World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (4 page)

By 1913, Rothstein had become one of the most powerful figures in New York, with friends in high places as well as low. His polite manner, his formidable intelligence and, of course, his tolerance towards all kinds of immoral activities made him a central conduit between the corrupt politicians of Tammany Hall and the ruthless mobsters of the criminal world. On the one hand, he received protection from Tammany Hall boss Charles F. Murphy and his advisor Tom Foley; on the other, he was in league with mob bosses such as Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Such was his standing in the crime world that he became known by many nicknames, including ‘The Brain’, ‘The Fixer’ and ‘Mr Big’. As well as his gambling interests, he ran a real estate enterprise, a bail bond business and a racing stables. He amassed a fortune, and expanded his interests in and around the New York area. Today, Rothstein is credited with consolidating organized crime into what later became known as the Mafia.

As well as betting on horse races and baseball games, Rothstein was also rumoured to ‘fix’ them. The most sensational of these rumours hit the headlines in 1919, during the World Series, when members of the Chicago White Sox team agreed to lose the game to the Cincinnati team for payment. In 1921, eight of the men were convicted of fraud and were banned from playing baseball again professionally. Rothstein was also called to testify in the case, but was acquitted due to lack of evidence. To this day, it is still unclear exactly what his involvement was in the scandal.

The Day Of Reckoning

Despite his links with the criminal underworld, Rothstein always seemed to keep his hands clean and emerge unscathed from any scandal. Up until the day of his death, he was never convicted of any criminal activity. However, in 1928, his luck ran out. He took part in a high-stakes game of poker that lasted several days. In the end, he lost a total of over three hundred thousand dollars and, in the weeks that ensued, did not pay off his debts. The host of the game, George McManus, eventually called him to a meeting in a hotel room to settle the matter. Rothstein was then somehow shot in the abdomen. McManus was arrested but later acquitted due to lack of evidence. The shot proved fatal when Rothstein died several days later. Thus, the kingpin of the New York underworld was finally brought down by a dispute over a game of cards.

Birmingham Church Bombing

On 15 September 1963, one of the most significant racially motivated terrorist attacks ever to take place in the United States occurred at the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, during a service. On that quiet Sunday morning, nineteen sticks of dynamite, secretly planted by Ku Klux Klan members in the church’s basement, detonated with a huge blast. Four teenage girls – Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley – were killed, and twenty-two more of the congregation injured.

The bombing had been intended to intimidate the black people of Birmingham, who at the time were the subject of constant racist attacks, so much so that the city was becoming known as ‘Bombingham’. But this proved to be one bomb too many. The people of Birmingham and America as a whole, both black and white, were outraged by this unprovoked assault on a peaceful group of citizens at prayer, and their calls for justice helped to foster the burgeoning civil rights movement of the day.

When the case came to trial, the authorities, under segregationist governor George Wallace, let the bombers off lightly, in true Southern style. However, resentment against the injustice of the incident continued to simmer, until many years later the case was reopened and the culprits finally brought to book.

The Birmingham church bombing eventually became one of the most renowned cold cases in United States legal history. As the mother of one of the victims, by that time aged eighty-two and in a wheelchair, commented when justice was done more than three decades after the event: ‘I’m very happy that justice finally came down today. I didn’t know whether it would come in my lifetime.’

Rule Of Hate

In the mid 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan was continuing its rule of hate in the South. It was a secret society dedicated to the eradication and intimidation of black people, and its members had infiltrated the top echelons of the police and judiciary. Ordinary citizens were terrified of the Klan, which often took reprisals against white people as well as black, in response to what they saw as fraternizing with the enemy. In the city of Birmingham, which had a large black population, there were constant attacks on black leaders, and the perpetrators of these crimes were left unpunished, or given ludicrously lenient fines or prison sentences. By 1963, the situation had got completely out of hand. On 15 September 1963, the congregation of the Bethel Baptist Church on 16th Street, Birmingham, assembled for Sunday worship. A group of eighty teenage girls went down to the basement with their teacher for a Sunday school class. At 10.22, the church exploded: walls collapsed, windows were blown out, and the air was filled with dust. Some survivors managed to crawl out of the rubble, but others could not move. When the rescue operation began, the mangled bodies of the four dead girls were recovered. The remnants of dynamite sticks were found under a flight of stairs leading to the basement.

A Scene Of Carnage

The bombing provoked national outrage; even Governor Wallace condemned the crime. The FBI came under intense pressure to find the culprits and a reward was advertised for information leading to the culprits. Just fifteen days after the event, three men were arrested: Robert Chambliss, John Wesley Hall, and Charles Cagle. Known as a virulent racist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, ‘Dynamite Bob’ Chambliss had been observed on the day of the bombing standing stock-still watching the scene of carnage, while others around him rushed to help the victims. Chambliss was on friendly terms with the local police force, and was widely considered to have immunity from police prosecution as a result.

To the dismay of the nation, the racist Southern courts gave the men only six-month suspended jail sentences, and fined them a thousand dollars each. The Klan were jubilant. But public pressure continued to mount, and the FBI continued their investigations, concluding that the bombing was the work of four men, all members of the same Klan group. Their names were Robert Chambliss, Thomas Blanton Jnr, Bobby Frank Cherry and Herman Frank Cash.

