On this date in 2003, Liu Yong’s situation took a very abrupt turn for the worse.
The wealthy Communist Party member and Shenyang city legislator had been sentenced to death 20 months before in a corruption case for ordering the murder of a tobacco vendor as part of a mafioso racket of graft, extortion, black marketeering, and kindred mayhem.
When that sentence was reduced on retrial on a showing that Liu’s confession was extracted by torture, public outcry at the appearance of a well-connected insider getting off scot-free led the Supreme Court to take the unprecedented step of yet again re-trying a criminal case itself.
“According to China’s legal system, a criminal case can usually be tried only twice,” as China Daily lightly put it.
Amnesty International is less measured, and alleges that the irregular Supreme Court hearing was ordered by political insiders to buttress the credibility of the country’s anti-corruption drive — and to avoid setting any precedent that evidence of torture should mitigate criminal sentencing. (China certainly found defenders for the trial (the link is to an ugly layout of raw HTML).)
The high court handed down its sentence this very day, after which Liu was immediately hailed to one of China’s mobile execution vans, given a lethal injection, and cremated.
On this date in 1878, John “Black Jack” Kehoe was hanged in Pottsville — as Pennsylvania’s anthracite trusts took a victory lap around the corpses of the Molly Maguires.
Even to say what the Mollies were is to take a side in their life-and-death struggle. Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine had poured into Pennsylvania’s coal mining country in the mid-19th century, where life in the mines was nasty, brutish and short, and the pay wasn’t anything to write home about either.
In a time when capital ruthlessly hunted any intimation of labor organizing and the Irish were a distinctly second-class people, the (apparent, or at least alleged) response of the Mollies was natural: form a secret society, and wring by threat of bodily harm the concessions it could not pursue by collective bargaining. For the recent Irish transplants, the tableau of a Catholic underclass working for a Protestant landlord who owned (and gouged on) everything in sight had a certain familiar feel.
Terrorists? They certainly used violence to achieve political objectives, at least if the testimony of their foes is credited. But they weren’t the only ones.
Mine owners turned public and private violence on Irish radicals pushing for things like the eight-hour day. The notorious strike-breaking Pinkerton Detective Agency was detailed to infiltrate the Mollies.
The main blow against the Mollies was struck over a period of (extrajudicial) vigilante justice in the mid-1870’s, culminating in “Pennsylvania’s Day of the Rope” in 1877, when ten supposed members were (judicially) hanged around the Keystone State.
Kehoe, a power broker in mining country with some sway at the capital who was reputed to call the shots among the Maguires, faced the hangman singly a year later for an 1862 cold-case murder so doubtfully ascribed to Kehoe that the governor hesitated to sign the death warrant.
He signed it just the same, marking a sort of ceremonial “end to Molly-ism.” The New York Timesexulted two days hence “that the widely-extended and long-continued tyranny and terror of this association is at an end,” and all because the resolute executive had gone and sent a hempen message to “the savage and benighted population of the coal region.”
The lesson taught by the punishment of the Molly Maguires would have been shorn of much of its terror and impressiveness if the energetic and persistent efforts made in behalf of KEHOE, the reputed king of that organization, had resulted in rescuing him from the gallows. If they had even so far succeeded as to have caused his punishment to be commuted to imprisonment for life, the admonitory influence of his fate upon the murderous clain of whom he was the last surviving chief would have been greatly lessened, and the snake of Molly Maguire-ism, of which he was the forked tongue and fangs, might haply have been only scotched, not killed. … The law has shown that it has subtlety enough to hunt [the Molly Maguires] through every possible labyrinth of refuge and strip from them every artifice of disguise, and power enough to wring them out of the desperate grasp of sympathizing constituencies and crush them.
Florid.
