Forbidden Knowledge Part 6

_02:: The Wedding In September 1990, a group of drug crime suspects in Corunna, Michigan, received an invitation to a wedding from a well-known drug dealer in the area. Attendees were asked to check their guns at the entrance, apparently a common occurrence at these events. As part of a five-month undercover investigation, the police staged a wedding on a Friday night, figuring it was easier to make the drug suspects come to them than to round them up. The groom was an undercover investigator, the bride a Flint police officer, and the bride's father (and reputed crime boss) was the police chief. That evening, after the vows, the toasts, and the dancing, the band, called SPOC, or COPS spelled backward, played "Fought the Law," setting off the cue for the evening's real agenda. All the police officers were then asked to stand, and those who remained seated were arrested. A dozen suspects were booked and, by Sat.u.r.day afternoon, 16 were in custody.

_03:: Sprint In May 2004, the Florida attorney general charged Sprint with reaching out and scamming someone. Actually, it was charged with scamming many more than one, and to make amends the attorney general spearheaded an agreement with the phone company to pay Florida $2.4 million to settle charges that it switched consumers to their long distance services without permission, a practice known as "slamming." During 2002, consumers were unknowingly converted to Sprint long distance after purchasing unrelated items at electronics stores. The old switcheroo actually occurred when customers reached the checkout counter and were asked to sign what looked like a typical sales receipt but was in fact a letter of authorization. As a result, the customer would leave the store having unwittingly approved a change in his long-distance provider. Investigations that began in January 2002 also uncovered evidence that sales personnel forged consumer signatures on these letters to meet sales quotas and receive bonuses. Nearly 4,000 Florida consumers complained about the unsolicited switches and received rest.i.tution from Sprint in response to their complaints.

We Don't Need Another Nero:

5 Leaders Who Spent Their Countries

into the Ground for Fun

If you're looking for some bank-breaking works of less-than-staggering genius, look no further. Not only were these five leaders plagued by terrible ideas, they never bothered to get their money's worth.

_01:: Caligula's Bridge (Over Very Troubled Waters) According to the cla.s.sical chronicler Suetonius, as he was going mad the Roman emperor Caligula began spending money on increasingly bizarre and extravagant projects to satisfy his megalomaniacal whims. Among Caligula's best efforts: constructing a three-mile pontoon bridge across the Bay of Naples by confiscating merchant s.h.i.+ps, having their bulwarks sawed off (making them useless afterward), spreading soil over the planks, and then planting trees, shrubs, and flowers to make the bridge more pleasant. When it was done, Caligula supposedly rode his horse across the bridge at the head of 20,000 troops to prove wrong an earlier prophecy that claimed he could no more become emperor than ride across the bay. After a night of partying, Caligula left and never came back. The bridge itself was destroyed by a storm a short while later. It was this kind of ridiculous spending that broke the Roman bank pretty quickly.

_02:: Nero's Extreme Home Makeover As everyone's favorite gossip Suetonius tells it, the emperor Nero decided to go Caligula one better by building an extravagant mansion for himself in burned-down neighborhoods of Rome following the great fire of 64 CE. Called the Domus Aurea, or "Golden House," because its exterior was overlaid with gold leaf and mother-of-pearl embedded with gems and beautiful seash.e.l.ls, the building was far and away the largest private residence ever seen in Rome, covering a large part of three of Rome's seven hills. So, just how extravagant was Nero's crib? In the entrance hall stood a 120-foot statue (of Nero); a columned arcade ran for a mile; a pool the size of a small lake was surrounded by buildings shaped like cities and fake farms; exotic animals roamed everywhere; and the ceilings were carved ivory panels that could retract to allow a rain of perfume and flowers to fall on partiers. The Roman poet Martial said of it, "One house took up the whole city of Rome." When it was finished Nero famously said, "Good, now I can at last begin to live like a human being."

