- 7 months ago
From kingpins to conmen, these criminals all came crashing down eventually. Join us as we explore some of history's most dramatic falls from criminal power! Our countdown includes notorious figures who ruled their underworlds through violence, corruption, and intimidation before justice finally caught up with them. Which criminal downfall shocked you the most?
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00:00When Escobar was finally located, we expected him to have a full army.
00:04Welcome to WatchMojo, where we'll be covering arrests that brought down some of the most influential criminals in history.
00:09But in December 2008...
00:12If you work on a trading desk, stop what you're doing for one second.
00:15Bernard Madoff became a household name.
00:17The Cray twins. During the 50s and 60s, Ronnie and Reggie Cray ruled the streets of London.
00:22The twins did indeed commandeer whatever they wanted, whether it was money, material items, or manpower.
00:30Backed by their gang, The Firm, they became London's most infamous crime bosses.
00:33Instead of shying away from the spotlight, they ended up achieving celebrity status in the 60s.
00:38Both twins earned a reputation for violence from a young age, which ultimately led to their downfall in 1968.
00:44It was a messy, really messy job, what they did of him anyway.
00:47It took a long time to kill him, apparently. It was a bad scene.
00:52In 1964, Detective Leonard Nipper Reed began investigating their operations.
00:57By 1968, they had acquired enough evidence to put them behind bars.
01:01A likely catalyst was their murder of Jack the Hat McVitie, who was a relatively minor gangster.
01:06The twins were sentenced to life in prison, ending their criminal reign.
01:09The Crays did their sorry best to live their lives in prison,
01:13whilst clinging to a name of reputation that was being diluted by each and every embarrassing charade
01:18that was being carried out by their minions.
01:20Manuel Noriega.
01:21In the 80s, Panama was a dictatorship, with Manuel Noriega at the helm.
01:25For six years, the military strongman of Panama.
01:29He wielded the power of life and death.
01:32He wasn't the leader on paper, but in all other respects, he was.
01:35Using puppet presidents, he became absurdly wealthy,
01:38exploiting his position to traffic drugs and weapons across Central America.
01:41Noriega luxuriated in the good life,
01:44and basked in the adulation of friends and cronies.
01:47One of his strongest allies was the Medellin cartel, founded by the famous Pablo Escobar.
01:52In the end, his regime was so brutal that America put pressure on Noriega to resign.
01:56After realizing it was an impossible task, they opted to invade Panama.
02:00Noriega was successfully captured, then tried in America, Panama, and France.
02:04The trial lasted nine months.
02:06Finally, the jury declared Noriega guilty, and the judge sentenced him to 40 years in jail.
02:12Whitey Bulger.
02:13It's no secret that the FBI sometimes keeps criminals as informants,
02:16then protects their operations in exchange for knowledge.
02:19And soon enough, Bulger and Flemmy, according to court proceedings,
02:22became secret FBI informants.
02:24Their handler was FBI agent John Connolly.
02:27It was an unusual relationship between an FBI operative and his informants, and turned criminal.
02:33One of their most infamous moles was Whitey Bulger,
02:35who led the Winter Hill Gang in Massachusetts.
02:38Bulger joined the FBI in the mid-1970s,
02:40which allowed him to terrorize his local area with impunity.
02:43He was the scariest criminal I ever came across.
02:46You could see it in his eyes.
02:48He just had that steer in his eyes, thousand-yard look.
02:51He was just ruthless.
02:53It all fell apart in 1994 when the DEA and local police set their sights on him.
02:57It took law enforcement 16 years to finally catch him,
03:00with Bulger spending 12 of those years on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.
03:04In 2011, they finally arrested him in Santa Monica, California, while he was 81 years old.
03:09After a worldwide manhunt, Bulger was finally arrested in Santa Monica, California, in 2011.
03:16Jeffrey Epstein
03:16In the early 80s, Epstein created a banking investment firm, which quickly became highly lucrative.
