5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (18 page)

1199:

King Richard I, “the Lionheart,” pauses to admire an arrow fired directly at him at Chalus. It hits him in the shoulder. As he lies dying of blood poisoning, he congratulates the bowman on his skill.

1632:

Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, refuses to wear any steel body armor at the Battle of Lützen, saying,

“The Lord God is my armor!” He is killed.

1836:

Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and his troops find themselves near a wood known to be full of Texan soldiers, but they insist on taking their usual afternoon siesta. While Santa Anna and his men quietly snooze, the Texans attack and rout the entire Mexican army in less than twenty minutes.

1849:

At Chillianwalla, nearsighted Brigadier Pope faces his cavalry in the wrong direction and leads them in a charge away from the battlefield.

1862:

General “Stonewall” Jackson, a strict Presbyterian who refuses to fight on Sundays, spends the day praying alone during the thick of the battle of Mechanicsville, refusing to speak to anyone while his troops take heavy casualties.

1864:

Major General John Sedgwick, unimpressed by Confederate sniper fire at the battle of Spotsylvania,
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[Ten Military Bloopers]

scoffs: “What! What! Men dodging this way from a single bullet! I am ashamed of you. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist . . .”

1869:

Francisco Lopez, the president of Paraguay, wages a hopeless war on three fronts against his neighboring enemies Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. He is outnumbered ten to one by their combined armies.

Lopez decides to make up the numbers by sending out a battalion of twelve-year-olds wearing false beards.

1879:

British Lord Chelmsford invades Zululand but suspects that the Zulus might not fight. At Isandlwana, 1,300 British troops are slaughtered.

Fifty-five survive.

1944:

Erwin Rommel, Hitler’s commander entrusted with the defense of France’s Channel coast against a possible Allied invasion, decides on the eve of D-Day that it is so quiet he might as well go home and celebrate his wife’s birthday.

195

Ten For10

mer Occupations

of Dictators

1

JOSEPH STALIN, RULER OF THE SOVIET UNION, 1929–53 Trainee priest

2

JOSIP BROZ (MARSHAL TITO), PRESIDENT OF

YUGOSLAVIA, 1945–80 Locksmith

3

RAFAEL TRUJILLO, PRESIDENT OF THE

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, 1930–61, and

GENERAL NE WIN, PRESIDENT OF BURMA,

1962–88 Post office clerks

4

BENITO MUSSOLINI, RULER OF ITALY,

1922–43, and MAO ZEDONG, CHAIRMAN OF

THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA,

1931–76 Trainee teachers

5

“PAPA DOC” DUVALIER, RULER OF HAITI,

1957–71 Family doctor

6

ENVER HOXHA, RULER OF ALBANIA,

1945–85 Tobacconist

7

FERDINAND MARCOS, PRESIDENT OF THE

PHILIPPINES, 1965–86 Criminal lawyer

8

NICOLAE CEAU¸

SESCU, PRESIDENT OF

ROMANIA, 1965–89 Shoemaker

9

POL POT, RULER OF CAMBODIA, 1975–79 Buddhist monk

10

IDI AMIN, PRESIDENT OF UGANDA, 1971–79

Doughnut vendor

196

Ten

10

Household Accessories

Belonging to Serial Killer

Ed Gein

1

Lamp shades made from human skin

2

A belt made from nipples

3

Four noses and a heart

4

A table with shinbone legs

5

A bowl made from the top of a human skull 6

Salted female genitals in a shoe box

7

A pair of lips on a string curtain pull

8

A shirt of human skin complete with female breasts 9

The faces of nine women, mounted on a wall 10

A head with large nails hammered through each ear
197

10

Ten Kleptocrats

1

JOSEPH MOBUTU, PRESIDENT OF ZAIRE

So rich, it was said, he could write a personal check to pay off his country’s entire foreign debt. Although his country was one of the world’s poorest, he chartered a French Concorde jet to fly his family to Europe on monthly shopping trips, and had pink champagne flown in from Paris and prostitutes delivered from Scandinavia.

He sent a government jet to Venezuela thirty-two times to ferry back five thousand longhaired sheep so he could build himself a model farm in the Zaire jungle.