_03:: Prince of Thieves (Mainly the White-Collar Variety) Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the brother of the sultan of Brunei, spent his small country into bankruptcy during the 1990s with a multibillion-dollar shopping spree that puts all the other royal contenders to shame. Clearly, Prince Jefri knew how to treat himself right, as the 300,000 citizens of Brunei found out when his purchases were put up for auction as part of bankruptcy proceedings. Included for sale were a golden toilet roll holder, rows of gold-plated Jacuzzis and showerheads, porcelain flamingos, gold-plated wastepaper baskets, a multi-million-dollar marquee complex, Comanche helicopter simulators, an Airbus jet, a Formula 1 racing car, and a bronze-plated eight-foot-high Trojan horse. Luxury hotels in Great Britain, France, and Singapore were also favorite purchases of Jefri. That's not to say he hasn't been caught with his fingers in more than a few (illegal) pies. Previously, a lawsuit had been brought against Jefri for the theft of approximately $16 billion from Brunei's state-run economic development agency. Needless to say, he didn't develop anything profitable with the funds.

_04:: Versailles and Everything After Louis XIV was one of the most extravagant kings in French history. A lot of the stuff Louis spent money on was quite respectableas a famous patron of arts he supported literary and cultural figures like Moliere, Le Brun, and Lully, and he spent a great deal of money to improve the Louvre. Of course, Louis' most famous boondoggle was his palace at Versailles, a sprawling 700-room rococo residence on an 800-hectare estate with carefully tended gardens and woodlands about 15 miles to the southwest of Paris. In fact, Louis used so many luxurious materialsincluding gold leaf, crystal chandeliers and doork.n.o.bs, silk and satin window dressings, exotic hardwood furniture, ivory, mother-of-pearl, and precious stonesand his house contained so many famous works of art, that it's actually impossible to calculate a modern cost equivalent. If the spending wasn't bad enough, Louis also foolishly kicked out the Huguenots, or French Protestants, even though they provided many of the country's leading merchants and much of its tax income. Last but not least, Louis launched an endless series of unwinnable wars that were to put the last nail in the coffin of French finances. Who knew the nickname the Sun King referred to was one that was setting?

_05:: Empress Dowager's s.h.i.+p That Never Sailed In 1888, China had been on the ropes for a good three decades. Once an international powerhouse, the nation's world rep had suffered greatly since its humiliating loss to Great Britain in the Opium War. Foreign technical advisors told the mandarins who set policy that China needed a modern navy along Western lines if it was going to defend itself from further European and j.a.panese aggression, and the mandarins duly set aside 30 million taels of silver for new, modern s.h.i.+ps. However, the dowager empress Cixi, who had the final say, decided that the money would be better spent on reconstructing the elaborate Summer Palace, which had served as a vacation spot for the Chinese imperial family for millennia. When advisors complained that the only s.h.i.+p she had purchased was a marble pleasure yacht, she noted that while it was indeed immobile, "it's still a very nice place for a picnic."

Sticky Fingers:

4 Celebrity Thieves

It's not surprising that celebrities stealthe sense of ent.i.tlement that accompanies wealth and adulation surely makes for a skewed sense of morality. It's what they steal that bothers us. Confederate battle plans? Cosmetics from a drugstore? And, most unfathomable, figs? Fame does funny things to people.

_01:: Hedy Lamarr (19132000) Hedy Lamarr was a prototypical Hollywood s.e.x symbol. Onscreen, the Austrian brunette sizzled as a femme fatale in movies like White Cargo and Samson and Delilah. And sure, her personal life was unstable: She married six times (twice more than Marilyn Monroe). But Lamarr was more than just a glamorous face. During World War II, she invented and patented an electronic device that made it more difficult to jam radio-guided torpedoes. Even though she understood the complexities of electrical engineering, Lamarr apparently couldn't outwit drugstore security guards. In the 1990s, she was caught shoplifting cosmetics on two occasions, but was never convicted. In the first case, she insisted on a jury trial and was acquitted by a 102 vote. After her second arrest, the charges were dropped.

_02:: Olga Korbut (1956) Although the all-around gold medal for women's gymnastics in the 1972 Olympics went to Lyudmila Turischeva, the star that year was Turischeva's teammate, Olga Korbut. Diminutive and adorable, Korbut completed the first back flip on the uneven bars on her way to three gold medals in Munich. And then, a decade after moving to rural Georgia (the American one), cute little Olga Korbut was arrested outside a Publix supermarket. Her crime? Stealing chocolate syrup, figs, and cheesebegging the question: What in the name of G.o.d did she intend to cook? Korbut characterized the event as a misunderstanding, but apparently didn't feel strongly enough about it to make a case: She paid a fine of $300 to avoid trial.

