Al Capone was pretty bad, but modern prohibition and global terrorism have bred a new crop of infamous gangsters that would have him running for cover.
Wikimedia CommonsAl Capone’s mugshot from June 17, 1931.
Al Capone, perhaps the most infamous gangster of all time, spelled bad news for everybody who knew him, from the female teacher he beat up at age 14 to the seven members of the Bugs Moran gang he famously had gunned down in Chicago on Valentine’s Day in 1929. All his life, Capone used violence, cunning, and ruthless determination to get everything that he wanted. And for a time during Prohibition, he had it all.
But it all came to an end on June 16, 1931, when Capone pled guilty to tax evasion in federal court after his lawyer carelessly confessed on his behalf in a letter to the authorities. Always the braggart, Capone walked out of court and boasted to the press that his deal only carried a two-and-a-half-year sentence and that he’d be back on the street in no time.
Back in court for formal sentencing, the judge informed Capone that the court had no obligation to impose the agreed-upon sentence. After a full trial, the jury sentenced Al Capone to 11 years in federal prison, of which he served eight.
In his time, Al Capone reigned as the king of Chicago. At a time when the average American earned $750 a year, Al Capone admitted to making $100,000 from illegal bootlegging.
Just as a fortune could be made in the ’20s from the underground traffic in alcohol, today’s drug prohibition has made billionaires out of criminals like Capone all over the world. Here are three of the worst and most infamous gangsters alive today.
Infamous Gangsters: Semion Yudkovich Mogilevich
Taringa
Half the battle in becoming an organized crime boss is cultivating a titanic ego. Many of the most successful gangsters in history have imagined themselves to be the biggest, baddest alpha wolves who ever lived. Most of these were just empty boasts, but Semion Mogilevich can actually make a case for himself as the boss of bosses.
Mogilevich is unusual in the Russian underworld for being an educated man. He earned a degree in economics prior to building his criminal empire, and has put whatever he learned about the subject at the then-communist University of Lviv to good use.
In a career that’s lasted over 40 years, Mogilevich has risen to the top of Russia’s organized crime scene, laundered tens of billions of dollars, and even bought his own arms factory. He holds citizenship in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and Israel. That last one is probably the most important; Israel never extradites its citizens, so if the law ever starts closing in on him, Mogilevich has a convenient bolthole to spend his retirement in.
Mogilevich’s links to Israel go back to the early 1980s, when he was fresh off of a three-year stretch in prison for fraud. During that time, large numbers of Russian and Ukrainian Jews – and more than a few dissidents who were willing to say they were Jews – were migrating out of the Soviet Union and into the Occupied Territories.
Mogilevich got into the business of facilitating emigres’ trips as if he was a freelance travel agent. Unlike a travel agent, however, he usually demanded a percentage of the refugees’ net worth up front, and then he generally stole anything they left behind and expected to be shipped after them. Mogilevich used the money from this to bribe officials into looking the other way and letting his business carry on unmolested.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian and Chechen gangsters went from shadowy criminals on the fringe of society to elected leaders and business tycoons. Few, if any, of them really left behind their criminal enterprises, and Mogilevich was no exception. Throughout the 1990s, he ran so many street-level scams that even the FBI has a hard time listing them all, from gangster mainstays such as drugs and prostitution to enforcement and insurance fraud.
In one scheme, Mogilevich sold untaxed heating oil to consumers as gasoline, which must have worked well on their Trabants and Volga sedans. Like a good economist, Mogilevich laundered the money through New York and London, and then he bought “legitimate” stakes in oil and gas companies.
Given that Russia has more oil than Kuwait, and that former Soviet oil companies were being sold for kopeks on the ruble, this was a really good move. It was around this time that Mogilevich bought a controlling share in Sukhoi, which manufactures fighter jets, and a Hungarian arms company that makes anti-aircraft guns.
Today, the 65-year-old Mogilevich lives in Kiev, surrounded by private security and basically immune to the law. Like Capone, he was brought up on tax evasion charges a few years ago, but Vladimir Putin’s government let him go, saying that he wasn’t charged with anything really serious. This despite the strong suspicion that he’s had scores of people killed and still runs a massive criminal empire on three continents.
Dawood Ibrahim
Webdunia Hindi/YouTube
Many organized crime organizations around the world straddle the line between international crime syndicates that use a lot of violence, and international terrorist organizations that smuggle drugs and stolen property to finance their private wars. Dawood Ibrahim, the son of an Indian police constable, has spent his whole career sliding back and forth over that line.
Many accuse Ibrahim of masterminding the 1993 Bombay bombings, in which 13 bombs went off all over the city in a coordinated, maximum-kill pattern that aimed to create chaos. In the event, the bombings killed or injured nearly 1,000 people. This was the first major serial bombing in history, and groups such as al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamia later made good use of it in London, Madrid, and Bali.
