Facts About These Notorious Law Breakers and Their Criminal History

39. An Oldies Fan

A small and dapper man in his mid-fifties at war’s end, van Meegeren was born in 1889 in the Dutch provincial town of Delft, the birthplace of seventeenth-century painter Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer had not been acclaimed during his lifetime, and faded into obscurity soon after his death in 1675. However, his works were rediscovered in the nineteenth century, and his reputation grew. By the time van Megeeren came of age, Vermeer was acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

Growing up in Delft, van Meegeren developed a passion for the art of the Dutch Golden Age, and became a huge fan of Delft’s most famous painter, Vermeer. Van Meegeren was mentored by an art teacher who reinforced his passion for old-time paintings, and influenced him into rejecting modern art as decadent and degenerate. In his early twenties, and defying his father, who wanted him to study architecture, van Meegeren moved to The Hague to study painting.

38. A Mediocre Painter

Van Meegeren graduated from art school in 1914, and got a job as an assistant art professor. He supplemented his income with commercial paintings for advertisements, Christmas cards, portraits, and landscapes. In the 1920s, he became relatively popular with paintings of tame deer belonging to a Dutch princess, which became a hit with the masses. All in all, van Meegeren was a relatively successful artist in his own country, although not exactly a trailblazing one.

By the late 1920s, however, van Meegeren’s old school tastes grew old. Contemporary critics, who were more into modern art forms like Surrealism and Cubism, began to deride van Meegeren’s work as derivative. They basically called him an unoriginal hack, who could only imitate the works of other artists. He responded by getting into a flame war with his critics, heatedly attacking them in art publications. By the time the dust settled in 1930, van Meegeren had rendered himself a pariah in the art world.

37. Turning to Crime

Wounded and angered by the criticism of his talents, van Meegeren set out to show his detractors. They had derided him for imitating the old-time Dutch Masters, so he decided to prank and punk them by producing a painting so good that it would rival the best works of the Dutch Golden Age. So good, in fact, that the critics would be unable to tell the difference.

In short, van Meegeren decided to turn to criminal forgery, by producing artwork indistinguishable from the best of centuries past, and passing it off as the work of Dutch Masters. Aside from the satisfaction of pulling one over at the art critics, van Meegeren figured that his quest would be highly profitable – if he could pull it off. So in 1932, he moved to southern France, and began experimenting with the technical and chemical procedures necessary for producing the perfect forgery.

36. Perfect Forgery of Art Requires Perfecting the Art of Forgery

Van Meegeren went to great lengths to prepare his forgeries. He began by purchasing authentic seventeenth-century painting canvases. He also mixed his own paints, using the same materials and formulas used by the Dutch Masters, and created paintbrushes from the same materials they had used. However, his greatest challenge was making a painting made a few months ago seem like it was three centuries old.

It takes decades for an oil painting to fully harden: a blob of paint in recent work dents if pressed. Van Meegeren needed to make paint that looks old, which meant it had to be dry. So he bought a pizza oven, and experimented to find the right paint mix that could withstand the heat of the oven and harden, without losing its brilliance. His experimental paints kept burning and melting, but he kept at it – for years. Eventually, he discovered that the trick was to dissolve a small amount of plastic into the paint. Van Meegeren was now ready for the ultimate criminal art con job.

35. Painting the Perfect Vermeer

After years of experimenting with his criminal forgery techniques, van Meegeren was finally ready to make his big move. In 1936, he painted The Supper at Emmaus in the style of Vermeer, and handed it off to a lawyer friend, claiming it was a hitherto “undiscovered” work by the famous Dutch Master. A renowned art historian examined it, accepted it as genuine, and praised it to the skies as “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft“.

The “discovery” of The Supper at Emmaus took the art world by storm. Wealthy art lovers of The Rembrandt Society chipped in, and purchased the painting for the equivalent of $5 million in 2020 dollars. It was donated to a prominent Rotterdam museum, where it was highlighted as a centerpiece in an exhibition of Dutch masterpieces. Pleased at having pulled it off – and even more pleased with the money gained – van Meegeren invested the proceeds in buying himself a nice mansion in Nice, and began to pump it out more forgeries.

