Bloodletters and Badmen

by Jay Robert Nash

Overview

A narrative encyclopedia of American criminals from the pilgrims to the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871317773
Publisher:	M. Evans & Company
Publication date:	04/20/1995
Edition description:	Completely revised, updated, and expande
Pages:	698
Sales rank:	399,676
Product dimensions:	8.38(w) x 11.14(h) x 1.39(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

A

ABBANDANDO, FRANK Syndicate Gangster * (1910-1942)

BACKGROUND: HABITUAL CRIMINAL, RAISED IN OCEAN HILL, N.Y., MINOR PUBLIC EDUCATION. ALIASES: THE DASHER. RECORD: SENT TO SEVERAL REFORM SCHOOLS AS A TEEN FOR EXTORTION; SERVED TERM AT ELMIRA, N.Y., REFORMATORY FOR KICKING NEW YORK POLICE OFFICER HAMPTON FERGUSON INTO UNCONSCIOUSNESS IN 1928; WITH HARRY MAIONE AND ABE RELES SHOT AND KILLED RIVAL N.Y. GANGSTERS METER AND IRVING SHAPIRO IN 1931; SHOT AND KILLED WILLIE SHAPIRO IN 1934; WITH MAIONE AND RELES STABBED AND AXED TO DEATH GEORGE "WHITEY" RUDNICK IN A BROWNSVILLE, N.Y. GARAGE ON 5/25/37; WITH MAIONE AND VITO GURINO SHOT AND KILLED FELICE ESPOSITO, A WITNESS TO A 1922 GANG MURDER, ON 2/9/39; WITH GURINO AND LEO TOCCI KIDNAPPED AND RAPED A 17-YEAR-OLD GIRL IN BROWNSVILLE ON 8/23/39; CONVICTED OF MURDER AND SENT TO SING'S ELECTRIC CHAIR ON 2/19/42.

Few, in any syndicate killers were more ruthless than Frank "The Dasher" Abbandando. He killed for the sheer love of killing, for the perverse elation it gave him. He showed no remorse for the more than forty lives he took. As he sat down to die in Sing Sing's electric chair, there was a smirk on the lamp-jawed gangster's face that registered only contempt and arrogance.

A native of Ocean Hill, Abbandando quit school at an early age and joined a street gang headed by another vicious hoodlum, Harry "Happy" Maione. He, Maione, and others worked the extortion racket, threatening to burn down shop buildings unless their owners paid them a weekly payoff. Sent to several reform schools, Abbandando could not be reformed. He was mean-spirited and enjoyed beating and bullying others. Apprehended for a minor offense in 1928 by police officer Hampton Ferguson, the hulking Abbandando turned on the officer, knocked him down, and kicked him into unconsciousness before other officers collared him.

This time Abbandando was sent to Elmira (N.Y.) reformatory. The only thing normal practiced by Abbandando at Elmira was to play second base for the reformatory team. He was so fast that he was nicknamed "The Dasher," a moniker he relished. When released from Elmira, Abbandando returned to his stomping grounds in Ocean Hill where he and Maione established lucrative gambling and loan-sharking rackets. Joining this gang was Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, another brutal gangster who aided Abbandando and Maione in battling the powerful Shapiro brothers, who bossed the rackets in neighboring Brownsville.

In 1931, Abbandando, Maione, and Reles shot and killed Meyer and Irving Shapiro, taking over most of the Brownsville rackets controlled by these gangsters. They took full control of this area after murdering Willie Shapiro, the last of the opposing brothers, in 1934. Abbandando, Maione, and Reles put together a large gang of thugs who thought and acted as they did: beat and kill anyone who opposed them, beat and kill anyone who failed to pay their bookies or loan-sharking agents.

So methodical and ruthless were these killers that they quickly came to the attention of the crime czars of Manhattan, particularly those younger gangsters--such as Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and Albert Anastasia--who had put together the newly organized national crime syndicate. Their organization needed a brutal, uncompromising goon squad that would injure or kill without asking questions.

