1,001 Facts That Will Scare the S#*t Out of You: The Ultimate Bathroom Reader (65 page)

481

FACT :
Charles Taylor, one of West Africa’s most bloodthirsty warlords,
drugged his legions of child soldiers
, called “Small Boy Units,” with cocktails of cocaine, gunpowder, and amphetamines. He is presently defending himself in a court in The Hague, Netherlands against charges of killings, mutilations, rape, and sexual slavery.
They should try him in Iran. They invented hanging, you know.

“Spider Men,” Crimes and Punishments, Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2009.

482

FACT : The Russian mob flourished after the Soviet Union fell
in 1991, deeply involving itself in prostitution, drug trafficking, sexual slavery, extortion, and political corruption.
For latecomers to capitalism, they got the hang of diversification in a hurry.

“Spider Men,” Crimes and Punishments, Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2009.

483

FACT :
Yakuza, the Japanese mafia,
consider themselves descendents of samurai
. These gangsters dress kidnapped women in short, pleated skirts and knee socks to cater to a “school girl” sex market.

They also sell unwanted Chinese boys on the Tokyo black market for as much as $5,000.
They also cut off Andy Garcia’s head in
Black Rain
. I realize it was just a movie, but come on, that was just uncalled for.

“Spider Men,” Crimes and Punishments, Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2009.

484

FACT :
Pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa
tripled in 2008
. Somali pirates assaulted more than a hundred ships and captured at least forty, extorting up to $150 million in ransom from ship owners around the world. Among crafts hijacked: a Ukrainian freighter carrying thirty-three Soviet tanks, and a supertanker delivering $100 million in Saudi crude oil to the U.S.
Worse, they always demand the ransom in gold doubloons and barrels of rum, which are hard to find nowadays.

Matthew Power, “Hostile Takeovers,” Crimes and Punishments, Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2009.

485

FACT :
In 1977, convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott contacted Norman Mailer, offering to provide an account of life behind bars. Mailer helped Abbott publish
In the Belly of the Beast
, and fought for his parole, which Abbott was granted in 1981. Though he became a celebrity,
Abbott was later arrested for another murder
, and returned to prison.
Abbott was working on
I Need Another Sucker
when he died in prison in 2002.

Crimes and Punishments, Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2009.

486

FACT :
In 1991, Milwaukee police officers, responding to a 911 call, found a naked teenage boy attempting to flee from an older man. The soft-spoken thirty-year-old man explained to the police that he and the boy were merely lovers having a domestic dispute. The man was so polite and persuasive that
the police let him take the boy back to his apartment
, where the man, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, strangled the boy, had sex with his body, and dismembered him. Dahmer was arrested two months later and convicted of fifteen murders. He was killed by another inmate in prison in 1994.
Most Americans remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that Jeffrey Dahmer had been killed.

Wait—no, I’m thinking of JFK. Never mind.

Harold Schechter and David Everitt, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

487

FACT :
Dr. Henry Howard Holmes was
America’s first serial killer
. Holmes built a Chicago mansion complete with trap doors, secret passageways, and rooms lined with asbestos that could be turned into gas chambers. Upon his capture in 1894, Holmes confessed to twenty-seven murders. He was hanged in 1896.
Holmes wouldn’t confess to more of his murders because he didn’t want people to think he was an animal.

“World’s worst killers,” BBC News, October 30, 1999,
www.news.bbc.co.uk
.

Harold Schechter and David Everitt, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

488

FACT :
Sisters Delfina and Maria de Jesus Gonzales owned a Mexican brothel called Rancho el Angel,
where they killed prostitutes and customers
. Upon the sisters’ arrest in 1964, police found the bodies of eighty women, eleven men, and babies.
The Sisters Gonzales killed a lot more employees than clients. What they lacked in workplace morale, they made up for in business sense: employees are easier to replace than customers.