34. Conning Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering

Van Meegeren moved back to the Netherlands at the start of WWII, but the war caught up with him when Germany overran and occupied the country in 1940. Nazi occupation did little to cramp van Meegeren’s style, and he continued producing forgeries and passing them off as originals. In 1942, one of his forgeries, Christ With the Adulteress, by “Vermeer”, was sold to a Nazi art dealer, who in turn sold it to Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering for the equivalent of $7 million today.

Christ With the Adulteress became Goering’s pride and joy, and he prominently showcased it in his mansion. After the war, the Allies discovered Goering’s art collection – looted from all across Europe – stashed in an Austrian mine. Included was Christ With The Adulteress, along with receipts and documentation linking it to van Meegeren. Selling such a rare piece of Dutch cultural heritage to Hitler’s number two was clear evidence of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. Collaborators being in especially bad odor soon after liberation from the Nazis, the recently reinstated Dutch authorities went gunning for van Meegeren.

Read too: These 10 Pieces of Art Stolen by the Nazis that are Still Missing Today.

33. Forging for His Life

Arrested and faced with collaboration charges punishable by death, van Meegeren realized that saving his life required that he come clean. So he confessed to having forged the “Vermeer” purchased by Goering, plus many other paintings falsely attributed to Dutch Masters. Understandably, the authorities were skeptical, so van Meegeren offered to prove it by producing another forgery. He would literally paint, or forge, for his life.

From July to December, 1945, in the presence of reporters and court-appointed witnesses, van Meegeren proceeded to forge another “Vermeer”. Using the same materials and techniques, he produced Young Christ in the Temple, which experts acknowledged was produced by the same hand that had created the “masterpiece” bought by Goering. A witness described the then-imprisoned Goering’s discovery that his beloved Christ With The Adulteress had been a criminal forgery, as that of a stunned innocent discovering for the first time that there is evil in the world.

32. From Traitor to National Hero

After van Meegeren successfully demonstrated that he was merely a criminal forger and not a traitor, the prosecutors dropped the charges of treason and collaboration against him. The revelation that he had conned the Nazis transformed him in Dutch eyes from a derided traitor into a national hero, who had performed an act of resistance by sticking it to the hated occupiers.

That did not get him off the hook with the authorities, however. Van Meegeren was prosecuted on the lesser criminal charges of forgery and fraud, and in November of 1947, he was found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of a year behind bars. However, he ended up not serving a single day of his sentence. A few days after the sentencing, while free during the grace period for filing an appeal, van Meegeren suffered a heart attack and was rushed to a hospital. There, he suffered a second heart attack, this one fatal, and died on December 30^th, 1947.

31. The Forger Who Saved Thousands of Jews

French teenager Adolphe Kaminsky joined the Resistance after France’s defeat and subsequent occupation by the Nazis. He was a precocious and self-taught gifted chemist. He combined that with a talent for forgery to make himself perhaps Europe’s best underground forger. Adolphe specialized in identity papers, and forged documents that helped save the lives of thousands of Jews.

He was born in 1925 to Russian Jewish parents who had emigrated to Argentina, before the family relocated to France in 1932. To help support his family, Adolphe dropped out of school at age thirteen and got a job working for dry cleaners. The work entailed the use of various compounds, which led to a familiarity with, and subsequent passion for, chemistry. He started reading up on chemistry, and got a part time job working for a chemist on weekends. That knowledge and love of chemistry would come in handy during Adolphe’s subsequent career as a forger.

30. Forging for the Resistance

Adolphe Kaminsky was fifteen when France fell to the Germans in 1940. It did not take long before he and his Jewish family felt the Nazi yoke. First, Adolphe’s home was seized early in the occupation to quarter German troops, and his family was evicted. The following year, the Nazis shot his mother dead. In 1943, Adolphe’s family was rounded up and interned in a holding camp, preparatory to deportation to Auschwitz. They were only saved by a last-minute intervention from the Argentinean consul.

