melted the ceiling tiles of his cell with a homemade candle, climbed out to the roof, and attempted to scale down the outside wall. Instead, he fell 40 feet to the pavement and was severely injured. Gomez sued, arguing that the prison was responsible because they “failed to provide ceiling tiles that could not be removed by melting them with a homemade candle” and ignored his “propensity to escape” (he’d tried to escape twice before).

THE VERDICT:
Lawyers for the prison pointed out a Colorado state law that prevented citizens from suing for damages sustained while committing a felony...such as escaping from prison. Case dismissed.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Chad Gabriel DeKoven

THE DEFENDANT:
Michigan Prison System

THE LAWSUIT:
DeKoven, a convicted armed robber who goes by the name “Messiah-God,” sued the prison system, demanding damages that included thousands of trees, tons of precious metals, peace in the Middle East, and “return of all U.S. military personnel to the United States within 90 days.”

THE VERDICT:
Case dismissed. While noting that all claims must be taken seriously, the judge ultimately dismissed the suit as frivolous. DeKoven, the judge said, “has no Constitutional right to be treated as the ‘Messiah-God’ or any other holy, extra-worldly, or supernatural being.”

THE PLAINTIFF:
Robert Paul Rice

THE DEFENDANT:
Utah State Prison

THE LAWSUIT:
Rice sued the prison for violating his religious freedom, claiming that he listed “the Vampire Order” as his religion and should have his religious needs provided for. According to the suit, prison officials failed to provide a “vampire diet” (only grains and vegetables—no meat) or a “vampress” with whom he could partake in “the vampiric sacrament.” Lawyers for the prison argued that it provides five diets to choose from and “vampire” isn’t one of them. And a “vampress?” Sorry, prisons in Utah do not allow conjugal visits.

THE VERDICT:
Rice lost. The court ruled that the case “raised questions that are so insubstantial as not to merit consideration.”

Of the 494 fugitives ever listed on the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted,” 463 have been captured
.

From small-time crook to family man to the world’s most famous punk-rocking, beach-basking fugitive, this brash Brit captured the heart of a nation...and drew the ire of Scotland Yard
.

A
NARCHY IN THE U.K
.

The greatest train robbery in British history was not orchestrated by Ronnie Biggs, nor did he have a big part in the heist. In fact, shortly before it took place—coincidentally on the night of Biggs’s 34th birthday in August 1963—he had all but given up a life of crime.

Born in 1929 to a poor family living in a poor section of South London, Ronald Arthur Biggs had been in trouble with the law since he was a teenager. Prone to stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down—pencils, pills, cars—he was caught as often as he was not, and spent much of his early adulthood behind bars. It was there that Biggs learned a trade, house-painting, and by his 30s, he had decided to go legit. Biggs married, had two sons, and tried to make an honest living as a painter. It turned out that he wasn’t a very good painter, either, and he was having trouble paying the bills. So he phoned a friend.

AN OFFER HE COULDN’T REFUSE

When Biggs called Bruce Reynolds, an old prison buddy, in 1963 to ask for a loan of £500 to “tide him over,” Reynolds offered Biggs something better—a job. And not just any job, but a role in a train robbery the likes of which had never been seen in the U.K. Biggs’s answer: No. He couldn’t risk losing his family to more prison time. But Reynolds pressed on, promising Biggs a payday of at least £40,000 for one night’s work. And Biggs wouldn’t even have to do the actual thieving. All he had to do was recruit a friend of his who could operate a train and then keep the actual train driver quiet while more experienced criminals did the hard stuff. Reluctantly, Biggs signed on. He told his wife he had an out-of-town painting job that would take a few weeks. Then he and Reynolds headed for the English countryside to meet up with the rest of the gang.

Moby Dick
author Herman Melville was once imprisoned in Tahiti. His crime: mutiny
.

TRAINSPOTTING

There were 16 men in on the job, a joint venture of two South London gangs. Some were responsible for obtaining vehicles, others for arranging hideouts, one to follow train schedules, and Biggs’s friend to drive the train. The plan: Stop the Glasgow-to-London mail train in remote Buckinghamshire in the middle of the night, break in, drive the locomotive and the money car to a bridge, and then steal the load of used bills that were on their way to London to be destroyed.

Working from a rented farmhouse, and relying on information provided by British mobsters, the job went down at 3:30 a.m. on August 8. One of the men tampered with a signal to stop the train. Then the strong-arms, posing as rail workers, overtook the mail crew, beating the driver senseless. One problem: Biggs’s friend couldn’t get the train to start back up, and it needed to get to a bridge where a truck was waiting. So they revived the injured driver and made him do it. Then the men formed a human chain to carry the 120 bags of money to the truck. It wasn’t pretty, but the job was over in 40 minutes. When the gang got back to the farm, they realized their haul was
huge
: £2.6 million ($3.8 million U.S.). It was Biggs’s 34th birthday, and a happy one at that.