Touch of Evil In April 2005, the New York Post reported that Life & Style star Kimora Lee Simmons not only pilfered props from the show's set, but also "made off with an entire rack of lamb from the lunch buffet table."

_03:: Dean Martin (19171995) Given the life story of Dean Martin, his kleptomania shouldn't come as a terrible surprise. The former steelworker, prizefighter, and bootlegger never had much promise until he ran into Jerry Lewis at an Atlantic City nightclub in 1946. Martin became the consummate straight man to Lewis's over-the-top clownishness, and it paid handsomely. But old Dean could never go entirely straight, even if he never wanted for money again. The Rat Packer once told the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post that he couldn't go to a department store without stealing. His booty? "A necktie or a pair of gloves or a pair of socks. Everyone has a little bit of larceny in them." Indeed. When pocketing socks/ feels like adrenaline shots/that's amore. Or kleptomania, anyway.

_04:: Pauline Cushman (18331893) And finally, a celebrity thief with real moxie and a heart of gold! Born in New Orleans, Pauline Cushman became a successful, if minor, actress in New York in the 1850s. At the start of the Civil War, she offered her services as a spy to the Union. Cushman, who reportedly used her feminine wiles to gain favor with the Confederate troops (if you catch our drift), followed General (Braxton) Bragg's army around throughout much of 1863. She was eventually caught red-handed with secret papers and sentenced to death, but a hasty retreat by Bragg's men allowed Union soldiers to save her. Cushman stole for the right reasons, but she was no angel. She abandoned her children, married three times, exaggerated her military exploits, and eventually became addicted to opium. She committed suicide in 1893.

Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day SAN FRANCISCO'S BIG BLAST By the time the Great Earthquake struck San Francisco at 5:13 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the city's fate had already been sealed by years of graft and greed. Corrupt mayor Eugene Schmitz and "Boss" Abraham Ruef had overseen years of shady deals that made the city a tinderbox. How so, you ask? Water mains were built across the San Andreas fault. Reservoirs under the city were filled with garbage from construction sites by corrupt contractors. And pillars in major buildings were filled with newspaper, much cheaper than fireproof concrete. When the earthquake struck, fires began in the mostly wooden city and spread like, well, wildfire. What's a corrupt mayor to do? Schmitz turned over authority to General Frederick Funston, who had the (burning) bright idea of creating firebreaks by blowing up buildings with dynamite. Without any water, the demolitions simply spread the fire further. By the time the fires were finally defeated four days later, 29,000 buildings were destroyed and over 3,000 people were dead, many of them shot as "looters" by the U.S. Army. Ironically, Schmitz and his cronies were set to be rounded up by authorities that very day, but the earthquake interrupted the operation.

Lowlife Perpetrates Art:

6 Greatest Art Heists and Scams of All Time

Everybody likes art in some form or another. In fact, some like it so much, they'll do anything they can to get their grubby hands on it. Here are six instances where the best of human artistry brought out the worst of human trickery.

_01:: When Greeks Lose Their Marbles Since 1832, some of the greatest treasures of ancient Greek civilization have been residing in the British Museum. And the Greeks, who understandably consider themselves the rightful owners of things Greek, want their stuff back. The objects in question are the Elgin Marbles, so called because they were removed by Thomas Bruce, the seventh earl of Elgin, and British amba.s.sador to Constantinople. Elgin claimed to have removed the friezes and sculptures because the Ottomans (who ruled Greece at the time) were neglecting them. Of course, critics are more than happy to tell you the good earl outright stole them. Whatever Elgin's motives, the workers who removed the sculptures did terrible, irreparable damage to the Parthenon. The marbles arrived in England between 1801 and 1805 to a mixture of awe and outrage. A profligate spender (earls just wanna have fun!), Elgin piled up huge debts and ended up selling the collection to Parliament in 1816. Since then, a cold war of sorts has simmered between the governments of England and Greece over the return of the sculptures. In fact, proponents of returning the marbles to Greece have removed Elgin's name and refer to them simply as the Parthenon Marbles.