In the meantime, Adolphe had joined the French Resistance at age sixteen. Sent by his father to pick up forged identity papers from a Resistance cell, he discovered that they faced difficulties removing a particular dye. The precocious chemist gave them a solution off the top of his head that immediately solved their problem. Impressed, the Resistance recruited Adolphe and put him to work in an underground laboratory in Paris. There, he spent the rest of the war forging identity papers for those on the run from the Nazis and in need of fake IDs, particularly Jews.

29. “The Robin Hood of False Papers“

By war’s end, Adolphe Kaminsky had produced fake documents that helped save over 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children, from the horrors of the Holocaust. After the war, he worked as a professional photographer. However, he continued his clandestine work as a master forger, lending his talents to disadvantaged peoples and liberation causes around the world.

He created documents for thousands of freedom fighters, such as the Algerian FLN, refugees, exiles, and pacifists. As the Jerusalem Post summed his career: “He grew to be a humanist forger, a utopian outlaw, the Robin Hood of false papers, preparing passports and identity cards for the world’s oppressed.”

28. The Light Fingered Maid

Britain, until well into the nineteenth century, routinely got rid of convicted criminals via penal transportation – a system of shipping undesirables to far away colonies. Upon arrival, the convicts were sold into indentured servitude for a fixed term. During the eighteenth century, Britain’s American Colonies and the West Indies were the most popular dumping grounds for such undesirables.

It was via penal transportation that Sarah Wilson (circa 1754 – circa 1865) arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1771. Once a maid in Buckingham Palace to one of Queen Charlotte’s ladies in waiting, Sarah had light fingers, and was caught stealing some of the queen’s jewels and gowns. She was tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang – theft being one of the hundreds of crimes punishable by death in Britain back then. Luckily, her sentence was commuted to penal transportation. Like many immigrants, Sarah would reinvent herself in the New World. Unlike most immigrants, she would reinvent herself as a royal princess.

27. The Princess Maid

Upon arrival in Baltimore, jailbird and penal exile Sarah Wilson was taken off the convict ship and sold as an indentured servant. However, she escaped within a few days. She had managed to hang on to some of Queen Charlotte’s belongings, and wearing the queen’s dress, she claimed to be Queen Charlotte’s sister, “Princess Susana Caroline Matilda of Mecklenberg-Strelitz”. She explained her presence in the American Colonies by inventing a royal family quarrel, and a scandal that required her to leave Britain until things calmed down temporarily.

During her time as a maid in Buckingham Palace, Sarah had observed royal mannerisms and aristocratic etiquette. She managed to pull off a convincing imitation that duped many Colonials into believing that she really was a princess, and parlayed that into a life of luxury. For years, the criminal “Princess Susana” traveled up and down the American Colonies, from New Hampshire in the north all the way down south to the Carolinas. She was hosted in style by many government officials, wealthy Americans, social climbers, and others eager to befriend and win the favor of a royal.

26. The “Royal” Conwoman

Sarah Wilson grifted many out of considerable sums by promising them royal appointments or telling them that she would put in a good word for them with her sister and brother in the law, the Queen and King of Britain. She also took out numerous loans, and bought many luxury items on credit from merchants and shopkeepers eager for royal patronage and the custom of a princess.

The scam ended when her master finally caught her and took her back to Baltimore. In 1775, she escaped again, and made her way northwards, where she met and married a British Army officer during the American Revolution. After the war, the couple stayed in the newly independent United States, after which Sarah vanished from the historic record.

25. The Jailbird Who Did Good

Eddie Chapman (1914 – 1997) was a safecracker, thief, crook, and all-around career criminal, who became the only Englishman ever awarded a German Iron Cross. It was ironic on many levels, because he was also one of history’s most colorful double-crossers. He fed the Germans false information that derailed the effectiveness of their “Vengeance Weapons”, and likely saved the lives of thousands of Londoners.

Raised in a dysfunctional family, Chapman was a criminal from early on. He enlisted at age 17, but within a few months grew bored and deserted. When the army caught up with him, he was sentenced to a prison stint and a dishonorable discharge. After his release, he turned to fraud and crime to support a gambling habit and a taste for fine drinks.

