Categotry Archives: Criminals

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James Porter

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Categories: Criminals, Religious Leaders

James R. Porter, a former priest and convicted child molester, died on Feb. 11. Cause of death was not released. He was 70.
Born in Revere, Mass., Porter was the second son of an oil company chemist. He graduated from Boston College with a degree in mathematics and entered St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. Although the seminary recommended Porter as a young man of “excellent character,” allegations of abuse surfaced only a few weeks after the church gave him his first post in North Attleborough, Mass., in 1960. He molested children, often brazenly, even as parents shared their suspicions with church authorities. Instead of turning Porter over to the police, however, the church transferred him to a parish in Fall River, Mass.
Over the next few years, the church responded to numerous complaints about Porter’s inappropriate behavior with children by transferring him to two more towns. In 1965, Porter was ordered to seek spiritual counseling at the Jemez Springs Foundation House, a Catholic rest center in New Mexico that helps priests overcome problems with alcoholism and sexual misconduct. Upon his release, Porter resumed his criminal activities and the church continued to protect him. Before he left the priesthood in 1974, Porter abused children in Texas, Minnesota and New Mexico.
Porter married, fathered four children and lived a quiet life until 1987 when he served four months in jail for molesting his children’s baby-sitter. Three years later, Frank Fitzpatrick, a Rhode Island private investigator who had been an altar boy under Porter, contacted the former priest. During taped telephone conversations, Porter admitted to sexually abusing dozens of children but couldn’t remember any of their names. In response, Fitzpatrick took out advertisements in New England newspapers to find Porter’s victims and seek justice.
Porter returned to face trial in Massachusetts in 1993, and was convicted of molesting 28 children and sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison. In a television interview, he confessed to abusing as many as 100 children. The high-profile case foreshadowed the clergy sex abuse scandal that swept through the Roman Catholic Church in 2002.
Porter completed his prison sentence last year, but was being held pending the completion of a civil commitment hearing to determine if he should be committed indefinitely as a sexual predator. The hearing, which was postponed last month when Porter became ill, featured testimony from several of his victims. Porter’s ex-wife also came forward and testified that she once caught him touching a neighborhood boy.
“Father Porter came to symbolize the start of an era when people could talk about priest abuse. The irony is James Porter caused a lot of laws to be changed, caused a lot of people to come forward,” said attorney Roderick MacLeish, who represented 101 Porter victims in lawsuits.
Last May, Porter married Anne Milner, a former nun he knew from seminary. The couple became reacquainted in 2002 when Milner wrote Porter in prison.
• Complete Coverage of Abuse in the Catholic Church From The Boston Globe

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Priscilla Ford

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Categories: Criminals

Priscilla Joyce Ford, a mass murderer and the only woman on Nevada’s death row, died on Jan. 29. Cause of death was not released. She was 75.
On Nov. 27, 1980, Thanksgiving Day, Ford was driving north on Virginia Street in Reno, Nev. Going about 40 mph, she intentionally steered her blue Lincoln Continental onto the crowded sidewalk and mowed down as many people as she could. Seven pedestrians died and 23 were injured in the incident.
Ford fled the scene, but stopped in traffic five blocks later. Police caught up with her at a red light and placed her under arrest. As she was given tests to determine her blood alcohol level — it was .162 — Ford called her victims “beasts” and “pigs.” A plea of not guilty by reason of insanity was entered on Ford’s behalf and the judge ordered her to undergo mental health treatment so she would be competent to stand trial.
The six-month trial featured 93 witnesses and more than 500 exhibits; at the time, it was the longest and most expensive in Reno history. Ford took the stand in her own defense and told the court that she was the spirit of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and Adam reincarnate. Prosecutors argued that she knew the difference between right and wrong.
In March 1982, the jury convicted Ford of six counts of murder and 23 counts of attempted murder, and sentenced her to die in Nevada’s gas chamber. Over the next two decades, Ford’s execution dates were set and stayed several times. Although the state appeals process ended in 1989, her federal appeals continued to challenge the death sentence.
When asked why she murdered the innocent bystanders, Ford originally blamed the event on “voices,” then said she did it to get attention for her daughter’s case. In 1973, her 11-year-old daughter was sent to the county’s juvenile detention center after Ford was arrested for trespassing and assault. Ford later accused the authorities of kidnapping the girl. In 1985, Ford claimed she didn’t remember the incident, but said she was ready “to die every day.”
A Michigan native, Ford earned a bachelor’s degree in education and worked for several years as a teacher. She began seeking treatment for mental illness in 1970, and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with violent tendencies. Ford claimed to have god-like powers and the ability to smite those who crossed her, however, she refused to stay on her medication.
Prior to the killings, Ford was working at a Macy’s department store in Reno as a gift-wrapper. She spent the rest of her life on death row at the Southern Nevada Women’s Correctional Center in Las Vegas.