2

JEAN-BÉDEL BOKASSA, RULER OF THE

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC His country was

officially rated the poorest in Africa, but he spent $18

million on a forty-eight-hour coronation binge to celebrate his “promotion” from president to emperor in 1977. At the coronation ceremony, which required the purchase of 100 limousines and 130 thoroughbred horses, guests drank about 65,000 bottles of champagne served by an army of waiters imported from Paris and were entertained by a 120-piece orchestra.

3

FERDINAND MARCOS, PRESIDENT OF THE

PHILIPPINES He appropriated up to one-third of all loans to the Philippines in the form of kickbacks and commissions and oversaw foreign investment in his country for a “small fee”; a U.S. nuclear power company once paid him tens of millions of dollars in bribes to allow them to build on Philippines land. As it turned out, it was money not well spent: The power station was never used, having been built over an earthquake zone.

198

[Ten Kleptocrats]

At one time, Marcos’s wife Imelda, apart from her influence as a world-class buyer of fashion footwear, was said to be the world’s single biggest buyer of jewelry.

4

NICOLAE CEAU¸

SESCU, PRESIDENT OF

ROMANIA He bulldozed the center of Bucharest to make way for a monumental avenue leading to the world’s largest palace, an architectural eyesore incorporating the work of about seven hundred interior designers, second in size only to the Pentagon and featuring a marble-lined nuclear bunker. The construction of the new Palace of the People required the destruction of dozens of historic buildings, including twenty-six churches, and it forced about forty thousand people to give up their homes in exchange for small apartments in a grim concrete residential block.

Romanian TV newswomen were forbidden to wear jewelry so they would not appear more glamorous than their first lady, Elena Ceau¸sescu.

5

FRAN ÇOIS “PAPA DOC” DUVALIER,

PRESIDENT OF HAITI He raised corruption to an art form, diverting millions of dollars in foreign-aid money into his own bank account. “Papa Doc” also hit upon a way of literally bleeding his own people dry by rounding up thousands of Haitians and marching them to the nearest blood bank, where each was given $1.80—about a week’s wages—in exchange for a quart of blood. The blood was then sold to the United States, where it was resold for transfusion at $22 a quart. “Papa Doc”

dreamed of building a permanent memorial to his
199

[Ten Kleptocrats]

megalomania, a new Haitian city called Duvalierville.

Haitian telephone subscribers were surprised to find that they had been charged an extra levy to fund the building project, especially as their country’s telephone system had not worked for twenty years.

6

JEAN-CLAUDE “BABY DOC” DUVALIER,

PRESIDENT OF HAITI When his father, “Papa Doc,”

died, he became at nineteen the youngest president in the world. In 1981, the International Monetary Fund gave $22 million to the treasury of Haiti, only to discover two days later that $20 million of it had been withdrawn by “Baby Doc.” Much of the money funded the extravagant lifestyle of his wife Michele, including $50,000 a month to fly flowers from Miami to Haiti. She always turned the air conditioning up to maximum so she could wear her fur coats indoors.

7

KING ZOG OF ALBANIA In 1939, an invasion by Mussolini forced Albania’s despot and his wife to flee into exile, accompanied by the entire national treasury.

The Zogs sat out the war years in the Ritz in London, where they thought it wise to sell their bright-red Mercedes, a wedding present from Adolf Hitler that was inconveniently identical to the one used by the Führer himself.

8

KIM JONG-IL, PRESIDENT OF NORTH KOREA

He is the world’s biggest single buyer of French cognac: The Dear Leader’s annual spending on his favorite tipple, which costs $1,300 a bottle in Seoul, is nearly eight
200

[Ten Kleptocrats]

hundred times the income of the average North Korean citizen. Kim Jong-Il also maintains a harem of about two thousand imported blondes and young Asian women, his

“Joy Brigade” comprising a “satisfaction team” for sexual favors, a “happiness team” for massages, and a “dancing team” for postcoital karaoke and dancing performances.

9

JOAQUÍN BALAGUER, PRESIDENT OF THE

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Balaguer bankrupted his country by spending millions on a massive illuminated cross, intended to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas.