03:21You know, he was a figure of mystery,
03:25in that all people really knew about him was he had, kind of, out of nowhere.
03:31Known to be unconventional, people thought he was very good-looking.
03:35This allowed him to become friends with America's wealthiest figures, such as Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein.
03:40Turned out, behind the scenes, he was trafficking underage women.
03:43This got him arrested in 2005, but he got away with a light 13 months in prison.
03:47For many, the most outrageous part of Epstein's plea bargain
03:51was a seedy deal he struck with the Attorney General for the Southern District of Florida.
03:56It gave Epstein and any alleged co-conspirators, known or unknown, immunity from further prosecution.
04:05In 2019, he was arrested again, but this time they seemed to take it more seriously.
04:10A few weeks later, he seemingly took his own life in jail.
04:13Some are skeptical, however, with conspiracy theorists claiming it was a murder to protect his wealthy friends.
04:18With Epstein dead, the charges against him were dismissed, denying justice to his many victims.
04:25Frank Lucas
04:26From the late 60s to mid-70s, Lucas was one of the most notorious figures in Harlem, New York.
04:31With the arrival of blue magic, it's clear that they found it.
04:35And Frank is making more money than ever.
04:37At his peak, he claimed he was earning $1 million daily.
04:40He got his product directly from Asia's Golden Triangle,
04:43which he claimed was smuggling in using the coffins of dead American forces.
04:46It's coming from Asia.
04:48So we had a heads up immediately as to where poppies were being grown.
04:53In 1975, his home was raided and Lucas was convicted soon after.
04:57Despite being sentenced to 70 years in prison, he only served five,
05:01after giving the police the names of his accomplices.
05:03They placed him in the witness protection program,
05:05but he was put back in jail shortly after for selling narcotics once again.
05:09Serves the full term and is released in 1991.
05:12John Gotti
05:13The five families are infamous criminal organizations all based in New York City.
05:17John Gotti was the most famous gangster since Al Capone.
05:22His picture's on page one of newspapers.
05:24His name is all over TV.
05:26He's a headline figure.
05:28One of the most infamous is the Gambino crime family,
05:31which gets up to all manner of illicit activities.
05:33In 1985, John Gotti had their previous ruler murder, then took charge.
05:37Under his rule, they became the most powerful crime family in America.
05:41Gotti is able to evade law enforcement for a few years,
05:45and it's a combination of having this network where he's able to insulate himself
05:52from specific crimes and specific offenses.
05:55He spent seven years pulling the strings,
05:57but unlike most mob bosses, he didn't shy away from the spotlight.
06:00This was likely a factor in his arrest and subsequent life sentence in 1992.
06:04His list of convictions was humongous, giving him no hope of freedom.
06:08Ten years later, Gotti died in prison, age 61.
06:11To some New Yorkers, Gotti will always be a modern-day Robin Hood.
06:16But he was never anything more than a thug.
06:19His only legacy was the destruction of the most powerful mafia family in history.
06:24El Chapo.
06:25Joaquin Guzman is more commonly known by his nickname El Chapo.
06:29To many in Sinaloa, El Chapo is not just a drug trafficker.
06:33He's a hero.
06:34They see him as a modern-day Robin Hood.
06:37He's infamous for leading the Sinaloa cartel,
06:39which made him the globe's most powerful narcotics dealer.
06:42During his career, estimates claim he caused at least 34,000 deaths.
06:46At one point, he maintained a power level similar to Pablo Escobar at his peak.
06:50He was first arrested in 1993, but escaped in 2001 after bribing guards.
06:54How he escaped remains a little murky.
06:57The official version and the one recounted by most journalists is that he was rolled out in a laundry cart by a lower-ranking prison official.
07:08In 2014, he was arrested and escaped once again.
07:11Finally, in 2016, they got him for good.
07:13Nobody's ever broken out of this supermax prison here in Colorado.