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Josef Schwammberger

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Categories: Criminals, Military

Josef Schwammberger, an SS lieutenant during World War II, spent 40 years living openly in South America before he was arrested and charged with war crimes. The Austrian was the commander of three labor camps in Poland — Przemysl, Rozwadow and Mielec — from 1942 to 1944. His reputation for cruelty against the Jewish inmates was so notorious that he appeared on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Most Wanted” Nazi list.
Schwammberger was arrested in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1945, but he escaped three years later while en route to his trial. He immigrated to Argentina, where he lived under his own name and worked at a petrochemical plant. In 1965, Schwammberger obtained Argentine citizenship, a calculated move that helped him in the 1970s when the West German authorities sought his extradition.
Argentine officials finally took Schwammberger into custody in 1987, but it would take another two years of appeals before he was returned to Germany for trial. In court, he was charged with murdering or helping to murder 3,377 people, including more than 40 by his own hand.
Survivors and witnesses traveled from all over the world to attend Schwammberger’s 11-month trial and testify to his crimes. They shared stories of how he set his German shepherd on camp inmates and personally shot Holocaust victims for being pregnant, stealing bread or hoarding their valuables. A lack of direct evidence forced prosecutors to reduce the number of charges to 34 inmates killed by Schwammberger and at least 275 who died as a result of his orders.
He was convicted in 1992 of seven counts of murder and 32 counts of accessory to murder and sentenced to life in prison. Schwammberger tried to appeal his incarceration in 2002 on the grounds that he was too frail, but the court ruled that his “particularly cruel” crimes outweighed his health concerns.
Schwammberger died on Dec. 3 in a hospital prison in Hohenasperg, Germany. Cause of death was not released. He was 92.

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Red Rountree

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Categories: Criminals

J.L. Hunter ”Red” Rountree was in his 80s when he became a bank robber. At the time, he said, robbery sounded like a good way to make money — and get some revenge against the banking industry.
The Texas native was once a successful businessman. He made millions running the Rountree Machinery Co., but became financially strapped after a Corpus Christi bank called in a business loan and forced him into bankruptcy. Rountree’s first wife died in 1986; a year later he married a 31-year-old drug addict. After spending $500,000 putting her through rehab, they divorced in 1995.
Living off Social Security didn’t suit Rountree so he began robbing banks. He was 86 when he robbed the SouthTrust Bank in Biloxi, Miss., in 1998. Ten minutes after making his getaway, however, the police caught him. Rountree was sentenced to three years probation and a $260 fine, and ordered to leave Mississippi.
In 1999, Rountree was robbing a NationsBank in Pensacola, Fla., when two customers thwarted his efforts. He was convicted again and sentenced to three years in prison. Rountree was released in 2002, but a life of crime still appealed to him.
“You want to know why I rob banks? It’s fun. I feel good, awful good. I feel good for sometimes days, for sometimes hours,” Rountree once said in an interview with The Associated Press.
In 2003, Roundtree hit the First American Bank in Abilene, Texas. Although the robbery was successful — he got away with nearly $2,000 — Rountree was captured that same day and later sentenced to 12 years in prison. Considered the nation’s oldest known bank robber, Roundtree was transferred last January to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo. He died on Oct. 12 at the age of 92. No family members came forward to claim Rountree’s body so he was buried in a cemetery near the prison.

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O.D.B.

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Categories: Business, Criminals, Musicians

odb.jpgRap artist O.D.B., a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan, collapsed and died on Nov. 13 in a Manhattan recording studio. Cause of death was not released. He was 35.
Although his legal name was Russell Tyrone Jones, O.D.B. went by many monikers: Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt, Joe Bannanas, Osiris, Unique Ason and Big Baby Jesus. In 1992, he helped form the Wu-Tang Clan, a Staten Island-based hip hop collective that was designed to showcase the talents of its nine MCs.
Buoyed by the success of the group’s debut, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” O.D.B. signed with Elektra and released his first solo effort, “Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version,” in 1995. His free-associative rhymes pushed the singles “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” and “Brooklyn Zoo” up the charts and afforded him the opportunity to live large. With a gold record under his belt, the Brooklyn native soon developed a reputation for being wild, controversial and thoroughly unpredictable.
O.D.B. launched the Osirus Entertainment record label, started his own clothing line and released his second solo album, “Nigga Please.” In 1998, he helped save a little girl’s life after she was hit by a car (he and his friends physically lifted the vehicle off of her).
A few days after the rescue, however, O.D.B. received a great deal of negative publicity when he behaved like a sore loser at the Grammy Awards. Upset that rapper P. Diddy (then known as Puff Daddy) won the award for best rap album, O.D.B. stormed the stage during singer Shawn Colvin’s acceptance speech, took over the microphone and complained that he had spent a lot of money on his clothes because he thought the Wu-Tang Clan was going to win. He later apologized for his behavior.
O.D.B. also had an extensive arrest record that included making terrorist threats, illegal possession of body armor, failure to pay child support, driving with a suspended license, shoplifting, lewd behavior and assault. He was ordered to attend drug rehabilitation in 2000, but left the Los Angeles clinic before completing the program. In 2001, he was sentenced to two to four years in prison for drug possession, plus two concurrent years for escaping from rehab.
Upon his release from prison in 2003, O.D.B. made a cameo appearance on Mariah Carey’s pop song, “Fantasy.” The father of 13 children, he was working on a comeback album at the time of his death.
Shimmy Shimmy Ya Download “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”
Brooklyn Zoo Download “Brooklyn Zoo”

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