They looked to the gang run by Abbandando, Maione, and Reles that had earned the sobriquet of Brooklyn, Inc. Within a few years, this gang of killers became known as Murder, Inc. Its members received orders from syndicate bosses either to beat up or to kill people they did not know, to go anywhere to enforce syndicate edicts.

The Dasher was one of Murder, Inc.'s most dedicated killers. Inside of a decade, Abbandando killed more than forty people on syndicate orders, slaying them with icepicks, axes, knives, and guns. He never took exception to a "contract" (a syndicate order to kill someone), and made his "hit" (murder) with alacrity and precision, collecting an average payment of $500 per killing.

Suddenly rich, Abbandando lavished himself with a huge wardrobe of blue-striped suits and loud ties. He bought several roadsters and moved into an expensive apartment. The Dasher also serviced a string of expensive call girls, but his sexual appetite was only satiated when forcing sex upon young women. Abbandando would cruise the streets of Brownsville and Ocean Hill in his purring roadster, searching for rape victims.

Typical of Abbandando's sexual offenses was the gang rape he supervised on the night of August 23, 1939. He spotted a tall, well-endowed young woman entering a Brownville bar. He and two of his goons, Vito Gurino and Leo Tocci, followed the girl and, once inside the bar, inveigled her into a back room. They grabbed her and forced her out the back exit and into Abbandando's car. She was driven to a nearby hotel where she was raped again and again by the three men.

When prosecutors confronted the Dasher with his many rape offenses at his murder trial, Abbandando became indignant, snarling: "I never raped nobody!" A prosecutor read an old arrest transcript in which the Dasher all but admitted raping the victim. Shrugging, Abbandando said: "Well, that one doesn't count. really I married the girl later."

Abbandando murdered in the same fashion as he attacked young women--ruthlessly and without conscience. Such was the case of George "Whitey" Rudnick, who had been earmarked for death because of bad debts and because the mob thought he might be informing on them to police. On May 25, 1937, Abbandando, Reles, and Maione took Rudnick to a Brownville garage and there tortured him by stabbing him sixty-three times with icepicks, strangling him slowly, and then using a meat cleaver to crush his head. The three killers, Reles later related, laughed uproariously as they repeatedly stuck icepicks into Rudnick, counting the blows and delighting in the victim's tortured screams of agony

The man who meticulously memorized this murder, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, was the gangster who brought an end to Murder, Inc. Believing that his bosses intended to kill him, Reles began to inform. He outlined, for the first time, the powerful hierarchy of syndicate members and operations in New York, naming his bosses as Louis Capone (no relation to Chicago's Al Capone), Albert Anastasia, and the overall boss of Murder, Inc., Louis "Lepke" Buchalter.

Reles appeared in court to testify against Abbandando and Maione, who were tried together for the Rudnick and other killings. Both gangsters shouted threats at Reles, who nevertheless damned them from the witness chair. The Dasher was particularly menacing, whispering death threats to anyone he disliked. At one point, when in the witness chair, Abbandando leaned in close to presiding Judge Franklin W. Taylor and told him he would kill him if he was found guilty. Judge Taylor was unmoved and remarked after the Dasher's conviction: "The skull and crossbones of the underworld must come down!"

Unlike Reles, Abbandando had no intention of informing on his bosses. Time and again the Dasher replied to questions about his superior: "I never heard of Anastasia!" Of course he blared his denials so that Anastasia's henchmen, whom he knew were standing in the hallway outside the courtroom, could hear his response and report dutifully back to Anastasia that the Dasher was loyal.

It did Abbandando no good. He was convicted and sent to Sing Sing with Maione to await execution. The Dasher showed his usual bravado to reporters seeing him off at the train for the Castle on the Hudson, saying: "I'm gonna miss the first night ballgame of the season." He then promised that he would be out of prison soon, so confident was Abbandando of the power of the syndicate. He never came out but, instead, on February 19, 1942, was led into the little green room that housed the electric chair. He sat down in it with a smirk of defiance on his face. He said nothing as the black hood was placed over his head. His strapped down body quivered, the only response the Dasher had to the electric current that took his life.

