The Book of Lists

15 UNUSUAL STOLEN OBJECTS

One hundred and ninety-one years after his death in 1799, George Washington’s battered wallet was stolen from an unlocked case in the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, New Jersey. The wallet was later returned to police. In a separate incident in 1986, a lock of Washington’s hair was taken from a museum in France. Five years later it was recovered, along with a lock of hair belonging to the Marquis de Lafayette, by French police during a raid on a drug dealer’s hideout.

In October 1989, $10,000 worth of frozen bull semen and embryos was taken from the dairy building at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, California. The embryos were later found, but despite a $1,500 reward, the semen was never recovered.

On August 2, 1992, congregation leaders of the first missionary Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, voted to oust their pastor, the Reverend Robert L. White. The Reverend White retaliated by loading most of the church’s property into three cars, a pickup, and a 14–foot-long-U-haul truck. Included in his haul were furniture, an organ, curtains, speakers, amplifiers and even the pulpit. He left behind the church’s piano because it was still being paid for.

Jason Paluck, a premedical student at Adelphi University, was arrested in May 1992 after his landlord discovered half of a human head in a plastic bag while evicting Paluck from his Mineola, New York, apartment. Paluck admitted that he had taken the head from one of his classes.

On the night of April 30, 1992, Jim B., a 24-year-old art student in Los Angeles, drove into Hollywood to observe the fires and looting that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Jim B. joined the crowd looting Frederick’s of Hollywood, the famous purveyor of exotic lingerie. He headed straight for their lingerie museum, intent on grabbing Madonna’s bustier. It had already been stolen, so Jim B. settled for Ava Gardner’s bloomers and a push-up bra worn by Katey Sagal on the television comedy Married… With Children. A couple of days later, a repentant Jim B. handed over the stolen items to the Reverend Bob Frambini, the pastor at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, who returned them to Frederick’s. Madonna’s bustier is still on the missing list. However, she did donate a replacement in exchange for a donation to a charity that provides free mammograms for the poor.

To mark the March 1990 debut of a new franchise in Sherman Oaks, California, the El Pollo Loco fast-food chain installed a 20-foot inflatable rubber chicken in front of the restaurant. Two weeks later, it was stolen. ‘Don’t ask me what someone would do with it,’ said Joe Masiello, director of operations for Chicken Enterprises, Ltd. ‘If you put it in your yard, someone would notice it.’ The restaurant’s owners offered a reward of 12 free chicken combos for its return, but the thieves didn’t bite.

Felicidad Noriega, the wife of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, was arrested in a Miami-area shopping mall in March 1992. She and a companion eventually pleaded guilty to stealing $305-worth of buttons, which they had removed from clothes in a department store.

In August 1990, businessman Andy Barrett of Pembroke, New Hampshire, reported the unexpected loss of an unassembled 15-ton prefabricated structure, complete with steel girders and beams 35 feet long and 3 feet thick.

St Anthony’s jawbone and several teeth were taken from a basilica in Padua, Italy, in October 1991, but were later found near Rome’s international airport at Fiumicino.

Israeli Air Force Reserve Major Ishmael Yitzhaki was convicted in February 1992 of stealing a WWII Mustang fighter plane and flying it to Sweden, where he sold it for $331,000. He had managed to remove the plane from the Air Force museum by saying it needed painting.

Bryan Goetzinger was part of the labour crew that cleared out the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film company vaults when MGM ceded its Culver City, California, lot to Lorimar Telepictures, in 1986. Among the items scheduled to be dumped was the lamppost that Gene Kelly swung on in the Hollywood musical classic Singin’ in the Rain. Goetzinger took the lamppost home and installed it in the front yard of his Hermosa Beach home. Four years later it was stolen. It was never recovered.

A life-size statue of Mary’s famous little lamb was erected in Sterling, Massachusetts, the hometown of Mary Sawyer, who was the inspiration for the nursery rhyme written in 1830 by Sarah J. Hale. During the night of June 30, 1990, the unfortunate lamb was stolen from the town commons. Fortunately, it was later returned.

In celebration of the 2001 World Championships in Athletics, the host city of Edmonton, Canada, erected statues of bison, painted in colours representing the competing nations. Twenty of the statues were vandalised, with thieves removing the testicles from the bison. Although two vandals were caught red-handed in August, police considered the remaining cases unsolved. Ric Dolphin, chairman of the project that erected the statues, suggested that if the vandals were caught, ‘Let the punishment fit the crime.’

Kay Kugler and her husband B.J. Miller bought 40 acres in California’s El Dorado County and erected a 10-by-20-foot prefabricated cabin on the property, which they used as a vacation home. In July 2003, they arrived at their property to discover that the cabin was gone. In their absence, someone had stolen the cabin, a shed, a generator, an antique bed, a well pump and a 2,600-gallon water tank.

Keith Bradford, 34, drank three beers at the Irish Tavern in Waterford, Michigan, in November, 1994, headed into the men’s room and ripped a condom machine from the wall. Numerous witnesses saw him walking away with the machine, so the police followed him home and recovered the machine, 48 condoms and 127 quarters.

18 STUPID THIEVES AND 3 DISHONOURABLE MENTIONS

Charles Taylor of Wichita, Kansas, was arrested for robbing a shoe store at knifepoint and stealing a $69 pair of size 10½ tan hiking boots on December 18, 1996. At his trial three months later, Taylor arrogantly rested his feet on the defence table. He was wearing a pair of size 10½ tan hiking boots. The judge, James Fleetwood was incredulous. ‘I leaned over and stared,’ he later said. ‘Surely nobody would be so stupid as to wear the boots he stole to his trial.’ But it turned out that one person was that stupid. Taylor was convicted of aggravated robbery and sent back to jail in his stocking feet.

On November 29, 1978, David Goodhall and two female accomplices entered a home supplies shop in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, intending to engage in a bit of shoplifting. After stuffing a pair of curtains into a plastic carrier bag, the threesome attempted to leave by separate exits. However, they were apprehended immediately by several store detectives. Goodhall and his cohorts had failed to notice that the shop, at that very moment, was hosting a convention of store detectives.

Eighteen-year-old Charles A. Meriweather broke into a home in Northwest Baltimore on the night of November 22–23, 1978, raped the woman who lived there, and then ransacked the house. When he discovered she had only $11.50 in cash, he asked her ‘How do you pay your bills?’

She replied, ‘By cheque’ and he ordered her to write out a cheque for $30. Then he changed his mind and upped it to $50.

‘Who shall I make it out to?’ asked the woman, a 34-year-old government employee.