Slums were razed to make way for the project and escalating costs led to soaring food prices. Balaguer was forced to cancel the opening ceremony in 1990 when he was snubbed by his invited guests, the king of Spain and the pope. When the illumination was finally switched on for the first time, it caused a disastrous drain on the national grid—unnoticed, however, by the 60 percent of the country’s people who still did not have electricity.

10

SANI ABACHA, MILITARY DICTATOR OF

NIGERIA He stole more than $4 billion during his five-year reign. Abacha died of a heart attack in 1998, aged fifty-four, during a Viagra-fueled romp with three Indian prostitutes. A few weeks after his death, police at Kano airport became suspicious when his widow, Maryam, tried to leave the country with thirty-eight pieces of luggage. Each was found to be stuffed with U.S. dollars.

Mrs. Abacha explained that she was not stealing the money, just “putting away the funds in some foreign
201

[Ten Kleptocrats]

accounts for safekeeping.” To dispel any lingering suspicions that she may have had anything to hide, she hired the services of O. J. Simpson’s legal expert Johnnie Cochran. The Nigerian government agreed to drop charges in exchange for the return of the billions of dollars sent to foreign bank accounts while her husband was in office.

202

Ten

10

Monarchs Madder than

King George III

1

KING CHARLES VI “THE FOOLISH” OF

FRANCE (C. 1380–1422) Early in his reign, he was struck down by a mystery illness that made his hair and nails fall out. He made a complete physical recovery but lived on in equally complete mental derangement, often given to bouts of extreme violence for most of his thirty-year rule. His physicians tried to cure him with shock treatment by arranging for seventeen men with blackened faces to hide in his room; when Charles entered, they all jumped out and shouted “Boo!” In one of his more lucid moments, he found out that his wife had taken a lover, the Count of Armagnac: Charles had him strangled and drowned in the River Seine.

2

SULTAN MURAD IV OF TURKEY (C. 1623–40)

Murad set himself a goal of taking ten lives a day, beheading anyone who annoyed him. He also enjoyed daily target-practice with his long-barreled gun, shooting at innocent passersby who strayed too close to his bedroom window. Murad once came across a party of women who were enjoying a picnic and had them all drowned because they were making too much noise. He killed one of his doctors by forcing to him to swallow an overdose of opium and murdered a musician for humming a Persian tune. Wherever he traveled, his stopping-off points were usually marked by spot executions of smokers—another of his pet hates. In the first five years of his reign he had about 25,000 people put to death, and he killed many of them himself.

203

[Ten Monarchs Madder than King George III]

3

KING CHRISTIAN VII OF DENMARK

(C. 1766–1808) This king indulged in violent wrecking sprees around his palace, often beating his head against walls until he drew blood. He spent his evenings stalking the streets of Copenhagen with a gang of friends, occasionally destroying brothels. He lived the last twenty years of his life in seclusion and was completely crazy, though he was dragged out to make an occasional ceremonial appearance. Little was known of the king’s mental condition outside royal circles; even when the full story broke years later, Danish history books taught that Christian had simply become a little odd because he had been sexually abused by pageboys when he was a child.

4

KING FREDERICK WILLIAM I OF PRUSSIA

(C. 1713–40) A close relative of King George III, the

“Soldier King” carried a rattan stick, which he used to thrash anyone in sight, including members of his own household. At mealtimes he threw plates and silverware, attacked his servants, and either starved his children or spat in their food. He kept two pistols loaded with salt by his side: One valet had his eye shot out, another was crippled. His courtiers were so afraid of him that when one of them was summoned to the king’s private quarters he dropped dead with fright. On his deathbed, the king was visited by a priest who read from the Book of Job: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither.” “Not quite naked,” the king corrected him. “I shall have my uniform on.”

204

[Ten Monarchs Madder than King George III]

5

KING FERDINAND VI OF SPAIN (C. 1746–59)

The only son of the mentally disturbed King Philip V, his reign was marked by a series of increasingly desperate suicide attempts during which he alternately tried starving and eating himself to death, cut his wrists with scissors, hanged himself with bedsheets, and strangled himself with table napkins. When all else failed, he begged his doctors to give him poison. He died of natural causes in his sleep at age forty-six.