24. Chapman Cons the Nazis

At the start of WWII, Chapman was on the lam, hiding in Jersey in the Channel Islands from arrest warrants awaiting him in the British mainland. A botched burglary earned him a two-year sentence in a Jersey prison, where the Germans found him when they captured the Channel Islands in 1940. He offered to work for them, so they freed and trained him in explosives, sabotage, and other clandestine skills. They then parachuted into Britain in 1942, tasked with destroying a bomber factory.

He was arrested soon after landing, however, and immediately accepted an offer to become a double agent – an easy choice, considering that the likeliest alternative would have been a hangman’s noose. Given the codename “Agent Zigzag”, a plan was concocted to fake the bomber factory’s destruction. It convinced the Germans, and raised Chapman high in their esteem. From then on, his radio reports, carefully fed him by British intelligence, were treated as gospel by the Germans.

23. Screwing the Nazis, and Getting Lionized by Them

Eddie Chapman was recalled to the Third Reich, and given a hero’s welcome by the Germans. Soon after D-Day, he was awarded an Iron Cross and sent back to Britain to report on the effectiveness of the German V1 and V2 rocket strikes on London. Under British control, he sent the Germans inflated figures about deaths from their rockets, while deceiving them about their actual impact points. That led the Germans to shift their aim points, with the result that they tended to fall on lower population density parts of London, with correspondingly fewer casualties.

After the war, Chapman continued his colorful life, went into smuggling, moved to the colonies, and started a farm. In violation of the Official Secrets Act, got his exploits were published in The Eddie Chapman Story (1953), Free Agent: Further Adventures of Eddie Chapman (1955), and The Real Eddie Chapman Story (1966). Collectively, they formed the basis of a 1967 movie, Triple Cross.

22. The Jailbird Who Did Bad

If Eddie Chapman was the jailbird who did good in WWII, Harold Cole (1906 – 1946) was the jailbird who did bad. An English criminal, Cole served in the British Army, the French Resistance – and double-crossed both by working for Germans. During his extraordinary wartime career, he lied and conned his way across France, joined the Nazis, and snitched on the Resistance, resulting in the arrest and execution of many.

Cole had already become a burglar, check forger, and embezzler in his teens. By 1939, he had served multiple stints in prison. When WWII began, he lied about his criminal history to enlist in the British Army and was sent to France. Promoted to sergeant, he was arrested for stealing money from the Sergeants’ Mess to spend on hookers. He became a POW in May, 1940 when the Germans captured the guardhouse where he was jailed.

21. Joining and Betraying the French Resistance

Harold Cole escaped, and got in touch with the French Resistance, claiming to be a British intelligence agent sent to organize escape lines to get stranded and escaped Allied military personnel back home. For some time, Cole actually did positive work, escorting escaped personnel across Nazi-occupied territory to the relative safety of Vichy France, from which they slipped into Spain and a ship back home.

However, he also embezzled from the funds intended to finance those operations to pay for a high society lifestyle of nightclubs, pricey restaurants, expensive champagne, fast cars, and faster girls. When his thefts came to light in 1941, the Resistance arrested and locked him up. While they deliberated on what to do with him, Cole escaped. On the run from the Resistance, he turned himself in to the Germans, gave them 30 pages of Resistance member names and addresses, and became an agent of the SS’ Sicherheitdienst, or SD. Over 150 Resistance members were arrested, of whom at least 50 were executed. Cole was present during the interrogation and torture of many of his former colleagues.

20. End of the Road for a Triple Traitor

As Allied armies neared Paris in 1944, Harold Cole fled in a Gestapo uniform. In June, 1945, he turned up in southern Germany, claiming to be a British undercover agent, and offered his services to the American occupation forces. Triple crossing, he turned against the Nazis, hunting and flushing them out of hiding, and murdering at least one of them.