_02:: "Just Judges" Just Disappeared The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a 24-panel masterpiece by Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, is considered one of the most important Christian paintings in history. One panel, however, known as the "Just Judges," has been missing since it was stolen from a cathedral in the Belgian city of Ghent in 1934. Shortly after the theft, the archbishop received 13 ransom notes signed "D.U.A." demanding 1 million Belgian francs for the painting's safe return. D.U.A. turned out to be a transposition of the initials of a.r.s.een Van Damme (with the "V" unlatinized into a "U"), alias of a.r.s.ene Goedertier, an eccentric who allegedly got the idea from a detective novel. Since then, numerous theories about the theft and the whereabouts of the painting have circulated: It was stolen by the Knights Templar; or the painting contains a map to the Holy Grail; or it's buried in the coffin of Belgium's King Albert I; or Goedertier was working for a n.a.z.i spy, who was ordered by Hitler to obtain it as the centerpiece of his new "Aryan religion." The theories and clues have tantalized sleuths for three-quarters of a century, but the painting's location still remains a mystery.

Touch of Evil In February 2005, two original Dogs Playing Poker paintings by Ca.s.sius Marcellus Coolidge went up for auction in New York. Estimated to bring in $50,000, they instead commanded a bid just short of $600,000.

_03:: The Case of the Missing Munch The Scream, Edvard Munch's 1893 expressionist masterpiece depicting anxiety and despair, is one of the most famous paintings in the world. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who couldn't recognize the ghostly figure on a bridge under a yellow-orange sky, with hands clasped over his (or her?) ears, mouth open in a shriek. And on Sunday, August 22, 2004, administrators at Oslo's Munch Museum were definitely given reason to let life imitate the art. In broad daylight, armed thieves barged into the museum, yanked The Scream and another famous Munch, Madonna, off the wall, then made a break for it. Police found only the getaway car and two empty frames. Understandably, Norwegians reacted with disbelief and outrage at the theft of two true national treasures. But, oddly enough, this wasn't the first time the painting had been purloined. There are actually four versions of The Scream. Another version was stolen in October 1994 from Oslo's National Gallery. That one turned up three months later, but the most recently ripped off version remains missing. Weird note: August 22 is a bad day for paintings. On that day in 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre.

_04:: Pahk the Cah, Then Steal Some Aht On March 18, 1990, in what still ranks as the biggest art theft in U.S. history, two thieves made off with masterpieces worthget thisover $300 million. The robbery occurred at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, where two men dressed as Boston cops pretended to respond to a disturbance. They cuffed the security guards, then helped themselves to 13 paintings, including works by Vermeer, Manet, and Rembrandt. While none of the paintings has yet been recovered, a theory has developed as to their whereabouts: the heist may have been masterminded by the Irish Republican Army, working in conjunction with Irish gangsters in Boston to ransom the paintings, then use the money to run guns to the IRA. Proponents of this theory say the paintings are hidden somewhere in Ireland, but IRA spokesmen vehemently deny this. Nevertheless, the FBI is said to be following this lead. Stay tuned.

_05:: The Disappearing Da Vinci On Wednesday, August 27, 2003, two men posing as tourists walked into Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. During the tour, they made off with a painting, Madonna with the Yarnwinder, a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci valued at about 30 million. The thieves were seen on camera casually heading for their vehicle, a Volkswagen Golf GTI (whose slogan, "Getaway Drivers Wanted," seems appropriate), with the incredibly valuable painting tucked under one arm. Over 500 years old, the painting had been in the possession of the family of the castle's owner, the duke of Buccleuch, since the 18th century. In fact, the Madonna was the centerpiece of the duke's art collection valued at over 400 million and including works by Rembrandt and Holbein. Despite the theft, the castle reopened to visitors days later. As of this writing, the painting has not been recovered, but it's believed to be too famous to ever be sold by the thieves.