PRINTS OF DARKNESS

But their celebration was short-lived. Although the job was successful, they weren’t too adept at covering their tracks. The initial plan was to burn down the farmhouse and with it all of the evidence—money bags and everything else they touched, including beer bottles and Monopoly game pieces. But the investigation by Scotland Yard was unprecedented in its size and scope, and within a day, the gang learned that the police were honing in on the farm, so they abandoned it, not wanting to start a big summer fire and give away their position. Reynolds hired a man to clean up the incriminating evidence, but instead the “cleaner” took his payment and ran, making it easy for the cops to lift fingerprints and track down most of the 16 train robbers, including Biggs. Little of the money was recovered. Biggs had hidden his share, a whopping £147,000.

The press coverage—like the loot—was also bigger than they had expected. Their names were plastered over papers worldwide, and Biggs, though he played only a small part, became famous. Wanting to make an example of Biggs, the judge sentenced him to 30 years at Wandsworth Prison in London. The day he arrived, Biggs started planning his escape.

Until President Kennedy was killed, it wasn’t a federal crime to assassinate the President
.

RUN, RONNIE, RUN

In 1965, after barely a year and a half in prison, Biggs and six other inmates used a homemade rope to climb a wall and jump into a waiting lorry. While Biggs fled to the countryside, the embarrassed British police force launched a massive manhunt all over the U.K. But Biggs was gone. He made it to Paris, where he received a painful round of reconstructive surgery. With a false identity and altered face, one “Terrence Furminger” quietly boarded a flight bound for Australia.

There, Biggs met up with his wife and two sons in Melbourne, and they were able to live quietly for a few years under the radar. But as the other escapees were rounded up, Biggs became the only member of Britain’s Great Train Robbery still on the lam. That made him among the most wanted men in the world. When tipsters steered the police to Australia, Biggs knew he had to run again. He said good-bye to his family and caught a flight for South America, first landing in Bolivia and then spending time in Argentina and Venezuela. By this point, however, his loot had all but run out and he was once again making an honest living as a construction worker. He was careful not to break the law for fear of extradition back to England, where a maximum-security cell was waiting for him. With a decade gone by since the Great Train Robbery and his daring escape, Biggs faded out of the public eye...for a while.

THE UNABASHED BANDIT

In 1974, through a ruse by London’s
Daily Express
offering Biggs £50,000 for an exclusive interview, British police tracked him down in Rio de Janeiro. Word of the capture got out, and Biggs’s name once again made headlines. Scotland Yard officials, patting themselves on the back for a job well done, were preparing to extradite him back to Britain. But then Biggs caught a huge break: He’d taken a mistress in Rio (one of several, actually), and she was pregnant with his baby. According to Brazilian law, he could not be deported if he was the sole source of income for his family. And just like that, Ronnie Biggs got to stay in Rio.

His status as antihero skyrocketed in England. Not only was he part of the fabled Great Train Robbery, but he escaped from prison
and
outsmarted Britain’s top cops. But the real kicker was that Biggs was allowed to live in paradise...in plain sight. That’s about as big as an “up yours” as anyone could give to Scotland Yard, and rowdy British youth took notice.

John Dillinger was known to offer cab fare home to his hostages when he released them
.

CRIME DOES PAY

In 1978, after Johnny Rotten left the Sex Pistols, the remaining two members of the seminal punk rock band went to Rio and tracked down Biggs. They set up a recording studio in a church, procured a lot of booze, and Biggs—wrinkled and gray—belted out the lead vocals on the Sex Pistols’ single “No One Is Innocent.” Here’s a verse:

Biggs was more than a fugitive, he was a hero—and a tourist attraction to boot. Not allowed to take a real job in Brazil because of his legal status, he took to charging tourists to spend time with him. “If you can’t live off the money you stole,” he said, “at least live off your reputation as a thief.” For $60, visitors could indulge in “The Ronnie Biggs Experience” at his small villa. They’d enjoy a pleasant meal, a poolside party, and the star attraction: listening to Ronnie Biggs make fun of the Scotland Yard detectives who couldn’t have him. However, he was trying to support
two
families, so he wrote a book telling his version of events called
Odd Man Out
. (The Rio tourist industry made out okay as well, selling Ronnie Biggs T-shirts and coffee mugs in souvenir shops.)