The British discovered Cole’s whereabouts and arrested him, but he escaped the prison where he was awaiting court-martial and headed to France. French police received a tip-off that he was hiding in a central Paris apartment, and on January 8^th, 1946, they crept up a staircase to seize him. Their heavy tread gave them away. however, and he met them at the doorway, pistol in hand. In the ensuing shootout, Cole was struck multiple time, and bled to death.

19. The Gruesome Grave Digger

In 1971, West German police were disturbed when they began receiving reports that somebody was robbing graves, exhuming bodies from cemeteries, and gnawing on them. The female corpses were sexually abused as well. In May, 1972, a morgue attendant came across somebody kissing a cadaver. When he tried to stop him, the culprit pulled out a pistol and fired, but missed.

The morgue worker gave police a description of the assailant, and they threw a dragnet. It eventually caught Kuno Hofmann, a deaf and mute laborer who had lost the powers of speech and hearing after his alcoholic father beat him in childhood. Hofmann had a rap sheet, including nine years in prison for theft. When the cops interrogated him, he readily confessed to a bizarre crime spree.

18. Macabre Self-Improvement

While behind bars, Kuno Hofmann had developed an obsession with self-improvement via occult “sciences”. He read extensively on satanic rituals, witchcraft, dark magic, and especially on vampirism and necrophilia. His occult readings led him to believe that he could become handsome and popular by performing dark magic rituals with corpses. Hence, the grave robbing.

On at least 35 occasions, Hofmann snuck into graveyards or mortuaries, and even managed to get copies of the keys to a local cemetery. He wanted the recently dead, so chose his victims from recent death notices in newspapers. He would try to get them in the morgue, but if he could not, he would wait until they were buried, then dig up their graves. Once he secured a corpse, Hofmann would perform rituals that involved stabbing and slashing it, cutting off the head on occasion, and drinking the blood. Other times, he would chew on the corpse, and if it was of a female he found attractive, he would have sex with it.

17. The Need for Ever Fresher Corpses

When Kuno Hofmann’s grave robbing and sexual molestation of corpses failed to make him handsome and popular, he reasoned it was because the corpses were not fresh enough. So he decided to get the freshest possible corpses, by killing people.

Hofmann’s first victims were lovers in a car. After shooting them dead, he drank the blood from their wounds, then he had sex with the girl’s corpse. As he told police, he liked her more than the graveyard corpses. He killed another victim, and would have gone on killing more, if his spree had not been cut short by his arrest. Hofmann was deemed insane, and ordered confined in a mental asylum for the rest of his life.

16. The Kingpin Who Laid the Foundations of the Modern Mafia

Salvatore Maranzano (1886 – 1931) of Castellammare, Sicily, was a powerful Mafiosi who emigrated to the US and laid the foundations of the modern American mafia. He founded what became the Bonano crime family, and instigated the Castellammarese War against Joe “The Boss” Masseria for control of New York’s criminal world. Winning that war, Maranzano declared himself capo di tutti capi, or “Boss of All Bosses” – the last such occurrence in the American mafia’s history.

Maranzano had initially studied to become a priest before turning to crime. Immigrating to America soon after WWI, he started a legitimate real estate business as a front for his criminal activities, such as bootlegging, narcotics, gambling, and prostitution. Maranzano was a huge fan of Julius Caesar, whom he sought to emulate, and had a habit of lecturing his less-educated American mafia peers about the Roman dictator, earning him the nickname “Little Caesar”. It was not meant as a compliment.

Read More: 20 Significant Mafia Hits.

15. Trouble Shipped Over From Sicily

Years of mounting tensions between the New York City criminal organizations of Salvatore Maranzano and Joe Masseria finally came to a head. The result was a bloody struggle for control of the Italian-American mafia, waged from February, 1930, to April, 1931, that came to be known as The Castellammarese War.

Joe Masseria had been the dominant mafia figure in the 1920s, running a powerful crime family whose ranks included future mob bosses such as Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, and Frank Costello. However, a Don Vito Ferro, a mafia chieftain from Castellammare, Sicily, decided to reach out and wrest control of the American mafia. So he sent Salvatore Maranzano to establish the rival Castellammarese faction, whose ranks included future mob bosses such as Joe Profaci, Joe Bonano, and Stefano Magaddino.

