David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

For several decades after the beginning of the twentieth century a mainstay of the Chicago whorehouse world, Charlie ‘Monkey Face’ Genker achieved his moniker not simply for a countenance lacking in beauty but also for his actions while employed by Mike ‘de Pike’ Heitler (a piker because he ran a 50-cent house). ‘Monkey Face’ matched the bounciness of his jungle cousins by scampering up doors and peeking over the transoms to get the girls and their customers to speed things up.

A long-time devoted aide to Al Capone, Jake Guzik continued until his death in 1956 to be the payoff man to the politicians and police for the Chicago mob. He often complained that he handled so much money he could not get the inky grease off his thumb. This explanation of the ‘Greasy Thumb’ sobriquet was such an embarrassment to the police that they concocted their own story, maintaining that Jake had once worked as a waiter and gained his nickname because he constantly stuck his thumb in the soup bowls.

Notorious Capone mob enforcer ‘Golf Bag’ Sam Hunt was so called because he lugged automatic weapons about in his golf bag to conceal them when on murder missions.

Bank robber Alvin Karpis was tabbed ‘Kreepy’ by fellow prison inmates in the 1920s because of his sallow, dour-faced looks. By the time he became public enemy No. 1 in 1935, Karpis’s face had become even creepier thanks to a botched plastic surgery job which was supposed to alter his appearance.

Somehow a blundering bootlegger named George R. Kelly became the feared public enemy ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly of the 1930s. His criminally ambitious wife, Kathryn, forced him to practise with the machine gun she gave him as a birthday present, while she built up his reputation with other criminals. However, Kelly was not a murderer, nor did he ever fire his weapon in anger with intent to kill.

Charles Luciano earned his ‘Lucky’ when he was taken for a ride and came back alive, although a knife wound gave him a permanently drooping right eye. Luciano told many stories over the years about the identity of his abductors — two different criminal gangs were mentioned as well as the police, who were trying to find out about an impending drug shipment, but the most likely version is that he was tortured and mutilated by the family of a cop whose daughter he had seduced. Luciano parlayed his misfortune into a public-relations coup, since he was the one and only underworld figure lucky enough to return alive after being taken for a one-way ride.

The acknowledged king of the pickpockets of the twentieth century, Thomas ‘Butterfingers’ Moran picked his first pocket during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and his last in 1970 at 78, some 50,000 pockets in all. He could, other practitioners acknowledged rather jealously, ‘slide in and out of a pocket like pure butter’.

The most pathological public enemy of the 1930s, Lester Gillis considered his own name as non-macho and came up with ‘Big George’ Nelson instead — a ridiculous alias considering the fact that he was just 5 ft 4 in. tall. He was called ‘Baby Face’ Nelson behind his back and in the press, which constantly enraged him.

Alternately the most charming and the most vicious of all syndicate killers, Benjamin Siegel could thus be described as being ‘bugs’. However, no one called him ‘Bugsy’ to his face, since it caused him to fly into a murderous rage. His mistress, Virginia Hall, likewise clobbered newsmen who called her man by this offensive sobriquet.

There has been a long and shocking tradition of punishing, excommunicating and killing animals for real or supposed crimes. In medieval times, animals were even put on the rack to extort confessions of guilt. Cases have been recorded and documented involving such unlikely creatures as flies, locusts, snakes, mosquitoes, caterpillars, eels, snails, beetles, grasshoppers, dolphins and most larger mammals. In seventeenth-century Russia, a goat was banished to Siberia. The belief that animals are morally culpable is happily out of fashion — but not completely, for even now, these travesties and comedies occasionally occur.

Rarely in American history has an animal served a prison term. Incredibly, it happened as recently as 1924, in Pike County, Pennsylvania. Pep, a male Labrador retriever, belonged to neighbours of Governor and Mrs Gifford Pinchot. A friendly dog, Pep unaccountably went wild one hot summer day and killed Mrs Pinchot’s cat. An enraged Governor Pinchot presided over an immediate hearing and then a trial. Poor Pep had no legal counsel, and the evidence against him was damning. Pinchot sentenced him to life imprisonment. The no doubt bewildered beast was taken to the state penitentiary in Philadelphia. The warden, also bewildered, wondered whether he should assign the mutt an ID number like the rest of the cons. Tradition won out, and Pep became No. C2559. The story has a happy ending: Pep’s fellow inmates lavished him with affection, and he was allowed to switch cellmates at will. The prisoners were building a new penitentiary in Graterford, Pennsylvania, and every morning the enthusiastic dog boarded the bus for work upon hearing his number called. When the prison was completed, Pep was one of the first to move in. In 1930, after six years in prison (42 dog years), Pep died of old age.

In Tripoli in 1963, 75 carrier pigeons received the death sentence. A gang of smugglers had trained the birds to carry bank notes from Italy, Greece and Egypt into Libya. The court ordered the pigeons to be killed because ‘They were too well trained and dangerous to be let loose.’ The humans were merely fined.

In 1905 the law against public cigarette smoking was violated in South Bend, Indiana. A showman’s chimpanzee puffed tobacco in front of a crowd and was hauled before the court, where he was convicted and fined.

In 1933 four dogs in McGraw, New York, were prosecuted to the full extent of the law for biting six-year-old Joyce Hammond. In a full hearing before an audience of 150, their lawyer failed to save them from execution by the county veterinarian. Proclaimed justice A.P. McGraw: ‘I know the value of a good dog. But this is a serious case… The dogs are criminals of the worst kind.’

The Wild West custom of killing a horse responsible for the death of a human was re-enacted by a group of Chicago gangsters in 1924. When the infamous Nails Morton died in Lincoln Park after being thrown from a riding horse, his buddies in Dion O’Banion’s gang sought revenge. They kidnapped the animal from its stable at gunpoint and took it to the scene of the crime, where they solemnly executed it.

In 1451 in Lausanne, a number of leeches were brought into an ecclesiastical court. We can only imagine their distress as they listened to the reading of a document demanding that they leave town. When the tenacious leeches stuck to their guns they were exorcised by the bishop-court.

‘Perverts transformed their stables into harems’, wrote a French author in his legal history of the province of Lorraine. For centuries, bestiality was a regularly prosecuted crime, and as recently as 1940 a man was burned at the stake in Pont-à-Mousson, France, with three cows. The case of Guillaume Guyart in 1606 contains a surreal twist. Guyart was sentenced to be hanged and burned for sodomy; his accomplice, a female dog, was to be knocked on the head and burned along with him. When Guyart managed to escape, the court decreed that his property be confiscated to pay for the costs of the trial. If the criminal were not caught, the judges ruled, the sentence would be carried out — a painting of Guyart would be hung from the scaffold. There is no record of the ultimate fate of the man or the dog.