_06:: The G.o.dfather of Fake What made Elmyr de Hory infamous wasn't the sheer number of forgeries he sold. It was that they were d.a.m.n good forgeries. For 30 years, de Hory sold forgeries of paintings by the world's greatest artists, including Pica.s.so, Chagall, Matisse, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. In fact, his forgeries were so good, so precise in every detail, that they fooled even the most experienced art buyers. So much so that the native Hungarian has even attracted his own cult following, who pay high prices for "authentic" de Hory fakes. Irony of ironies, the forger's forgeries are now being forged and sold by other forgers! Even more odd: today, legitimate museums host exhibitions of de Hory's works. De Hory told his story in Fake! a 1969 biography by Clifford Irving (who went on to, yes, forge a phony autobiography of Howard Hughes). But in the end the master forger wound up penniless (just like a real painter) and committed suicide in 1976, although rumors persist that he faked that, too.

Hey Judas:

5 Historical Tattletales and $nitches

Judas handed Jesus over to the Romans for 30 lousy pieces of silver (about $40 in today's money, by some estimates). And sure, some of the snitches in our roundup got a little more coin than that, but whatever their worth, today they're simply remembered as dirty rats.

_01:: Tonny Ahlers (19172000) In August 1944, the Gestapo raided the warehouse annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and seven others had lived in hiding for more than two years. All eight ended up at Auschwitzwith only Anne's father, Otto, surviving. Clearly, someone ratted out the Franks, but only recently has attention started to focus on Anton "Tonny" Ahlers. Dishonest, violent, and virulently anti-Semitic, Ahlers was a business a.s.sociate of Otto Frank, and knew the Frank family lived in hiding. But just how d.a.m.ning is the evidence? Well, let's put it this way: Ahlers's own son believes that his father betrayed the Franks. He also thinks Tonny might have blackmailed Otto after the war, noting that Tonny received a monthly check from mysterious sources until 1980the year Otto Frank died. That part of the story may be far-fetched, but even so, many historians seem to think that the mystery of Anne Frank's betrayal has been solved.

Touch of Evil Police admitted they probably would not have solved the Manson murders without the help of Susan Atkins, a Manson Family member who spilled her guts to her cell mate *

_02:: Robert Hanssen (1944) Widely believed to be the most damaging spy in the history of the FBI, Robert Hanssen snuck secrets to the Russians for millions of dollars in cash and diamonds between 1985 and 2001. His most damaging snitch? In October of 1985, Robbie informed the Soviet KGB that two KGB officers, Sergey Motorin and Valeriy Martynov, had been recruited to spy for the United States. Both men were promptly executed. Despite his handsome payoffs, though, Hanssenknown as Ramon Garcia to his Russian handlersdidn't exactly live like James Bond. The suburban snitch tooled around in a Ford Taurus and was happily married with six kids. And, like all the bad guys in The Da Vinci Code, Hanssen was also a member of Opus Dei, a secretive organization within the Catholic Church.

_03:: Richie Rich (14961567) Believe it or not, the name Richie Rich had sinister implications even before Macaulay Culkin made it into a terrible film. After Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon (without the pope's blessing), the devoutly Catholic Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia, refused to sign an oath swearing allegiance to the king above the pope. On trial for treason, More's fate was sealed by the king's solicitor general, Richard Rich, who claimed More had told him that Parliament should have the right to depose the king. Rich, who never missed a chance to suck up to the powerful, was almost certainly lying, but More was convicted. A gentleman to the last, More comforted his executioners, saying, "Be not afraid to do thine office." He died on July 6, 1535and was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1866.

_04:: Elia Kazan (19092003) Although he directed such cla.s.sic films as East of Eden and A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan is probably most famous for tattling on Hollywood communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the 1930s, Kazan briefly joined the Communist Party but left, feeling betrayed (and rightly so, really) by Stalin's decidedly unegalitarian regime. When Kazan named names, helping to create the Hollywood blacklist, it provoked a firestorm of controversy within the artistic communityand when artists get mad, they do good work. Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which portrays a Puritan who chooses to die rather than make a false accusation, is widely seen as an attack on Kazan. For his own part, Kazan made On the Waterfront, a movie about a heroic mob snitch, played by Marlon Brando.