‘Charles A. Meriweather,’ said Charles A. Meriweather, adding, ‘It better not bounce or I’ll be back.’

Meriweather was arrested several hours later.

Every night, Mrs Hollis Sharpe of Los Angeles took her miniature poodle, Jonathan, out for a walk so that he could do his duty. A responsible and considerate citizen, Mrs Sharpe always brought along with her a newspaper and a plastic bag to clean up after him ‘You have to think of your neighbours,’ she explained. On the night of November 13, 1974, Jonathan had finished his business and Mrs Sharpe was walking home with the bag in her right hand when a mugger attacked her from behind, shoved her to the ground, grabbed her plastic bag, jumped into a car, and drove off with the spoils of his crime. Mrs Sharpe suffered a broken arm, but remained good-humoured about the incident. ‘I only wish there had been a little more in the bag,’ she said.

Edward McAlea put on a stocking mask, burst into a jewellery store in Liverpool, and pointed a revolver at the three men inside. ‘This is a stick up,’ he said. ‘Get down.’ None of them did, since all of them noticed the red plastic stopper in the muzzle of McAlea’s toy gun. After a brief scuffle, McAlea escaped, but not before he had pulled off his mask. The jeweller recognised him as a customer from the day before, and McAlea was apprehended.

In 1977, a thief in Southampton, England, came up with a clever method of robbing the cash register at a local supermarket. After collecting a basket full of groceries, he approached the checkout area and placed a £10 note on the counter. The grocery clerk took the bill and opened the cash register, at which point the thief snatched the contents and ran off. It turned out to be a bad deal for the thief, since the till contained only £4.37 and the thief ended up losing £5.63.

On the night of August 23–24, 1980, a well-organised gang of thieves began their raid on the safe of the leisure-centre office in Chichester, Sussex, by stealing a speedboat. Using water skis to paddle across the lake, they picked up their equipment and paddled on to the office. However, what they thought were cutting tools turned out to be welding gear, and they soon managed to seal the safe completely shut. The next morning it took the office staff an hour to hammer and chisel the safe open again.

There is a whole sub-genre of stupid thieves who get stuck while trying to sneak into buildings through chimneys and air vents that turn out to be narrower at the bottom than at the top.

However, none has quite met the fate that befell Calvin Wilson of Natchez, Mississippi. A burglar with a criminal record, Wilson disappeared in 1985. The following year, a body found on the banks of the Mississippi River was identified — incorrectly, as it turned out — as that of Wilson. Fifteen years later, in January 2001, masons renovating a historic building in Natchez discovered a fully-clothed skeleton in the chimney. Lying next to the skeleton was a wallet belonging to Calvin Wilson. Adams County sheriffs theorised that Wilson had tried to enter the building, which was then a gift shop, through the chimney, fallen in head first and become stuck in the chimney, unable to call for help.

Clive Bunyan ran into a store in Cayton, near Scarborough, England, and forced the shop assistant to give him £157 from the till. Then he made his getaway on his motorbike. To hide his identity, Bunyan had worn his full-face helmet as a mask. It was a smooth successful heist, except for one detail. He had forgotten that across his helmet, in inch-high letters, were the words, ‘Clive Bunyan — Driver’. Bunyan was arrested and ordered to pay for his crime by doing 200 hours of community service.

Terry Johnson had no trouble identifying the two men who burgled her Chicago apartment at 2.30 am on August 17, 1981. All she had to do was write down the number on the police badge that one of them was wearing and the identity number on the fender of their squad car. The two officers — Stephen Webster, 33, and Tyrone Pickens, 32 — had actually committed the crime in full uniform, while on duty, using police department tools.

Twenty-five-year-old Marshall George Cummings, Jr., of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was charged with attempted robbery in connection with a purse-snatching at a shopping centre on October 14, 1976. During the trial the following January, Cummings chose to act as his own attorney. While cross-examining the victim, Cummings asked, ‘Did you get a good look at my face when I took your purse?’ Cummings later decided to turn over his defence to a public defender, but it was too late. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

On the night of June 12, 1991, John Meacham, Joseph Plante and Joe Laattsch were burgling a soon-to-be demolished bank building in West Covina, California, when Meacham came upon an empty vault. He called over his accomplices and invited them inside to check out the acoustics. Then he closed the vault door so they could appreciate the full effect. Unfortunately, the door locked. Meacham spent 40 minutes trying to open it, without success. Finally he called the fire department, who called the police. After seven hours, a concrete-sawing firm was able to free the locked-up robbers, after which they were transported to another building they could not get out of.

Dennis Newton was on trial in 1985 for armed robbery in Oklahoma City. Assistant District Attorney Larry Jones asked one of the witnesses, the supervisor of the store that had been robbed, to identify the robber. When she pointed to the defendant, Newton jumped to his feet, accused the witness of lying, and said, ‘I should have blown your –ing head off!’ After a moment of stunned silence, he added, ‘If I’d been the one that was there.’ The jury sentenced Jones to 30 years in prison.

In December 1989, three 15-year-old boys stole a car in Prairie Village, Kansas, and stopped off at the nearest convenience store to ask directions back to Missouri. Except that it wasn’t a convenience store — it was a police station. At the same moment, a description of the stolen vehicle was broadcast over the police station public address system. The car thieves tried to escape, but were quickly apprehended.

Stephen Le and two juvenile companions tried to break into a parked pickup truck in Larkspur, California, on the night of September 27, 1989. But the owner caught them in the act, chased them, and hailed a police car. Le and one of his friends climbed a fence and ran. It soon became apparent that they had chosen the wrong fence — this one surrounded the property of San Quentin prison. The suspects were booked for investigation of auto burglary and trespassing on state property, although charges were never filed. ‘Nothing like this has ever happened here before,’ said Lieutenant Cal White. ‘People just don’t break into prison every day.’

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.

20 UNDERWORLD NICKNAMES

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!’

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.

22 CASES OF ANIMALS AND INSECTS BROUGHT BEFORE THE LAW

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.

Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather left a rare account of an American buggery case. He wrote, ‘on June 6, 1662, at New Haven, there was a most unparallelled wretch, one Potter by name, about 60 years of age, executed for damnable Beastialities [sic]’. Potter, it seems, began sodomising animals at the age of 10 and never stopped. At the same time, he was a devout churchgoer noted for his piety and for being ‘zealous in reforming the sins of other people’. The man’s wife, Mather wrote, ‘had seen him confounding himself with a bitch ten years before; and he had excused himself as well as he could, but conjured her to keep it secret’. Potter then hanged the animal, presumably as an apology to his wife. Eventually, the law caught up with him, and he went to the gallows preceded by a cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows. Watching his concubines die one by one, Potter was in tears by the time he approached the scaffold.