Like we said, violence wasn’t the exclusive resort of one side. But the monopoly of violence … that was held, as always, by the same hands that held the monopolies. Sean Connery as Kehoe reflects on the uneven contest while awaiting his fate in a (fictional) exchange with the Pinkerton mole who condemned him from the 1970 film The Molly Maguires.*
Pennsylvania Gov. John Hartranft left office a few weeks later, and reflected in his outgoing address on the lessons “the manufacturers and operators” ought to draw from the late unpleasantness.
The Mollie Maguire murders, like the agrarian murders in Ireland, and the trades-union outrages, arsons, and machine-breakings in England, were not the work of the so-called criminal classes. They were essentially class murders … If some of the leading spirits of the class had been members of a board of arbitration as representatives of labor, with some of the employers or their agents as representatives of capital, it is not unreasonable to suppose that most of the disagreements that have kept the coal regions in a state of turmoil might have been amicably adjusted, and many of those who were assassinated and of those who have been hanged living to-day.
101 years later, Kehoe received what was thought to be the first and only posthumous pardon in the state’s history. The Mollies’ true extent, purpose and actual actions — even their very existence as anything but a stalking-horse for the more thorough conquest of surplus labor — remain hotly debated to this day, since the public record of this tight-lipped society consists of little beyond the courtroom testimony of a handful of parties thoroughly prejudiced to hostility by class interest or payoffs.
* Written by Walter Bernstein, who had only recently emerged from the Hollywood blacklist for his Communist proclivities.
On this date in 2000, Amilcar Cetino Perez and Tomas Cerrate Hernandez were executed on live television in Guatemala for kidnapping and murdering a liquor heiress.
The televised Perez execution began at 6:05 a.m., with Hernandez (reportedly “shaking badly”) following at 7:15. Both took some minutes; Amnesty International has charged that they were botched and the prisoners suffered prolonged suffering. The macabre spectacle was replayed on Guatemalan TV throughout the day.
So daunting (or puffed-up) was the menace posed by the Los Posaco kidnapping-and-extortion gang they belonged to, the president sent his family to Canada to shield them from reprisals.
Today’s casualties were the second and third persons to die by lethal injection in Guatemala,* and remain to this date the last.
They might not retain that distinction long, however. Legislation earlier this year filled a legal gap that had caused a five-year moratorium on executions — ironically, by restoring the president’s power to pardon and commute death sentences.
On this date in 2004, at Ho Chi Minh City’s Long Binh execution ground, Vietnamese mafioso Truong Van Cam was shot with four of his lieutenants for ordering the murder of a rival crime lord.
An anti-communist soldier during the Vietnam War, “Nam Cam” (“Cam the fifth sibling”) survived a communist re-education camp and ingratiated himself sufficiently with the powers that be through the late 1970’s and 1980’s to ensconce himself as a wealthy and influential power broker within the country.
Nam Cam emerges from court after hearing his death sentence on June 5, 2003.
His arrest in 2001 for ordering a hit in a characteristic underworld turf war mushroomed into a vast corruption scandal, implicating a network of official protectors who ran interference for his criminal syndicate.
More than 150 people stood trial with Nam Cam — including “two expelled members of the 150-member Communist Party central committee, the former head of the state radio system, and the former director of police in Troung Nam Cam’s base of operation, Ho Chi Minh City.” (Source)
The doomed capo reportedly indulged the comfort of gloating that “the Communists may have thought they defeated South Vietnam, but I have shown that they are rotten to the core with corruption.”
On this date in 1942, mobsters Frank Abbandando and Harry Maione were electrocuted in New York’s Sing Sing prison for murder.
The two had risen together from an Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, gang to help weld together Murder, Inc. in the 1930’s — which, as its press-conferred moniker suggested, executed hits for the mob.
Dozens of corpses were left in their trail, and it was long odds that the spectacularly mangled body of a minor loan shark and suspected police informant killed in 1937 would be the one to haunt them. But when the government brought the heat against Murder, Inc., a collaborator in that hit turned state’s evidence and testified against Abbandando and Maione.