14. The Castellammarese War

In 1928, the Masseria and Maranzano factions started hijacking each other’s alcohol trucks, and encroaching on and disrupting rival bootlegging operations. Fighting erupted in February, 1930, when Masseria ordered the killing of a Castellammarese Detroit racketeer. The Castellammarese retaliated a few months later by murdering a key Masseria enforcer in Harlem. A few weeks later, they got a Masseria ally whom he had earlier betrayed, the Reina family, to switch sides, killing a key Masseria loyalist on their way out. Masseria responded in October, 1930, by sending one of his key lieutenants, Alfred Mineo, to kill a key Castellamerese ally, Joe Aiello, in Chicago.

In November, Mineo and another key Masseria henchman were murdered, and Mineo’s successor defected to Maranzano. The tide then swiftly turned, with other Masseria allies defecting and switching to the Castellamarese. With his ship clearly sinking, Masseria’s remaining key henchmen, led by Lucky Luciano, approached Maranzano, offering to defect and seal the deal by murdering Masseria. On April 15^th, 1931, Masseria was duly murdered.

13. A Short-Lived Victory

On the surface, the Castellammarese War had been a power struggle between mob bosses Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. An underlying current, however, was a generational struggle of their younger underlings, who grew up American, against the rival bosses and their entire generation of leadership. Derided as “Mustache Petes”, the old-timers were insular, set in their Old World ways, and unwilling or unable to adapt to American realities.

Having won, Maranzano reorganized the Italian-American mafia, establishing the basic structure that survives to this day. Each family would henceforth have a boss and underboss, and beneath them would be captains, or caporegimes, in command of soldiers. Above them all, Maranzano declared himself Boss of All Bosses However, Maranazano, an egomaniac with delusions of grandeur who fancied himself a Julius Caesar of the criminal world, did not enjoy his victory for long. Five months after declaring himself capo di tutti capi, Lucky Luciano had him murdered. He then he abolished the Boss of All Bosses title, and set up a collective mafia leadership council, The Commission, to avoid future gang wars.

12. History’s Most Successful Pirate

Ching Shih, also known as Madame Ching (1775 – 1844), was a Chinese pirate who terrorized the South China in the early nineteenth century. She was arguably history’s most successful pirate, commanding tens of thousands of outlaws. Despite challenging the British Empire, the Portuguese Empire, as well as the Chinese Qing Dynasty, she survived to retire from piracy and into a peaceful life.

She was a former prostitute who married a powerful pirate named Cheng, and participated fully in his piratical activities. Upon his death, she inherited his outlaw realm, and became known as Ching Shih, Chinese for “Cheng’s Widow”. However, she was not just a widow who lucked into a huge inheritance: her own legacy as a pirate far exceeded that of her deceased husband.

11. Choosing the Right Subordinates

Madame Ching’s success owed much to her talent at choosing capable subordinates. The most formidable of them was Cheung Po Tsai (1783 – 1822), whose name translates as “Cheung Po, the Kid”. He was a poor fisherman’s son who was kidnapped at age fifteen by Madame Ching and her husband, and pressed into their crews. The teenager exhibited a precocious talent for the new career suddenly thrust upon him, and rose swiftly through the ranks.

Before long, Cheung had become the pirate couple’s favorite protege and subordinate, and ended up getting adopted by them. After Cheng’s untimely death by drowning, Madame Ching took over his pirate fleet, and she selected Cheung as her right-hand man. The pirate queen and her adoptive son soon developed an incestuous affair, and eventually married.

10. An Outlaw’s Greatest Coup: Dying Peacefully in Bed

Madame Ching’s scale of piratical operations far exceeded anything seen in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. At the height of her power, she controlled over 300 ships, and commanded up to 80,000 outlaws. To put that in perspective, Blackbeard, the Age of Piracy’s most notorious villain, commanded no more than 4 ships and 300 men.