In Vanvres, France, in 1750, Jacques Ferron was caught in the act of love with a she-ass and sentenced to hang. Normally, his partner would have died as well — but members of the community took an unprecedented step. They signed a petition that they had known the she-ass for four years, that she had always been well behaved at home and abroad and had never caused a scandal of any kind. She was, they concluded, ‘in all her habits of life a most honest creature’. As the result of this intervention, Ferron was hanged for sodomy, and the she-ass was acquitted.

The vast majority of prosecuted animals were pigs. In the Middle Ages they were frequently left unwatched, and they often harmed small children. Once arrested, they were usually placed in solitary confinement in the same jail with human criminals, registered as ‘so-and-so’s pig’, and publicly hanged with all the formality of a typical medieval execution. In the annals of animal crime, there are many famous pig cases. One of the most fully documented and most unusual occurred in Savigny, France, in 1457. A sow and her six piglets were accused of ‘willfully and feloniously’ murdering a five-year-old boy, Jean Martin. Found guilty, the sow was eventually hanged by its hind legs from the gallows. But the matter was not so simple: were the six piglets — who had been found stained with blood at the scene of the crime — also guilty? Their owner, Jean Bailly, was asked to post bail for them until a second trial and to take the accused back into his custody. Bailly said he didn’t have the money, and furthermore, refused to make any promises about the piglets’ future good behaviour. Three weeks later ‘the six little porklets’ went to court. Because of their youth and the lack of firm evidence of their guilt, the court was lenient. The piglets were given to a local noblewoman; Bailly did not have to pay, and the porklets could hold their heads high.

A significant pig case occurred in 1846 in Pleternica, Slavonia — it was one of the first times an animal’s owner bore responsibility for damages. A pig ate the ears of a one-year-old girl and was given the usual death sentence. Its owner was sentenced to labour in order to provide a dowry for the earless girl, so that, despite her loss, she might someday find a husband.

As recently as January 23, 1962, an animal was called into the court-room. Makao, a young cercopithecoid monkey, escaped from his master’s apartment in Paris and wandered into an empty studio nearby. He bit into a tube of lipstick, destroyed some expensive knick-knacks and ‘stole’ a box that was later recovered — empty. The victims of Makao’s pranks filed a complaint stating that the box had contained a valuable ring. The monkey’s owner contended before the judge that his pet could not possibly have opened such a box. Makao was ordered to appear in court, where he deftly opened a series of boxes. His defence ruined, Makao’s master was held liable for full damages.

In 1877 in New York City, Mary Shea, a woman of Celtic origin, was bitten on the finger by Jimmy, an organ-grinder’s monkey. Mary demanded retribution, but the judge said he could not commit an animal. Miffed, Mary stormed out of the courtroom, snarling, ‘This is a nice country for justice!’ The monkey, who was dressed in a scarlet coat and velvet cap, showed his appreciation: he curled his tail around the gas fixture on the judge’s desk and tried to shake hands with him. The police blotter gave this record of the event: ‘Name: Jimmy Dillio. Occupation: Monkey. Disposition: Discharged’.

One of the most celebrated animal trials was that of the rooster in Basel, Switzerland, which was accused in 1474 of laying an egg (without a yolk no less). It was a widely held belief that such eggs could be hatched by witches in league with Satan, giving birth to deadly winged snakes. The accused cock was in a tight spot, and even his defence attorney did not argue that the charges were false. He did argue that his client had no pact with the devil and that laying an egg was an unpremeditated and involuntary act. The judges were not impressed, and after a lengthy trial it was decided that the rooster was possessed by Satan. The bird and the egg were burned at the stake before a huge crowd. The subject was being debated more than 200 years later, in 1710, when a Frenchman presented a paper before the Academy of Sciences stating that yolkless eggs were merely the occasional products of an ailing hen.

In Stelvio, Italy, in 1519, field mice (referred to in a German account as Lutmäusse — they may have been moles) were accused of damaging crops by burrowing. They were granted a defence attorney, Hans Grienebner, so that they could ‘show cause for their conduct by pleading their exigencies and distress’. He claimed that his clients were helpful citizens who ate harmful insects and enriched the soil. The prosecutor, Schwartz Mining, argued that the damage they caused was preventing local tenants from paying their rents. The judge was merciful. Though he exiled the animals, he assured them of safe conduct ‘and an additional respite of 14 days to all those which are with young, and to such as are yet in their infancy’.

In the 1700s, an order of Franciscan friars in Brazil was driven to despair by the termites which were devouring not only the food and furniture, but also the very walls of the monastery. The monks pleaded with the bishop for an act of excommunication, and an ecclesiastical trial was held. When the accused defiantly failed to appear in court, they were appointed a lawyer. He made the usual speech about how all God’s creatures deserved to eat, and he praised his clients’ industry, which he said was far greater than that of the friars. Further, he argued that the termites had occupied the land long before the monks. The lengthy trial overflowed with complicated legal speeches and much passionate quoting of authorities. In the end, it was decided that the monks should give the termites their own plot of land. The judge’s order was read aloud to the termite hills. According to a monk’s document dated January, 1713, the termites promptly came out of the hills and marched in columns to their new home. Woodn’t you know it?

It was an ancient Breton belief that tomcats had to be killed before reaching the age of seven, or they would kill their masters. One morning a farmer of Pleyben was found dead in his bed, his throat slit. The local judge had already arrested two servants, when the herdsman noticed the household cat in front of the hearth. Proclaiming, ‘I for one know who the culprit is!’ the herdsman pulled the following stunt: he tied a string to the dead man’s wrist, ran the other end through a window, and gave it a tug from outside — thus ‘shaking’ the corpse’s arm. Right in front of the judge, the tomcat calmly approached his ‘revived’ master in order to finish him off properly. The guilty cat was burned alive.

In Ansbach, Germany, in 1685, it was reported that a vicious wolf was ravaging herds and devouring women and children. The beast was believed to be none other than the town’s deceased mayor, who had turned into a werewolf. A typical politician, the wolf/mayor was hard to pin down, but was finally captured and killed. The animal’s carcass was then dressed in a flesh-coloured suit, a brown wig, and a long grey-white beard. Its snout was cut off and replaced with a mask of the mayor. By court order, the creature was hanged from a windmill. The weremayor’s pelt was then stuffed and displayed in a town official’s cabinet, to serve forever as proof of the existence of werewolves.