(ALSO SEE Albert Anastasia: Louis Buchalter; Meyer Lansky; Charles Luciano: Harry Maione; Murder, Inc.; Abe Reles.)

ABBOTT, BURTON W. Murderer * (1928-1957)

BACKGROUND: BORN AND RAISED IN SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. MARRIED, WIFE GEORGIA. STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, MAJORING IN ACCOUNTING. TUBERCULAR SINCE CHILDHOOD (HAD A LUNG AND SEVERAL RIBS REMOVED). DESCRIPTION: 5'8", BROWN EYES, BROWN HAIR, SLIGHT BUILD. ALIASES: NONE. RECORDS: STRANGLED AND MURDERED 14-YEAR-OLD STEPHANIE BRYAN IN SAN FRANCISCO 4/28/55; WAS FOUND GUILTY IN A LONG AND SENSATIONAL TRIAL AND SENTENCED TO DEATH; DIED IN THE GAS CHAMBER AT SAN QUENTIN PRISON 3/15/57.

Burton Abbott was a mild-mannered, almost shy man whose friends called him "Bud" after the comedian. He had led an exemplary life, never had a police record and married an older woman named Georgia. Abbott's recreational habits were more intellectual than common: he was a better-than-average chess player and considered himself a minor master at preparing special cuisine. On weekends, Abbott would drive several hundred miles north of his Alameda home to a small cabin he owned in the Trinity Mountain range for some fishing, small same hunting, and general contemplation.

Though tubercular and frail, Burton Abbott in 1955 was a well-rounded young man, soberly approaching middle age with high values and solid purpose. The great mystery surrounding his brutal killing of fourteen-year-old Stephanie Bryan, therefore, remains doubly arcane.

The girl vanished in front of the Hotel Claremont in Berkeley after walking a classmate home on April 28, 1955. Hours later, dozens of policemen began a desperate search for her throughout Berkeley and Contra Costa County.

Several persons reported seeing a young girl in the area trying to fight off a young man in a car, but identification was skimpy. Thirteen days later a French textbook belonging to Stephanie was found in remote Franklin Canyon. It was the only trace of her.

The mystery would have remained had it not been for the unthinking actions of Burton Abbott's wife Georgia on the evening of July 15, 1955. While Abbott was entertaining a friend, Otto Dezman, (the husband of Leona Dezman for whom Georgia worked in a beauty parlor), Georgia rummaged around in the basement of Abbott's Alameda home. She was searching for costume material for a play she had written. Suddenly, she came across a girl's wallet buried in a box of old clothes.

Standing beneath the glare of a single naked light bulb, Georgia Abbott inspected the wallet finding Stephanie Bryan's identification card, pictures of the girl's schoolmates, and an unfinished letter she had been writing to a friend on the day of her murder. Mrs. Abbott, an avid newspaper reader, realized instantly what she had found and rushed upstairs.

Confronting her husband and Dezman, she held up the wallet and blurted: "Isn't this the girl who disappeared?"

After Dezman inspected the wallet, he called the police. Abbott appeared confused by the discovery, saying nothing. When police came, no one in the Abbott household could offer an explanation. Abbott distractedly played chess while an officer casually asked him a few questions and then went away.

The police returned the next day and carefully began to dig through Abbott's basement, overlooking nothing. While Abbott worked a crossword puzzle upstairs, the police dug up from the earthen floor Stephanie's schoolbooks and her bra.

Confronted with this new evidence, Abbott shrugged. Anyone, he claimed, could have planted that in his basement. In May of that year, he explained, his garage had been used as a polling place and dozens of people would have had access to his house. The police appeared satisfied with this excuse but a newsman, following a hunch, visited Abbott's Trinity Mountain cabin. He brought along a friend with two hunting dogs. The dogs quickly scurried to a shallow grave and the men began digging.

The badly decomposed but recognizable body of Stephanie Bryan was there. Her head had been crushed and her panties were tied tightly about her neck. The coroner, after being summoned, could not say whether or not she had been sexually molested.