FBI Cover-Up

The FBI assembled a mass of evidence against these men, but FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover suppressed the information, fearing that a prosecution would fan the flames of the civil rights movement. Hoover was obsessed with destroying the reputation of Martin Luther King, whom he regarded as a Communist agent, and knew that the truth about the Birmingham bombing would help the civil rights leader’s case. However, there were others who were more concerned that justice should be done. In 1970, the new Attorney General of Alabama, William J. Baxley, was elected, and made it his business to get to the bottom of the case, which had shocked him deeply as he was growing up.

Baxley put a great deal of effort into investigating the case, but after a few years became convinced that the only way it would be solved would be to reopen the suppressed FBI files. He threatened the FBI with exposure for withholding the information, and in 1976, the bureau finally allowed him access to the files. The following year, Robert Chambliss was brought to trial, and his niece, Elizabeth Cobbs, testified against him, along with others. Chambliss received a sentence of life imprisonment, and died in 1985, still swearing to the very end that he was innocent.

Baxley had made himself too unpopular to win an election as governor of the state. Once he was out of power, the case grew colder and colder. However, fifteen years later, in 1997 it was finally reopened. The FBI were continuing to block the investigation, but new evidence had apparently come to light – Herman Frank Cash, one of the original suspects, had died, but Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were tracked down – Cherry living in a beaten-up trailer in Texas. The pair were arrested for murder.

Murder Boasts

Blanton’s trial in 2001, over thirty years after the event, attracted national attention. The FBI had planted a bug in his apartment, and, on the tape, he was heard talking about bombing the church. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case against Cherry took longer to bring to court, because his lawyers alleged that he was mentally unfit to be tried. However, eventually, the trial took place in 2002. His ex-wife and granddaughter testified against him, and secret FBI tapes revealed that he boasted about bombing the church. Like Blanton, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison two years later.

Thus it was that the perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing were finally brought to justice in one of the oldest, coldest cases in United States legal history. In his oration at the girls’ funeral, Dr Martin Luther King had said: ‘God has a way of wringing good out of evil’. Decades after their death – and King’s assassination too – with the power of the Ku Klux Klan diminished in the South, many felt that his words had finally come true.

The Bitch of Buchenwald

In 1950, when the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ Ilse Koch was finally tried for mass-murder in a German court, she protested that she had no knowledge at all of what had gone on in the concentration-camp outside Weimar. Despite the evidence of dozens of ex-inmates, she insisted:

‘I was merely a housewife. I was busy raising my children. I never saw anything that was against humanity!’

As hundreds of people gathered outside the court shouted ‘Kill her! Kill her!’ she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Ilse Koch was born in Dresden, and by the age of 17 she was a voluptuous blue-eyed blonde: the very model of Aryan womanhood – and every potential storm-trooper’s wet dream. Enrolling in the Nazi Youth Party, she went to work in a bookshop that sold party literature and under-the-counter pornography; and she was soon having a string of affairs with SS men. Then, though, she came to the attention of SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, who selected her as the perfect mate for his then top aide, the brutish Karl Koch. Shortly after the wedding, when Koch was appointed commander of Buchenwald, she was installed in a villa near the camp, given two children, and then more or less forgotten by her husband, who was too busy staging multiple sex-orgies in Weimar to care.

Perhaps in revenge, Ilse began mounting orgies of her own, taking five or six of her husband’s officers into her bed at a time. She was perverse, sexually insatiable – and it wasn’t long after the beginning of the war that she started turning her attention to the mostly Jewish prisoners at the camp.

She first sunbathed nude outside the wire to tantalise them; then started greeting their trucks and transport trains semi-naked, fondling her breasts and shouting obscenties. If any of the incoming prisoners looked up at her, they were beaten senseless; and on one occasion, about which she filled out a report, two were clubbed to death and one had his face ground into the earth until he suffocated. All were executed, she wrote blithely, for ogling her.

She encouraged the guards to use the prisoners for target practice; and often took part herself. She scouted out good-looking soldiers seconded to the camp and offered them mass-orgies with her. Then, finally – perhaps jaded with mere sex – she started to collect trophies.

One day, by chance, she saw two tattooed prisoners working without their shirts. She ordered them to be killed immediately and their skins prepared and brought to her. She soon became obsessed with the possibilities of human skin, particularly if tattooed. She had lampshades made from the skin of selected prisoners for her living room, even a pair of gloves. Not content with this, she also started to experiment with prisoners’ severed heads, having them shrunk down by the dozen to grapefruit size to decorate her dining-room.

She was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg after the war by an American military court, and sentenced to life in prison, but two years later she was released, on the grounds that a crime by one German against others could not properly be considered a war crime. By the time she appeared in a German court in Augsburg, she was a bloated, raddled figure who blamed everything on her husband – who had conveniently been executed by the Nazis for embezzlement years before. She staged an epileptic fit in court, and when she heard its final judgment in her prison cell, she merely laughed. She died in prison in 1971.