Still others believe Ibrahim held close relations with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and that he probably coordinated the logistics for the 2008 Mumbai attacks. He was named a global terrorist in 2003, and he has consistently worked to destabilize and tear down the Indian government.
STR/AFP/Getty ImagesIndian policemen walk through the shooting site at Chattrapati Shivaji Railway terminus on November 26, 2008 in Mumbai. More than 60 people were killed in a series of attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai late November 26, with two five-star hotels among the targets of gunmen armed with powerful assault rifles and grenades. Many believe that Dawood Ibrahim helped facilitate these attacks.
However, terrorism is only Ibrahim’s part-time job. The real money in India comes from managing the black market, or hawala, which runs narcotics, weapons, and even stolen art across south Asia from Vietnam to Egypt and beyond. Ibrahim is running a fair share of the drug traffic into the UK, and he runs a kind of underworld Bank of (anti-) America, which loans, launders, and invests money for terrorist groups all over the world.
As an aid to his regional jihad, or maybe just to better smuggle heroin, Ibrahim has always maintained a close relationship with ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency. The ISI isn’t like most intelligence agencies; it’s more like an independent government within Pakistan. The ISI answers to no authority, and it’s more or less free to wage its own proxy war with India and shelter militants.
Its cozy relationship with Ibrahim is probably a good source of cash for the agency, and might help explain why he seems to have unrestricted access to the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
He needs that access now. After a long and successful career as a racketeer/smuggler/international terrorist, Dawood Ibrahim did the one thing a mafia chieftain must never do: he drew attention. The United States has put him on a list of known terrorists and banned financial institutions from doing business with him. Ibrahim’s overseas assets are now seized as soon as they’re identified. Many of his associates – the ones he hasn’t killed – have already been arrested, and India is actively hunting for him.
He seems to have multiple identities and perhaps a dozen safehouses in Pakistan. He is also rumored to be critically ill with gangrene, though there’s no telling whether or not that’s an ISI cover story until somebody finds a body. Either way, the problem might just take care of itself soon.
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera
Excélsior TV/YouTube
In 1930, the Chicago Crime Commission named Al Capone Public Enemy #1, which was an official designation they came up with just for him. After Capone was sent away, the title went unassigned for another 83 years. In 2013, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera became the second man to hold that title for his influence over the narcotics traffic in North America.
Guzmán’s rise to the top of Mexico’s Sinaola Cartel is the typical ganglord backstory; he started out as a street tough who started his own marijuana cultivation business by age 15. By early adulthood, he had joined the local opium-growing racket and killed his way to the top.
In 1993, he was sentenced to 20 years in a Guatemalan prison for drug and murder charges, but he managed to bribe his way out and get back to the killing. As leader of the Cartel, Guzmán accumulated a personal fortune in excess of $1 billion and made the Forbes list of the most influential people in the world three years in a row.
Wikimedia Commons
Unlike his mentors in Mexico’s drug scene, Guzmán refused to be just a middleman for Colombian cocaine smugglers and started his own methamphetamine production business. He pioneered routes through Texas and California for his drug mules and paved the road north with enough bribes to pave the desert with money. Not content with feeding America’s need for speed, Guzmán started encroaching on other cartels’ turf and shipping cocaine and heroin to the seller’s market in the United States.
In response, the U.S. government exerted a great deal of pressure on Mexico to catch Guzmán, as if that would stop the drugs. The crackdown arguably triggered Mexico’s current state of near-civil war, in which every cartel from Guatemala to Arizona is industriously strangling its rivals over territory.
By 2014, with the suppression of the Colombian cartels, Guzmán’s Sinaola Cartel all but took over the traffic into the United States. It is believed that Guzmán may have become the richest gangster in the world by this point and was smuggling more drugs to the U.S. than anyone else in history.
Soy 502/TwitterGuzmán’s arrest.
Of course you don’t go from a teenaged marijuana farmer to the chairman of the board for international narcotics without whacking a few enemies, and Guzmán has made a macabre art out of it. In 2010, the Juarez Cartel started making inroads into Guzmán’s marijuana cultivation turf in Sonora.
One farmer, 26-year-old Hugo Hernandez, apparently made a deal with the Juarez group. In response, Guzmán’s thugs beat the life out of him, cut his body into seven pieces, sliced off his face, and then stitched the face onto a soccer ball for a quick game. They left a note on the body that read: “Have a happy new year. It will be your last.”
In 2015, Guzmán – who was fresh from his second or third prison escape at the time – decided he’d had enough of the Islamic State interfering with his European and Middle Eastern export markets.
In typical Sinaola style, he publicly announced that he would slaughter ISIS members next to their families and feed them to dogs. Unfortunately for Guzmán, and for much of the world, it doesn’t look like he’s going to get a chance to carry out his threat. In January 2016, Mexican Marines cornered Guzmán in a private residence and took him in — perhaps, this time, for good.
Next, read about the most brutal gangs around the world. Then, read about the brutal deaths of Bonnie and Clyde.