With her massive armada, Madame Ching effectively controlled and held for ransom the shipping lanes around southern China. Her widespread depredations and the resultant outcry finally compelled the Chinese authorities to launch a massive campaign to eradicate piracy and restore order. In 1810, seeing the writing on the wall and deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, she accepted a pardon. Madame Ching abandoned piracy, and returned to her hometown, where she opened a gambling house and brothel. She died peacefully in bed in 1844, surrounded by her family.

Read More: History’s Most Fascinating Female Pirates.

9. Harlem’s Greatest Crime Boss

Harlem’s most feared criminal kingpin from 1930 until his death in 1968 was Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. Born in South Carolina in 1905, he got his nickname from a bump in the back of his head. When he was ten, Bumpy’s older brother killed a white man and fled to the north to escape a lynch mob.

Bumpy’s temper and refusal to abide by the day’s racial codes, particularly the deference to whites part, made his parents fear that he would end up killing somebody or get lynched. So at age fourteen, he was sent to live with a sister in Harlem.

8. Working for Harlem’s Crime Queen

In Harlem, Bumpy Johnson joined a protection racket that shook down stores. He got his big break when he was hired as a leg breaker by Madam Saint Clair, Harlem’s biggest bookmaker and reigning crime queen. He eventually became a numbers runner, then a bookmaker. When mobster Dutch Schultz attempted to take over Saint Clair’s bookmaking in the early 1930s, Bumpy Johnson was her point man in a gang war that lasted until Schultz’s assassination on mob boss Lucky Luciano’s orders in 1935.

After Schultz’s demise, Bumpy negotiated a deal with Lucky Luciano in the 1930s, by which Harlem bookmakers retained their independence in exchange for a cut to the mafia. It was the first time a black man had cut such a deal with the Italian mob. It made Bumpy a respected and somewhat heroic figure in the neighborhood. Thereafter, he was the main associate of the Luciano (later Genovese) mafia crime family in Harlem.

7. Feared and Revered

Bumpy Johnson was feared and revered in Harlem for decades. He became friends with famous figures such as Cab Calloway, Billie Holliday, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Lena Horne. His activities were reported in the celebrity sections of magazines such as Jet. He was also Harlem’s criminal kingpin, whose approval every hood needed in order to operate in that part of town. He did 9 years in Alcatraz from 1954 to 1963, and was greeted with a parade upon his return.

Yet, despite his flashy fashion, his poetic pretensions, and ostentatious distribution of turkeys to the poor on Thanksgiving, he never joined the pantheon of famous American villains. This, notwithstanding that the stock gangster boss character in every blaxploitation film, starting with “Bumpy Jonas” in Shaft, is modeled on him, or that the entire gangsta rap genre is essentially a homage to Bumpy Johnson.

Read More: Most Notorious Alcatraz Inmates.

6. Deadlier Than Al Capone?

Bumpy Johnson almost certainly murdered and ordered the murder of more people than, e.g.; John Gotti, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and perhaps even Al Capone. He certainly ran his criminal empire for far longer than any of them ran theirs. The fact that he was black, and so were most of his victims, is a factor in explaining why he is not as famous as other iconic American criminals. His exploits did not resonate far beyond Harlem.

Another factor is that there was something cold and reptilian about Bumpy. Most famous criminals were hot and passionate. Bumpy Johnson, by contrast, quietly made his victims disappear, like Al Capone’s successor Frank Nitti – another crime boss who ran his criminal kingdom for decades, and garnered relatively little public attention.

5. Maintaining Order

Bumpy Johnson died of a heart attack in a Harlem restaurant, clutching his chest and keeling over around 2 AM on the morning of July 7^th, 1968. His death was dramatized in the movie American Gangster, which depicted him expiring in the arms of his surrogate son and successor, Frank Lucas, who would revolutionize New York’s drug trade.

Bumpy Johnson had dominated the Harlem crime scene for decades, maintaining some measure of order on the street. After his death, various contenders scrambled to fill his shoes. Their competition led to a marked increase in violence and chaos on the streets.