There are ancient records of the hangings of bulls and oxen, but there is only one known case of the hanging of an elephant — it happened in Erwin, Tennessee, on September 13, 1916. The Sparks Circus was stationed in Kingsport, Tennessee, when Mary, a veteran circus elephant, was being ridden to water by an inexperienced trainer, Walter Eldridge. On the way, Mary spotted a watermelon rind and headed for this snack. When Eldridge jerked hard on her head with a spear-tipped stick, Mary let out a loud trumpet, reached behind her with her trunk, and yanked the trainer off her back. Mary dashed Eldridge against a soft-drink stand and then walked over and stepped on his head. A Kingsport resident came running and fired five pistol shots into the huge animal. Mary groaned and shook but did not die — in fact, she performed in that night’s show. The next day the circus moved to Erwin, where ‘authorities’ (no one is sure who) decreed that Mary should die on the gallows, to the great sorrow of her friends in the circus. She was taken to the Clinchfield railroad yards, where a large crowd was gathered. A 7/8-in. chain was slung around her neck, and a 100-ton derrick hoisted her 5 ft in the air. The chain broke. The next chain held, and Mary died quickly. Her 5-ton corpse was buried with a steam shovel.

Carl Miles exhibited Blackie, his ‘talking’ cat, on street corners in Augusta, Georgia, and collected ‘contributions’. Blackie could say two phrases: ‘I love you’ and ‘I want my momma’. In 1981, the city of Augusta said the enterprise required a business licence and a fee, which Miles refused to pay. He sued the city council, arguing that the fee impinged on the cat’s right to free speech. The judge actually heard Blackie say ‘I love you’ in court. However, he ruled that the case was not a free speech issue. Since Blackie was charging money for his speech, the city was entitled to their fee. Miles paid $50 for the licence and Blackie went back to work. He died in 1992 at the age of 18.

On September 30, 1982, Tucker, a 140-lb bull mastiff, ran into a neighbour’s yard and attacked the neighbour’s black miniature poodle, Bonnie. Tucker’s owner, Eric Leonard, freed the poodle from Tucker’s mouth, but the poodle had received critical injuries and died. A district court in Augusta, Maine, ruled that Tucker was a danger to other dogs and should be killed by intravenous injection. Leonard appealed to the Maine Supreme Court, but it upheld the lower court’s ruling. In 1984, two days before his scheduled execution, the ‘National Doggie Liberation Front’ removed Tucker from the shelter where he was being held. What happened to Tucker is unknown.

The long arm of the law almost took the life of a 110-lb Akita named Taro, who got into trouble on Christmas Day of 1990. Owned by Lonnie and Sandy Lehrer of Haworth, New Jersey, Taro injured the Lehrers’ ten-year-old niece, but how the injury occurred was in dispute. Police and doctors who inspected the injury said the dog bit the girl’s lower lip. The Lehrers said the child provoked the dog and that while protecting himself, Taro scratched her lip. Taro had never before hurt a human being, but he had been in three dogfights and had killed a dog during one of the fights. A panel of local authorities ruled that Taro fell under the state’s vicious-dog law and sentenced the Akita to death. A three-year legal nightmare ensued as the Lehrers fought their way through municipal court, superior court, a state appeals court, and finally the New Jersey Supreme Court. While the legal battle raged on, Taro remained on death row at Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, where he was kept in a climate-controlled cell and was allowed two exercise walks a day. By the time his execution day neared, the dog had become an international celebrity. Animal rights activist and former actress Brigitte Bardot pleaded for clemency; a businessman from Kenya raised money to save the dog. Thousands of animal lovers wrote to the Lehrers and offered to adopt the dog. Even the dog’s jailer and the assemblyman behind the vicious-dog law interceded on behalf of Taro. But when the courts failed to free the dog, the final verdict fell to Governor Christine Todd Whitman. Although the governor did not exactly pardon the Akita, she agreed to release him on three conditions: Taro would be exiled from New Jersey; Taro must have new owners; Taro’s new owners, or the Lehrers, must assume all financial liability for the dog’s future actions. The Lehrers agreed, and the dog was released in February 1994, after spending three years in jail. The Lehrers subsequently found a new home for Taro in Pleasantville, New York. When all the costs of the canine death-row case were added up, the total exceeded $100,000. Taro died of natural causes in 1999.

8 TRIAL VERDICTS THAT CAUSED RIOTS

The conviction of a Jewish army officer for high treason in 1894 unleashed a tidal wave of anti-Semitism and popular unrest in France. Alfred Dreyfus, the son of a manufacturer who lived in Alsace, a region annexed by Germany in 1871, had achieved the rank of captain and was the only Jew on the general staff when he was accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. On the basis of forged and falsified evidence, he was court-martialled and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the notorious prison of French Guiana. His trial polarised French society into two groups — the ‘revisionists’ (liberals and anticlericals) and the ‘nationalists’ (the army and the Catholic Church). Friendship and family ties were broken over the case, duels were fought, strikes occurred, and street fights broke out, bringing France to the verge of civil war. Novelist Émile Zola was convicted of criminal libel for writing a newspaper article that accused the authorities of framing Dreyfus. Retried in 1899 — and again found guilty by the army — Dreyfus was pardoned by the president of France that year, but he was not restored to his former rank until 1906.

In July 1914, the wife of France’s minister of finance was tried for the murder of Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro. Lacking any legal means to stop Calmette’s personal and professional attacks upon her husband, Henriette Caillaux had purchased a pistol, presented herself at the editor’s office, and shot him to death. During her nine-day trial she wept copiously and was subject to fainting spells, especially when her prenuptial love letters from the then-married Caillaux were read in open court. After the verdict of acquittal was announced on July 28, pandemonium broke out in the courtroom and in the streets of Paris, reflecting the widespread feeling that power and wealth had subverted justice. Coincidentally, that very day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, swallowing up the Caillaux verdict in the general onrush towards WWI.

In 1921 two Italian-born anarchists were convicted, on the basis of disputed evidence, of murdering a guard and a paymaster in a South Braintree, Massachusetts, payroll robbery. The six-year legal battle for the life of shoemaker Nicola Sacco and his friend Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fishmonger, became an international cause célèbre. There were general strikes in South America, massive demonstrations in Europe, and protest meetings in Asia and Africa to affirm a worldwide belief in their innocence. Despite new evidence, the trial judge refused to reopen the case, sending Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair on August 23, 1927, and sparking a new wave of riots all over the world. In the US, important people and public facilities were placed under armed guard as a precaution, while thousands of mourners conducted the martyrs to their final resting place.