_05:: Dona Marina (ca. 15011550) Conquistador Hernan Cortes might never have conquered much without the able a.s.sistance of his slave, snitch, and mistress, Dona Marina. Originally named Malintzin, Marina abandoned her Aztec name after converting to Christianity. And because she understood Aztec, Mayan, and Spanish (a triple threat!), Marina became a vital adviser and collaborator to Cortes...not to mention his lover. But besides blessing the conquistador with a son, she also aided his efforts in decimating the Aztec empire and people. Known in Mexico as La Malinche, Marina's betrayal has become part of the (Spanish, not Aztec) languagea malinchista is a person who abandons his or her language and heritage in pursuit of selfish goals.

Corruption, Corruption, What's Your Function?

5 of the Worst Perpetrators

They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Never was that more true than with these dirty (or should we say absolutely dirty?) rotten scoundrels.

_01:: Good Ol' Boss Tweed The undisputed poster child for graft and greed in American politics, Boss William Tweed raised corruption to an art form. As a member of New York's Tammany Hall, Tweed and his cronies, including Mayor Fernando Wood, ran New York in the Civil War era as their own private money factory. Tweed once bought 300 benches for $5 each, then sold them to the city for $600 a pop. And that's just the tip of it. The building of City Hall was a clinic in graft: the city was charged $7,500 for every thermometer, $41,190 for each broom, and $5.7 million for furniture and carpets. One carpenter even received almost $361,000 for a single month's work. And although he was crooked as a dog's hind leg, Tweed does get a bit of credit from some historians for undertaking many important projects that improved life in New York (albeit at enormous financial gain to himself). Tweed's illicit profits were said to be in the range of $200 million, and that's in the 1860s! The law eventually caught up with the Boss, though, and he died in prison in 1878.

_02:: President Grant's Cronies The 18th president of the United States was a great war general. But he was less skilled at avoiding scandal. To be fair, it wasn't so much Grant himself as the cast of characters around him that caused all the trouble. Grant's period in office (18691877) was marred by four major scandals: Credit Mobilier, a railroad construction scandal during which the federal government and Union Pacific stockholders were bilked out of some $20 million; the Whiskey Ring, wherein over 100 Treasury Department officials were convicted of taking bribes and cutting deals for distillers; the Indian Ring, another scandal of bribes from companies licensed to trade on Indian reservations; and Black Friday, a scheme involving Grant's brother-in-law that attempted to artificially inflate the price of gold. So, what's buried in Grant's Tomb? Let's just say a lot of dirty laundry.

_03:: The Entire Nation of Bangladesh?

Well, you have to be the best at something. The nongovernment watchdog group Transparency International repeatedly ranks Bangladesh and the regime of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia as the world's most corrupt (the runners-up for this dubious honor are Nigeria at number 2 and Haiti at number 3). You can barely walk a block in the capital of Dhakar without coming face-to-face with graft: you have to pay the postman to get your mail; bus drivers pay cops to let them drive their routes; victims of crime have to pay the cops to have someone arrested; doctors take bribes to dispense medicine; even meter readers get their palms greased for keeping energy bills low. It's estimated that 6% of the nation's GNP is spent on corruption. Not surprising in a place where the unemployment rate hovers around 70%.

_04:: The Less-Than-Honorable Judge Maloney In the 1970s and '80s, the Cook County Circuit Court system based in Chicago was so corrupt and dirty that two federal investigations, Operations Greylord and Gambat, were undertaken to expose it. Lots of judges went to jail for their underhanded dealings, but the worst of the worst was the not-so-honorable Thomas J. Maloney. During the 13 years he spent on the bench, from 1977 to 1990, Maloney "fixed" as many as six murder trials, taking bribes from $10,000 to $100,000 from gangs to convict members of other gangs of murder or manslaughter. Eventually, the justice got his own justice as he was indicted and sentenced to 15 years and 9 months in prison. The fact is he's the only judge in Illinois history to be convicted of fixing a trial. Of course, there would have been another in the same Greylord operation, Judge Frank J. Wilson, but he blew his own brains out just before the Feds came a-knocking.