Pep has an ice pick. Happer has meat cleaver. It is the kind you chop with, you know, butcher cleaver. Abby grabs Rudnick by the feet and drags him over to the car. Pep and Happy grab it by the head. They put it in the car. Somebody says “It don’t fit.” Just as they push the body in it gives a little cough or something. With that, Pep starts with the ice pick and starts punching away at Whitey. Maione says “Let me hit the bastard one for luck.” And he hits him with the cleaver some place on the head.
Convicting mobsters was no mean feat — after all, they tended to whack informants — and the arrogant Abbandando in particular was shocked that his powerful connections didn’t manage to rig the trial.
But he and Maione were not altogether bereft of underworld consolation in their hour of need.
Three months before they were electrocuted, the stool pigeon in their trial “fell” to his death from a New York hotel room. It was just hours before he was to testify against Cosa Nostra boss Albert Anastasia, who would escape his fortuitously weakened prosecutors and eventually take over Murder, Inc., in its mid-1940’s twilight.
On this date in 1853, two chiefs of the New York street gang Daybreak Boys were hanged at “the Tombs” jail in Manhattan.
It was a yeasty era in the Big Apple, burgeoning with immigrants into one of the great urban centers of the world. The city’s stupefying growth — it would triple in size during this generation — fertilized a thousand niches, neighborhoods and enclaves, all the boroughs’ glorious mess.
Gangs were sometimes necessary as a support system for the new immigrants, who were otherwise powerless. Soon, the gangs were the undisputed rulers of their districts, and the politicians soon began to call upon them for assistance. Before long, an election day in New York City meant sinister looking men armed with clubs hovering around the polling places ensuring that people voted for the “right” candidate.
Other gangs operated independently of the political machines and served only themselves and answered to no one. They were found mostly along the waterfront of the Fourth Ward, and were likened to bloodthirsty pirates who plundered vessels in the harbor, killing anyone who got in their way.
The Daybreak Boys was one such gang. Operating out of Pete Williams’ gin mill at the intersection of James and Water Sts., an area known as Slaughterhouse Point, the Daybreakers were the terror of the East River in the early 1850s. Between 1850 and 1852, they were credited (blamed?) for the loss of $100,000 in property and at least 20 murders. The origin of their name is uncertain, though that they were known to operate on the East River sometimes into the early morning is a theory. The phonetic spelling of “b’hoy” soon became a badge of honor for men in the area, for a man was not truly considered part of the “in” crowd if he were not “one of the b’hoys.”
The Prohibition-era book that gave title and inspiration to that film is the go-to source on the Daybreak Boys, among many other contemporaneous criminal syndicates. Nicholas Saul, hanged in his 20th year, co-founded and led the gang of youthful toughs. Their evolution towards murderous piracy on the Hudson and East Rivers set the backdrop for this day’s drop: they had killed a watchman during an unsuccessful raid on a ship the previous summer, and been cornered and arrested by police.
Local luminaries — including the gangster played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the Gangs clip above — turned out for the occasion to pay the condemned tribute, shaking hands with the young men on their way to the gallows.
The Daybreak Boys would have a few years left in their run yet. A fellow with the estimable nickname of Slobbery Jim inherited leadership — talents that would later serve him as an officer in the Confederate army — and the enterprise didn’t peter out until the depredations of kindred river raiders drove the New York Police Department to establish its Harbor Unit.
The wealthy Communist Party member and Shenyang city legislator had been sentenced to death 20 months before in a corruption case for ordering the murder of a tobacco vendor as part of a mafioso racket of graft, extortion, black marketeering, and kindred mayhem.
The main blow against the Mollies was struck over a period of (extrajudicial) vigilante justice in the mid-1870’s, culminating in “Pennsylvania’s Day of the Rope” in 1877, when ten supposed members were (judicially) hanged around the Keystone State.
The televised Perez execution began at 6:05 a.m., with Hernandez (