07:17Since opening in 1994, known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, this airtight penitentiary is housed the worst of the worst,
07:24including billionaire cartel kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, like the rest here, segregated and on permanent lockdown 23 hours a day.
07:33Al Capone, also known as Scarface, there are few criminals who earned the reputation Capone did.
07:38And one man seemed to rule Chicago.
07:42A racketeer, pimp, bootlegger, and cold-blooded killer named Al Capone.
07:47In the 1920s, America prohibited alcohol.
07:51This gave rise to huge crime syndicates peddling illegal liquor.
07:54The most famous was run by Al Capone, who ruled over Chicago from 1925 to 1931.
08:00He was a pretty crafty image builder.
08:04It's no accident that when he was seen in public, he always had the Borsalina on at an angle,
08:09he always had the same kind of stylish topcoat, and he also had this charismatic, larger-than-life persona.
08:17For a time, he was considered America's Robin Hood because public opinion was largely opposed to prohibition.
08:22After the St. Valentine's Day massacre, when seven gangsters were murdered on Capone's orders,
08:27he became overwhelmingly despised.
08:29In the end, he was charged with tax evasion, a fairly minor offense compared to his other misdeeds, but it ended his career.
08:34It effectively ended his reign because it took him out of the play for a good long time.
08:42Bernie Madoff.
08:43Ponzi schemes are named after Charles Ponzi, a criminal who made over $20 million scamming so-called investors.
08:49Tonight, as much as $50 billion is gone, vanished.
08:54From Madoff clients around the world, including celebrities like Steven Spielberg, Kevin Bacon, and Elie Wiesel.
09:01Despite having the scheme named after him, he didn't run the most successful Ponzi scheme.
09:05That medal goes to Bernie Madoff.
09:06His scheme was worth approximately $65 billion, the largest in history.
09:10He was getting people to invest in his trading, in his hedge fund.
09:15The money that people were investing with him was not going into the stock market.
09:19It was simply going into a JPMorgan Chase bank account.
09:22In 1960, he opened a penny stock brokerage, and by 2008, it had become the sixth largest of its type.
09:28That same year, he was arrested after his sons told law enforcement about the scam.
09:32Roughly $18 billion was lost, with $4 billion of that still being missing years after the scheme's collapse.
09:38And the remorse he claimed in every message is suspect as well.
09:42At his 2009 sentencing, Madoff turned to his victims.
09:46I'm sorry, he said.
09:47I know that doesn't help you.
09:49It didn't.
09:50And neither does Bernie Madoff's death.
10:08Pablo Escobar, Colombia's most famous cartel boss is Pablo Escobar by a significant margin.
10:14Pablo Escobar, he's a painful memory for the Colombian history.
10:21He's the chief of the cartel of Medellin, one of the most powerful cartels that the country and the world have had.
10:28His criminal career began in the 70s, then came to a huge crash in 1993.
10:41Escobar's operations peaked in the 80s, when he smuggled over 70 tons of narcotics into America monthly.
10:47En ese momento estábamos hablando de una guerra sin cuartel en contra de la sociedad colombiana y una oferta de negociación que estaba sujeta a que se le dieran algunos prerequisitos para que el enemigo número uno en ese momento terminara sometido a la justicia.
11:06Some of his most outrageous crimes were the Avianca Flight 203 and D.A.S. building bombings, earning him a reputation as a terrorist.
11:13After a lengthy manhunt, he was found in Medellin, but refused arrest.
11:17While trying to escape, he was shot and killed with his cartel dismantling in his absence.
11:21Escobar es el perfecto icono del mal, es tan buen narco que es una máquina de hacer dinero después de muerte.
11:29Who do you think was the most nefarious crime boss in history?
11:32Let us know in the comments section.
11:33His legacy.
11:36Just another boss who killed the previous boss, gets arrested, dies in jail.
11:40No more, no less.
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