Nine black youths, aged 13–19, were charged with the ‘rape’ of two white prostitutes who had been riding the rails with them. Hurriedly tried and convicted in the Alabama town of Scottsboro, all but the youngest boy received a death sentence in 1931. The case attracted the attention of the Communist party, and workers throughout the US soon demonstrated — at Communist instigation — against the convictions of the ‘Scottsboro boys’. In Dresden, Germany, the US consulate was stoned by a crowd of Communist youths. In New York City’s Harlem, 1,500 protestors led by Communists left so many signs and banners after their march that two dump trucks were needed to haul the refuse away. The US Supreme Court twice ordered retrials, citing the inadequacy of defence counsel and the exclusion of black citizens from southern juries. The Scottsboro boys were retried three times in all. It was 1950 before the last one — middle-aged by then — was released.

Maria Hertogh was born in 1937 in Indonesia to Dutch Roman Catholic parents. When the Japanese invaded in WWII they interned Maria’s parents. During this time, Che Amirah and her husband looked after Maria. She was renamed Nadra and raised as a Muslim. Later, the Amirahs moved to the British colony of Malaysia. After the war, Maria’s parents tried to find her but were unable to locate her until 1949. Adeline Hertogh went to court to claim custody of Maria. A Singapore court ruled that Maria should be returned to her natural parents. After the verdict was announced, Maria cried, ‘Amirah is my mother. She has loved me, cared for me and brought me up.’ Che Amirah then appealed and the verdict was reversed in July 1950. In August, 13-year old Maria married a 22-year-old teacher in a Muslim ceremony. Meanwhile, the custody case was again appealed. The court ruled that Maria’s father had never consented to have the Amirahs raise the girl and that the Hertoghs should therefore have custody. The court also annulled Maria’s marriage. While Che Amirah appealed this latest verdict, authorities decided to place Maria in the care of a convent. Newspaper pictures of Maria in a Christian convent aroused the antipathy of Singapore’s Muslim population. On December 11 the court rendered its final decision, dismissing Amirah’s appeal and confirming the Hertoghs’ custody of Maria. After the verdict was announced, crowds of Muslims outside the courthouse started rioting. By the time British military police regained control of the streets 3 days later, 18 people had been killed and 173 injured.

The case of the Chicago Seven, spawned in street rioting during the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago, triggered a renewed round of protest after the jury verdict was delivered in 1970. The trial itself was chaotic: Black Panther leader Bobby Seale had to be bound and gagged to keep him quiet, and the wife of Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman warned the judge that she would dance on his grave. The seven defendants were acquitted of conspiracy, but five of them received maximum sentences (five years plus fines and court costs) for their intent to incite a riot. The ‘jury of the streets’ registered its immediate disapproval: some 5,000 marchers protested the verdict in Boston, 3,000 assembled in Chicago, and in Washington, DC more than 500 demonstrators convened in front of the Watergate residence of US Attorney General John Mitchell. Students at the University of California in Santa Barbara burned down a local bank in protest, prompting Governor Ronald Reagan to threaten further antiriot prosecutions.

At his trial for the murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, Dan White claimed as a mitigating circumstance that he ate too much junk food. A former policeman and a member of the city’s board of supervisors (he was elected with the slogan, ‘Crime is number one with me’), White had resigned from the board, then changed his mind. Angered by the mayor’s refusal to reappoint him, he shot Moscone and Milk, leader of the city’s large gay population, on November 27, 1978. White had suffered from depressions that were compounded by his overconsumption of Twinkies, his attorney argued. On May 21, 1979, when the jury returned a verdict of involuntary manslaughter due to ‘diminished capacity’ — which meant the possibility of parole in five years — the huge gay community and their supporters rioted in the streets of San Francisco, torching 12 police cars and causing $1 million-worth of property damage. As one gay leader announced, ‘Society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies, who have hairdressing salons, but as people capable of violence.’ White committed suicide in 1985.

In the early morning hours of March 3, 1991, motorist Rodney King was stopped by Los Angeles police officers following a three-mile high-speed chase. According to the arrest reports filed later, King refused orders to exit the car, then put up such a struggle that officers had to use batons and stun guns to subdue him. However, unknown to the police, the entire incident had been filmed by a nearby resident, and the video told a different story. On the tape, King appeared to offer little resistance as several officers kicked and beat him to the ground, while a dozen of their colleagues looked on. Public outrage led to a grand jury investigation that indicted four officers — Theodore J. Briseno, Stacey C. Koons, Laurence M. Powell, and Timothy E. Wind — for assault and the use of excessive force. Because of the massive publicity, when the trial opened on March 4, 1992, it had been moved from Los Angeles to suburban Simi Valley. The prosecution presented several witnesses who testified that the officers — particularly Powell — were ‘out of control’. However, defence attorney Michael Stone insisted, ‘We do not see an example of unprovoked police brutality. We see, rather, a controlled application of baton strikes for the very obvious reason of getting this man into custody.’ The jury clearly agreed. On April 29 they returned not-guilty verdicts for all the defendants. The verdict rocked Los Angeles. Within hours, the city erupted in rioting that left 58 people dead and caused $1 billion in damages.

WITTICISMS OF 9 CONDEMNED CRIMINALS

As he was being strapped into the electric chair Appel quipped, ‘Well, folks, you’ll soon see a baked Appel.’

The last man to die in Nevada’s gas chamber, Bishop’s final words were, ‘I’ve always wanted to try everything once… Let’s go!’

On the way to the gallows the sheriff told Clark to speed up the pace. Clark replied, ‘Nothing will happen until I get there.’

Turning to a newsman on his way to the electric chair, French helpfully suggested, ‘I have a terrific headline for you in the morning: “French Fries”.’

The last person to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin, Harris issued a final statement through the prison warden that stated, ‘You can be a king or a street-sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.’ The quote was inspired by a line from the film Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

As he stepped onto the gallows Palmer looked at the trapdoor and exclaimed, ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’

Feeling the edge of the axe soon to be used on him, Raleigh said, ‘’Tis a sharp remedy but a sure one for all ills.’

Asked if he had a last request, Rodgers stated, ‘Why yes — a bulletproof vest.’

Sitting down in the electric chair Wood said, ‘Gentlemen, you are about to see the effects of electricity upon wood.’

29 UNUSUAL LAWSUITS

In hopes of ending a drought in upstate New York in the 1880s, a Presbyterian minister named Duncan McLeod organized a mass prayer session to take place on a Saturday in August. At noon people throughout the area stopped their activities and prayed for rain. By one o’clock clouds had appeared; by two a gusty wind was blowing; by three the temperature had dropped 20º, and by four a thunderstorm had arrived. The storm, which dropped almost two inches of rain, washed out a bridge and completely destroyed a barn, which burned to the ground after being struck by lightning.