_05:: Alexander the Waste Sure, there have been some bad popes. With a list numbering 262 and counting, there're bound to be a few bad apples, right? But Alexander VI (reigned 14921503) was the baddest apple of 'em all. A member of the Spanish branch of the powerful and corrupt Borgia family, Alexander bought and bribed his way onto the papal throne, and used it to gather wealth and women for himself and influence for his children. By some accounts he had as many as seven illegitimate children and carried on with numerous mistresses while he was pope. Alexander also made a fortune selling indulgences, and married off his beautiful fair-haired daughter Lucrezia three times, each time to someone richer and more powerful. When the pope finally checked out, he was left to rot and turn purple in the Sistine Chapel, until his bloated corpse had to be stuffed and crammed into his coffina suitably rotten ending for a very rotten man.

5 Great Bank Robberies When the famous bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he supposedly replied, "That's where the money is." Sutton claimed he never actually said it. Pity. Someone should have.

_01:: The Great Northfield, Minnesota, Raid OK, in terms of actual success, this 1876 robbery was a bust. But it had a heck of a cast: legendary bandits Frank and Jesse James; Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger; and three lesser-known outlaws. Their target was Northfield's First National Bank, which the gang settled on after casing a half-dozen other towns. Clearly, not enough casing, as the robbery couldn't have gone worse. The bank's cas.h.i.+er refused to open the safe, an alert pa.s.serby sounded the alarm, and townspeople killed two of the robbers as the rest escaped. A week later, a posse killed or captured all of the other outlaws except the James brothers, who escaped home to Missouri. It was the beginning of the end for 19th-century America's most notorious bandits. Worse still? The take from the Northfield bank was a mere $26.70.

_02:: Hitler's Gold As the German army rolled through Europe in World War II, it ransacked the banks of other countries, transferring the loot to the central Reichsbank in Berlin. But when the U.S. Third Army neared the German capital, the stolen booty was hidden in mines near the village of Merkers. Unfortunately for the n.a.z.is, the Third Army captured Merkers before the treasure could be moved again. And it was truly a treasure: 55 boxes of crated gold, 8,198 bars of gold bullion, and a few tons of artwork. The total value of the precious metals and currency was put at $520 million, and it took 50 years to return the loot to the robbed countries. In 1997, several countries waived their remaining claims, and the funds were used to aid Holocaust survivors.

Touch of Evil The 1951 robbery of Boston's Brink Express Company headquarters netted seven criminals more than $2.75 million. After the FBI spent nearly $30 million over six years to catch the crooks, less than 2% of the take was ever recovered.

_03:: Thinking Inside the Box(es) In early 1976, the Lebanese capital of Beirut was in the throes of a civil war. Palestinian guerrilla groups had gained control of the city's aptly named Bank Street and set about knocking off a dozen banks. The biggest prize on the lot? The British Bank of the Middle East. To get to the loot, a PLO-affiliated group blasted through the wall of a Catholic church next door to the bank. Then imported Corsican safe-crackers were employed to open the vault to get to the safety-deposit boxes. Over a two-day period, the robbers loaded trucks with $20 million to $50 million in currency, gold, jewels, and stocks and bonds (not bad for a couple of days' work). The bad guys got away, though all was not lost. Eventually, some of the stocks and bonds were sold back to their owners.

_04:: More Francs Than a Wiener Schnitzel How many Frenchmen does it take to rob a bank? Well, at least 10, if you're talking about the 1992 Bank of France robbery in Toulon. Using inside information from a bank employee, the gang kidnapped a guard's family and forced the guard to open the bank's doors. But just in case the "we've got your family and we'd be happy to off them" tactic wasn't convincing enough, the group decided to ensure the poor guy's cooperation by strapping explosives to him. Apparently, it was pretty effective. Once inside, the robbers removed the film from the surveillance cameras, emptied the vaults of 160 million francs (about $30 million), and took off in several vansincluding one belonging to the bank. Within two months, most of the gang was caught, betrayed by the bank employee (not to be confused with the guard) who'd helped in the job. But several of the robbers still got away, and amazingly, less than 10% of the loot was ever recovered.

Lies Your Mother