David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

During a midnight raid in May 1997, thieves climbed a 6-ft fence at the home of Bob Hodgson in Ryton, near Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. They broke open two locks and stole 40 homing pigeons worth £1,000. It was a clever, well-organised robbery — except for one minor problem: homing pigeons fly home. That is exactly what all but the eight youngest pigeons did.

While training to become a military police officer, US Army Private Daniel Bowden was taught how criminals commit bank robberies. As it turned out, Bowden was not a very good student. In May 1997, he robbed a federal credit union in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, making away with $4,759 in cash. The following week, Bowden, who had not worn a mask during the commission of his crime, returned to the same bank and tried to deposit the money into his own personal account. He was immediately recognised by a teller, who alerted the military police.

In February 2004, Carlos Henrique Auad of Petropolis, Brazil, broke into a bar near his home and stole a television set. A few nights later, Auad tried to break into the same bar through the roof. This time, carrying a gun, he slipped and fell and shot himself in the right foot. Auad went straight home, but failed to notice that he left a trail of blood that led right to his door. He was arrested by police who found the television set.

Alfred Acree Jr was sitting in a van in Charles City, Virginia, on April 7, 1993, with three friends and at least 30 small bags of cocaine. When sheriff’s deputies surrounded the van, Acree raced into a dark, wooded area by the side of the road. He weaved in and out of the trees in an attempt to evade his pursuers. He thought he had done a pretty good job — and was amazed when the deputies caught him (and found $800 worth of cocaine in his pockets). What Acree had forgotten was that he was wearing LA Tech sneakers that sent out a red light every time they struck the ground. While Acree was tiring himself zigzagging through the forest, the sheriffs were calmly following the blinking red lights.

Drug traffickers Edward Velez and José Gonzales were transporting 2 lb of methamphetamine by aeroplane on the night of December 7, 1994. They had planned to land at a small airport in Turlock, California, but Velez, the pilot, miscalculated and touched down at a different airport 20 miles away. Unfortunately for Velez and Gonzalez, the airport was part of the Castle Air Force Base, where air force pilots were practicing night touch-and-go landings. Security police intercepted the plane as soon as it landed.

In early 1994 an Islamic fundamentalist group in Jordan launched a terrorist campaign that included attacks against secular sites such as video stores and supermarkets that sold liquor. During the late morning of February 1, Eid Saleh al Jahaleen, a 31-year-old plumber, entered the Salwa Cinema in the city of Zarqa. The cinema was showing soft-core pornographic films from Turkey. Jahaleen, who was apparently paid $50 to plant a bomb, had never seen soft-core porn and became entranced. When the bomb went off, he was still in his seat. Jahaleen lost both legs in the explosion.

A prolific hit man for Murder, Inc. — organised crime’s enforcement arm in the 1930s — and with some 50 killings to his credit, Frank Abbandando once approached a longshoreman on whom there was a ‘contract’. Abbandando fired directly into his victim’s face, only to have the weapon misfire. The chagrined executioner dashed off, circling the block so fast that he came up behind his slowly pursuing target, and this time Abbandando managed to shoot him dead, picking up his moniker in the process.

Tough Tony Accardo was a Chicago syndicate boss for many decades. Accardo, who prided himself on never having spent a day in jail, was sometimes called ‘Joe Batters’, harking back to his earlier days of proficiency with a baseball bat when he was one of Al Capone’s most dedicated sluggers.

An old-time Capone muscle-man, Joseph Aiuppa rose to become the Mafia boss of Cicero III. Because he was a notorious scowler not given to smiling, he was called ‘Ha Ha’.

This Minneapolis gangster liked to brag about the grotesque murder method that earned him his nickname. Israel Alderman (also known as ‘Little Auldie’ and ‘Izzy Lump Lump’) ran a second-storey speakeasy where he claimed to have committed 11 murders. In each case he deftly pressed an icepick through his victim’s eardrum into the brain; his quick technique made it appear that the dead man had merely slumped in a drunken heap on the bar. ‘Icepick Willie’ would laughingly chide the corpse as he dragged it to a back room, where he dumped the body down a coal chute leading to a truck in the alley below.

Louis Amberg, the underworld terror of Brooklyn from the 1920s to 1935 — when he was finally rubbed out — was called ‘Pretty’ because he may well have been the ugliest gangster who ever lived. Immortalised by Damon Runyon in several stories as the gangster who stuffed his victims into laundry bags, Amberg was approached when he was 20 by Ringling Brothers Circus, which wanted him to appear as the missing link. ‘Pretty’ turned the job down but often bragged about the offer afterwards.

Business agent of the mob-dominated electrical workers union in Chicago in the 1920s, Michael J. Boyle gained the title of ‘Umbrella Mike’ because of his practice of standing at a bar on certain days of the week with an unfurled umbrella. Building contractors deposited cash levies into this receptacle and then magically were not beset by labour difficulties.

Louis Buchalter — who died in the electric chair in 1944 — was the head of Murder, Inc. He was better known as ‘Lepke’, a form of ‘Lepkeleh’. This was the affectionate Yiddish diminutive, meaning ‘Little Louis’, that his mother had used. Affectionate, ‘Lepke’ was not. As one associate once said, ‘Lep loves to hurt people.’

Al Capone claimed that the huge scar on his cheek was from a WWI wound suffered while fighting with the lost battalion in France, but actually he was never in the armed service. He had been knifed while working as a bouncer in a Brooklyn saloon-brothel by a hoodlum named Frank Galluccio during a dispute over a woman. Capone once visited the editorial offices of William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American and convinced that paper to stop referring to him as ‘Scarface Al’.

Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll was feared by police and rival gangsters alike in the early 1930s because of his utter disregard for human life. Once he shot down several children at play while trying to get an underworld foe. When he was trapped in a phone booth and riddled with bullets in 1932 no one cried over his death, and police made little effort to solve the crime.

Racket boss Joseph Doto adopted the name of ‘Joe Adonis’ because he considered his looks the equal of Aphrodite’s famous lover.

Public enemy Charles Arthur Floyd hated his nickname, which was used by prostitutes of the Midwest whorehouses he patronised, and in fact he killed at least two gangsters for repeatedly calling him ‘Pretty Boy’. When he was shot down by FBI agents in 1934, he refused to identify himself as ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd and with his dying breath snarled, ‘I’m Charles Arthur Floyd!’