4. From Philanthropist and Socialite to Pirate

At the close of the seventeenth century, one of New York City’s leading citizens was the Scotsman William Kidd (circa 1645 – 1701). A prominent philanthropist and socialite, Kidd became personal friends with at least three New York governors. Among his philanthropic activities was the lead role he played in building NYC’s now historic Trinity Church. There was thus little in Kidd’s background to indicate that he would end up swinging from the gallows, executed as the notorious pirate, Captain Kidd.

Kidd’s first sea command was as a privateer, commissioned in 1689 by the governor of Nevis to fight the French. He was granted what was known as “letters of marque”, authorizing him to prey on French vessels for the duration of hostilities between Britain and France. Later, he was issued additional letters of marque by the governors of New York and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

3. A Failed Pirate Hunter

In 1695, William Kidd’s mission was expanded. He was presented with a letter of marque signed by King William III, giving him a roving commission to attack pirates in the Indian Ocean- thus making him a sort of legal criminal. The voyage started inauspiciously: sailing out of London in a newly equipped ship, the 34 gun and 150 men crew Adventure Galley, Kidd offended a Royal Navy captain by failing to salute his warship. The captain retaliated by stopping the Adventure Galley, and seizing half of its crew to press into the Royal Navy.

Crossing the Atlantic short-handed, Kidd made it to New York, where he replenished his crew with whatever out-of-work seafarers he could find. Most of them were hardened criminals and former pirates. Sailing into the Indian Ocean, a third of Kidd’s crew died of cholera by the time they reached the Comoros Islands. To top it off, he was unable to find any of the pirates he had been sent to hunt down.

2. Turning to Piracy

The enterprise was a failure, and Captain Kidd’s crew, getting antsy, urged him to attack some passing vessels in order to make the voyage worth their time. When Kidd declined, his men threatened mutiny. Under pressure, he gave in, and reluctantly started attacking ships not covered by his privateering letters.

By 1698, he had abandoned reluctance and any pretense of privateering, and turned full pirate and criminal. That year, he sealed his fate when he attacked a British East India Company ship. The powerful company exerted its influence in London, and Kidd was declared a pirate and criminal.

1. His Fame Preceded Him

Unbeknownst to Captain Kidd, by the time he returned to the American Colonies, his fame – or infamy – had preceded him, and his public image had been transformed into that of a notorious criminal pirate. During his absence, attitudes towards piracy had changed from the wink, wink, nudge, nudge, which had been the norm when he began his voyage. Now, crackdown was in the air, and the authorities were eager to make an example of somebody.

Kidd was thus extremely unlucky to return when he did. He was arrested as soon as he arrived in Boston, and he was sent in chains across the Atlantic for prosecution in London. There, word of his previous connections with government elites caused a scandal, and the powerful supporters whom he had expected to defend him abandoned Kidd in droves. He was swiftly tried and convicted, and on May 23^rd, 1701, he was hanged. His corpse was then left to rot in a cage on the Thames for all to see.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Ancient Origins – Sarah Wilson: The Trickster Who Rose From Convict to Princess

Cordingly, David – Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (1996)

Cracked – 5 Criminal Masterminds Who Used Their Powers For Good

Critchley, David – The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891-1931 (2008)

Dolnick, Edward – The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (2008)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Criminal History – Salvatore Maranzano, American Organized Crime Leader

Ha’artez, March 7^th, 2013 – Con Artist: The True Story of a Master Forger and Criminal

Historic UK Criminal – Captain William Kidd

Historical Society of Pennsylvania – The Remarkable Career of Sarah Wilson: Criminal, Princess, and Marchioness of Colonial America

Kaminsky, Sarah – Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life (2016)

Macintyre, Ben – Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman, Lover, Criminal, Hero, Spy (2007)

Murphy, Brendan – Turncoat: The Strange Case of British Sergeant Harold Cole (1987)

NPR – How Mediocre Dutch Artist Cast The Forger’s Spell

Raab, Selwyn – Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires (2005)

Salon, December 28^th, 2017 – The Long Rise and Fast Fall of New York’s Black Mafia

Wikipedia – Criminal Bumpy Johnson

Wikipedia – Criminal Ching Shih

Wikipedia – Criminal Han van Meegeren