As it happened, the barn belonged to Phineas Dodd, the only farmer in Phelps, New York, who had refused to join the collective prayer. Many thought that Dodd had been a victim of divine justice, but Dodd had other ideas: when he heard that Reverend McLeod was accepting congratulations for having ended the drought, he sued the minister for $5,000 to cover the damages to his property. The minister was put in a difficult situation: after repeatedly telling his followers that God had answered their prayers, he could hardly back down and say that the storm was just a coincidence. Fortunately for McLeod, his lawyer was able to convince the judge that the mass prayers had requested only rain and that the thunder and lightning had been a bonus provided by God and for which McLeod and his parishioners were not responsible.

In the spring of 1888, actress Lillian Russell starred on Broadway in the play The Queen’s Mate. When producer James Duff decided to take the show on the road, he insisted that Russell wear silk tights in one scene, as she had in New York. Russell refused, saying that what was acceptable in New York might be considered scandalous in smaller cities. She also claimed that theatres out West were draughty and that she might catch cold. While cynics gossiped that Russell’s reluctance was due to recent weight gains (she was now 5 ft 6 in. and 165 lb), Duff took the issue to court. The judge turned out to be a gallant fellow who ruled in Lillian Russell’s favour, observing that her figure was a national asset that needed to be protected at all costs.

The elite status of the Cabot family of New England is summarised in the old ditty:

In August 1923, the Cabots received a bit of a jolt when Harry and Myrtle Kabotchnick of Philadelphia filed a petition to have their last name changed to Cabot. Immediate objections were raised by several prominent members of the Cabot family as well as by The Pennsylvania Society of the Order of Founders and Patriots of America. However, Judge Audendried ruled in favour of the Kabotchnicks, and a new branch was grafted onto the Cabot family tree.

The case of Gloria Sykes caused a sensation in San Francisco throughout the month of April 1970. A devout Lutheran and college graduate from Dearborn Heights, Michigan, the 23-year-old Sykes had been involved in a cable car accident. The Hyde Street cable car lost its grip and plunged backwards, throwing Sykes against a pole. She suffered two black eyes and several bruises, but worst of all, claimed her lawyer, she was transformed into a nymphomaniac. Although she had had sex back in Michigan, she became insatiable after the accident and once engaged in sexual intercourse 50 times in five days. This inconvenience caused her to sue the Municipal Railway for $500,000 for physical and emotional injuries. The jury of eight woman and four men was basically sympathetic and awarded Sykes a judgment for $50,000.

In 1971 Gerald Mayo filed suit in Pennsylvania at the US district court against Satan and his servants, claiming they had placed obstacles in his path which caused his downfall. On December 3, Mayo’s complaint was denied on the grounds that the defendant did not reside in Pennsylvania.

In 1976, Cecilia M. Pizzo filed suit in New Orleans to nullify the Louisiana Purchase, which had doubled the size of the United States in 1803. Pizzo claimed that neither Napoleon nor Thomas Jefferson had the authority to make the deal and that the 8-million-acre parcel still belonged to Spain. Judge Jack M. Gordon ruled that although it might be true that only the French Parliament and the US Congress had had the legal right to engage in negotiations, the fact was that Pizzo had filed her suit 167 years too late, since the statute of limitations on such cases is only six years.

In April 1978, 24-year-old Tom Hansen of Boulder, Colorado, sued his parents, Richard and Shirley, for ‘parental malpractice’. Young Hansen claimed that his parents had done such a bad job of rearing him that he would be forced to seek psychiatric care for the rest of his life. He asked $250,000 in medical expenses and $100,000 in punitive damages. In explaining his reasons for filing the suit, Hansen said it was an alternative to his desire to kill his father: ‘I felt like killing my father for a long time. I guess I found a more appropriate way of dealing with it.’ The suit was subsequently dismissed by the District Court and later by the Colorado Court of Appeals.

Tom Horsley, a 41-year-old accountant from Campbell, California, was quite upset in May 1978, when his date for the night, 31-year-old waitress Alyn Chesselet of San Francisco, failed to show up. He was so upset, in fact, that he sued her for ‘breach of oral contract’. His lawyer explained that Mr Horsley is ‘not the type of man to take standing up lying down’. Horsley asked for $38 in compensation: $17 for time lost at his hourly wage of $8.50, $17 in travel expenses, and $4 in court costs. Chesselet, in her defence, said she had attempted to call Horsley about her change in plans, which was due to having to work an extra shift, but he had already left his office. Judge Richard P. Figone ruled against Horsley, who remained philosophical. ‘I feel good about the whole thing,’ he said. ‘It raised people’s consciousness about this problem… There’s too much of this thing, broken dates. It shows people are not sincere.’

Beatrice Daigle, 73, of Woonsocket, R.I., filed a $250,000 suit when she learned that she had been praying at the wrong grave for 17 years. After her husband died on January 28, 1961, The Church of the Precious Blood in Woonsocket sold Mrs Daigle a plot at St John the Baptist Cemetery in Bellingham, Massachusetts. Mrs Daigle visited the grave frequently to pray for the repose of her dead husband’s soul. On April 26, 1978, workers opened the grave in order to move Mr Daigle’s body to another plot and discovered instead the body of a woman, Jeanne Champagne. Three more graves had to be dug up before Mr Daigle’s body was located. Mrs Daigle, who was present at the exhumation, suffered ‘severe emotional trauma and distress’ because of the mistake. In November 1979 the case was dismissed.

On February 5, 1979, Woodrow W. Bussey filed a $2 million suit in Oklahoma County District Court claiming that the Adolph Coors Co. and a local tavern had caused him to become an alcoholic by failing to warn him that the 3.2-proof beer served in Oklahoma is actually an intoxicating beverage. Bussey said that Coors beer had done irreparable damage to his brain, ‘pickling his mind’ and preventing him from thinking clearly. In 1988 Bussey, reacting to the reparations paid to Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II, sued the United States government for uprooting his Cherokee ancestors during the 1838 forced march known as the Trail of Tears.

Martha Burke’s twin sister, Margaret Fox, was one of the 580 people killed in the plane disaster at Tenerife in the Canary Islands on March 27, 1977. Consequently, Mrs Burke sued Pan American — not for the wrongful death of her sister, but for her own injuries, which she sustained because of the ‘extrasensory empathy’ which is common among identical twins. At the moment of the collision, Mrs Burke, sitting at her home in Fremont, California, suffered burning sensations in her chest and stomach and a feeling of being split.

On February 21, 1980, Federal Court Judge Robert Ward ruled against Burke, explaining that legally she had to be physically present at the accident to collect damages.

Maria del Carmen y Ruiz was married to one of Fidel Castro’s intelligence chiefs when, in 1964, she was approached by the CIA in Cuba and asked to be a spy. She worked diligently at her new job, but in January 1969 she was caught by Cuban counterintelligence agents and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After serving 8½ years, she became the first convicted American spy to be released from Cuban custody. In May 1980 Ruiz, now remarried and known as Carmen Mackowski, sued the CIA for inadequate training. She also charged that the CIA had misled her into believing that if she was detected, they would arrange for her immediate release. US District Court Judge Dickinson Debevoise of Trenton, New Jersey, ruled in favor of the CIA because, as one newspaper put it, federal judges ‘do not have authority to intervene in CIA employment matters that might result in the release of intelligence information’.

In September 1980, in La Jolla, California, the ‘Grand Old Man of Divorce Law’, John T. Holt and his wife, Phyllis, filed suit against their neighbours, William and Helen Hawkins. The Holts claimed that the Hawkins had trimmed their hedges into obscene shapes. The Holts named 20 other neighbours as co-conspirators. They asked $250,000 in punitive damages and demanded removal of trees and hedges that had been shaped ‘to resemble phallic symbols’. The case was finally dismissed in January 1982.

Virginia O’Hare, 42, of Poughkeepsie, New York, filed a malpractice suit against plastic surgeon Howard Bellin after her navel ended up two inches off-centre following surgery in November 1974, to give her ‘a flat sexy belly’. Dr Bellin had previously performed successful operations on O’Hare’s nose and eyelids. Bellin argued that O’Hare’s navel (which was later returned to its proper position by another plastic surgeon) had only been misplaced by a half inch, which he called ‘not cosmetically unacceptable’. In May 1979, a State Supreme Court jury awarded O’Hare $854,219, including $100,000 for pain and suffering, $4,219 for the corrective surgery, and $750,000 for loss of earnings. Not surprisingly, Dr Bellin appealed the verdict but later agreed to pay Mrs O’Hare $200,000.

Police officer George E. La Brash, 56, suffered a stroke on September 23, 1979, while guarding the 3,300-year-old golden mask of King Tutankhamun when it was on display in San Francisco. La Brash claimed that he was a victim of the famous Curse of King Tut, which had caused the sudden death of numerous people involved in the 1923 discovery of Tut’s tomb. For this reason he contended that the stroke was job-related and that he was entitled to $18,400 in disability pay for the eight months of his recuperation. On February 9, 1982, Superior Court Judge Richard P. Figone denied La Brash’s claim.

Penny Pellito of Miramar, Florida, filed a personal-injury lawsuit against the Hollywood Home Depot hardware store after she was struck in the head by three eight-foot planks while shopping in April 1987. Pellito claimed that the accident caused her to lose the unusual ability to block out pain. Although witnesses testified to having witnessed a doctor saw Pellito’s toe bone without benefit of anaesthesia before the accident, a jury rejected her claim. They also decided that she was 80% responsible for the accident, but they did award her $1,200 for normal physical damages.

On August 28, 1988, the world-championship cycling road race, held in Robse, Belgium, came down to a sprint between Steve Bauer of Canada and 1984 world champion Claude Criquielion of Belgium. But a mere 75 m. from the finish line the two crashed, allowing Maurizio Fondriest of Italy to snatch an unexpected victory. In a case without precedent in professional cycling, Criquielion sued Bauer for assault and asked for more than $1.5 million in damages. Criquielion alleged that Bauer had swerved in front of him and elbowed him, thus denying him the glory and financial rewards that come with a world championship. The case dragged though the courts, but finally, three and a half years later, a Belgian judge ruled in favour of Bauer.

Former sex symbol Brigitte Bardot has devoted her post-film career years to promoting the rights of animals. Among the members of her personal menagerie in St Tropez, France, were a 32-year-old mare named Duchesse and a young donkey named Mimosa. In the summer of 1989, Bardot invited her neighbour’s donkey, a three-year-old male named Charley, to graze alongside Duchesse and Mimosa. When Charley began to display a sexual interest in Duchesse, Bardot feared that if Charley were allowed to have his way with the elderly mare, it might prove fatal to her. So she called in her vet and had Charley castrated. Charley’s owner, Jean-Pierre Manivet, was out of town at the time. When he returned to St Tropez, he was outraged by what had happened. Manivet sued Bardot, claiming that Charley had really been interested in Mimosa, not Duchesse. Bardot countersued, alleging that the bad publicity had harmed her reputation. Both suits were eventually rejected by the courts.

In 1982, Charles Wayne Brown of Newton, Iowa, was struck in the right eye by a golf ball stroked by car salesman Bill Samuelson. The accident caused permanent damage to Brown’s eye. Brown sued Samuelson for failing to yell ‘fore’ before he hit the ball. The case was dismissed in 1984.

Amanda Blake of Northampton, Massachusetts, had been working for Coca-Cola Bottling Company for eight years when, in 1985, Coca-Cola discovered that she had fallen in love with and become engaged to David Cronin, who worked for Pepsi. Blake was ordered to break off her engagement, persuade Cronin to quit his job, or quit herself. She refused, and was fired for ‘conflict of interest’. Black sued Coca-Cola for damages and won a settlement worth several hundred thousand dollars.

On December 30, 1985, Doris Barnett of Los Angeles appeared on television to try her luck at the California lottery’s Big Spin. Barnett spun the lottery wheel and watched as her ball settled into the $3 million slot. Show host Geoff Edwards threw his hands in the air and shouted ‘Three million dollars!’ Barnett’s children rushed out of the audience and joined her in celebration, whooping and jumping for joy. Then Edwards tapped Barnett on the shoulder and turned her attention back to the wheel. The ball had slipped out of the $3 million slot and into the $10,000 slot. Edwards explained that lottery rules required the ball to stay in the slot for five seconds. Barnett was hustled offstage, but she did not go meekly. She sued the California lottery. In 1989, after watching endless videos of other contestants being declared winners in less than five seconds, a jury awarded Barnett the $3 million, as well as an extra $400,000 in damages for emotional trauma. But the California lottery didn’t go meekly either: they refused to pay. Eventually, though, ‘a mutually satisfactory settlement’ was reached, with the agreement that the amount not be made public.

Two cases filed in Los Angeles challenged the right of fashionable nightclubs to deny entrance to would-be patrons because they are not stylishly dressed. In the first case, settled in 1990, Kenneth Lipton, an attorney specialising in dog-bite cases, was barred from entering the Mayan nightclub because a doorman judged his turquoise shirt and baggy olive pants to be ‘not cool’. Owners of the club were forced to pay Lipton and three companions $1,112 in damages. The following year, the California State Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control won its suit against Vertigo, another trendy club that refused admittance to those people they claimed had no fashion sense. Administrative law judge Milford Maron ruled that Vertigo would lose its license if it continued to exclude customers based on a discriminatory dress code and the whim of doormen. Vertigo’s owners chose to close the club in December 1992.

‘World’s Oldest Newspaper Carrier, 101, Quits Because She’s Pregnant’, read the headline in a 1990 edition of the Sun, a supermarket tabloid. The accompanying article, complete with a photograph of the sexually active senior, told the story of a newspaper carrier in Stirling, Australia, who had to give up her job when a millionaire on her route impregnated her. The story was totally false. Stirling, Australia, didn’t even exist. But, as it turned out, the photo was of a real, living person — Nellie Mitchell, who had delivered the Arkansas Gazette for 50 years. Mitchell wasn’t really 101 years old — she was only 96, young enough to be humiliated when friends and neighbours asked her when her baby was due. Mitchell sued the Sun, charging invasion of privacy and extreme emotional distress. John Vader, the editor of the Sun, admitted in court that he had chosen the picture of Mitchell because he assumed she was dead. Dead people cannot sue. A jury awarded Mitchell $850,000 in punitive damages and $650,000 in compensatory damages. In 1993 a federal district court judge reduced the amount of compensatory damages to $150,000.

On the surface, Plaster Caster v. Cohen was just another lawsuit concerning disputed property. What made the case unusual was the nature of the property. In 1966, Cynthia Albritton was, in her own words, ‘a teen-age virgin dying to meet rock stars’. She was also a student at the University of Illinois. When her art teacher gave her an assignment to make a plaster cast of ‘something hard’, she got an idea. She began approaching visiting rock groups and asking if she could make plaster casts of their penises. She had no problem finding girlfriends to help her prepare her models. At first she used plaster of paris, then a combination of tinfoil and hot wax, before settling on an alginate product used for tooth and jaw moulds. Her project gained underground notoriety and she changed her name to Cynthia Plaster Caster. In 1970 her home in Los Angeles was burgled, so she gave 23 of her rock members to music publisher Herb Cohen for safekeeping. Cohen refused to return them, claiming they were a payoff for a business debt owed him by Frank Zappa, who had employed Plaster Caster. In 1991 Plaster Caster filed suit against Cohen, who countersued. Two years later a Los Angeles superior court ruled in favour of Cynthia Plaster Caster, who regained control of her ‘babies’, including Jimi Hendrix, Anthony Newley, Eric Burdon and Eddie Brigati.

Krandel Lee Newton, a street artist in Dallas’s West End, thought he had a pretty good thing going. Unlike other street artists, Newton specialised in drawing people’s rear ends. He even registered a trademark for his business: Butt Sketch. Then in 1992 along came another street artist, Mark Burton, who decided to add rear-end sketches to his repertoire. Burton called his business Fanny Sketch. Newton filed a federal lawsuit accusing Burton of threatening his business. The suit was settled out of court when Burton agreed to stop using the name Fanny Sketch and to refrain from engaging in any act which could cause the public to confuse his work with Mr. Newton’s ‘customartistry services’.

Canella, a Rottweiler living in Key Largo, Florida, was in heat and her owner, Kevin Foley, had plans to mate her with ‘an acceptable male’ and then sell the litter. But before he could do so, a neighbouring Chihuahua named Rocky sneaked onto Foley’s property and engaged Canella. Rocky and Canella were caught in the act, both by Foley, who snapped a photo of the incident, and by an animal control officer who happened to be passing by and stopped to watch the unusual coupling. A month later Foley learned that Canella was pregnant. He terminated the pregnancy by hysterectomy and sued Rocky’s owner, Dayami Diaz. On November 1, 1993, Monroe County judge Reagan Ptomey ruled in favour of Foley and ordered Diaz to pay him $2,567.50.

It was with some reluctance that Arizona Court of Appeals Judge Philip Espinosa accompanied his wife to a Barry Manilow concert on the fateful night of December 23, 1993. Not a Manilow fan to begin with, he nonetheless expected an endurable evening of ‘soft, amplified music’. Instead he found himself sitting through the loudest concert he had ever attended. It was so loud, in fact, that Espinosa was left with a constant and permanent ringing in his ears. He sued Manilow and others responsible for damages. The case was settled out of court in 1997 when Manilow agreed to donate $5,000 to an ear disorder association.

In honour of his impending wedding, Paul Shimkonis’ friends threw a bachelor party for him at the Diamond Dolls topless club in Clearwater, Florida. As part of the show, he was asked to lean back in a chair with his eyes closed while dancer Tawny Peaks danced around him. In the words of the lawsuit that Shimkonis filed a year and a half later, ‘Suddenly, without warning and without Plaintiff’s consent, (the dancer) jumped on the Plaintiff, forcing her very large breasts into his face, causing his head to jerk backwards.’ Shimkonis, a physical therapist, suffered head and neck injuries, incurred major medical bills and still couldn’t turn his head to the right. Finally, on June 29, 1998, he filed suit against Diamond Dolls, asking $15,000 to cover his medical expenses and as compensation for ‘loss of capacity for the enjoyment of life’. The case was brought before television’s ‘The People’s Court’ with former New York City mayor Ed Koch presiding. A female court officer examined Peaks’ 69HH breasts in chambers and reported that although they were 20 per cent silicone, they were soft and ‘not as dense as Plaintiff described’. Koch ruled in favour of Tawny Peaks and the club. Peaks had her breasts reduced in 1999 and in 2005 put one of the implants up for sale on eBay: ‘Somebody might bid on it. It’s like the first boob to be sued over in a lawsuit,’ she said. The infamous implant sold for $16,766.00 to Internet casino company GoldenPalace.com.

Surprising as it may seem, Shimkonis v. Peaks was not the only lawsuit to arise from a 1996 breast attack. In an unrelated case in Belleview, Illinois, Bennie Casson sued dancer Busty Heart (Susan Sykes) and P.T.’ s Show Club in Sauget after he was assaulted by Heart’s 88-inch breasts during a performance.

Australian mega-star Dame Edna Everage (a.k.a. Barry Humphries) made a point of ending her public performances by tossing dozens of gladioli with cut stems into the audience. Unfortunately, at the end of a show in Melbourne in April 2000, the stem of one of Dame Edna’s gladis hit singing teacher Gary May in the left eye. May, who was taken away in an ambulance, sued for 40,000 Australian dollars, but later reached an out-ofcourt settlement.