But her presence on Abbott's land sealed his fate. He was arrested and tried for kidnapping and murder.

Burton Abbott's extensive trial was dominated by massive circumstantial evidence against him. He did not considerably improve his chances for acquittal by taking the stand. There, Abbott appeared to take the whole thing lightly, even laughing on the stand when the prosecution insisted that he had intended to rape little Stephanie and killed her when she resisted. The jury didn't care for Abbott's laughter.

It took seven days before the jury found him guilty of Murder One and he was sentenced to death in San Quentin's death chamber. Burton Abbott's real agony began on death row. He was granted several minor stays of execution, some for only hours, while his lawyers prepared weary appeals, all of which were denied.

Even such ardent foes of Capital Punishment as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, then Attorney General, rejected his pleas. Abbott continued to cry out his innocence.

Shortly before his day of execution, the condemned man was visited by San Quentin's psychiatrist, Dr. David Schmidt. When Schmidt asked him about the killing, Abbott tersely replied: "I can't admit it, Doc. Think of what it would do to my mother. She could not take it." This statement, which was kept confidential, was later revealed as Abbott's "confession," creating a political storm in California.

But Abbott never did make a public admission of his guilt and on March 14, 1957, Abbott walked into the small glass death room. At 11:15 a.m. the gas pellets were dropped beneath his chair. As the fumes rose about Burton Abbott the hotline from Governor Goodwin Knight's office began buzzing for San Quentin's warden.

"Hold the execution," one of Knight's aides yelled over the phone.

"Too late," Warden Harry Teets said. "The gas has already been released." Oddly, the Governor's stay was only for an hour anyway. The decision to grant this extra hour was never explained, but it mattered little to Abbott. He was dead by 11:25 a.m.

ABBOTT, JACK * HENRY Murderer * (1944- )

BACKGROUND: HABITUAL CRIMINAL. ALIASES: JACK EASTMAN. SENT TO A UTAH REFORM SCHOOL IN 1953 AT AGE NINE. RELEASED IN 1962 AND WAS SHORTLY ARRESTED FOR PASSING BAD CHECKS AND SENT TO THE UTAH STATE PENITENTIARY AS A CONVICTED FORGER. KILLED A FELLOW INMATE IN 1966, WAS CONVICTED AND RECEIVED A FOURTEEN-YEAR SENTENCE FOR MURDER. ESCAPED IN 1961 AND, WHILE AT LARGE FOR SIX WEEKS, ROBBED A BANK. RECAPTURED AND CONVICTED OF BANK ROBBERY. WROTE EXTENSIVE LETTERS TO AUTHOR NORMAN MAILER, OFFERING DETAILS OF PRISON LIFE AND PROMOTING HIMSELF AS AN AUTHOR. THROUGH THE EFFORTS OF MAILER AND OTHERS, WAS GIVEN A CONTRACT FOR A BOOK AND PAROLED ON 6/5/81. KNIFED TO DEATH 22-YEAR-OLD WAITER RICHARD ADAN ON 7/18/81, FLED TO MEXICO, THEN TO LOUISIANA WHERE DETECTIVES LOCATED AND ARRESTED HIM ON 9/23/81. TRIED BEFORE JUDGE IRVING LANG OF THE MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT, PROSECUTED BY JAMES FOGEL AND DEFENDED BY CRIMINAL ATTORNEY IVAN FISHER. GIVEN A MINIMUM SENTENCE, FIFTEEN YEARS TO LIFE. ABBOTT WAS RETURNED TO THE UTAH STATE PENITENTIARY TO SERVE OUT HIS REMAINING EIGHT YEARS BEFORE BEING SENT TO NEW YORK TO SERVE OUT THE MURDER SENTENCE.

One of the shrewdest and deadliest killers of recent times, Jack Henry Abbott spent all but nine months of his adult life behind bars for committing violent crimes. He was a calculating and clever convict who literary wrote himself out of prison with the considerable help of novelist-turned-amateur criminologist, Norman Mailer. His killer's streak ran to the bone marrow, however, and, shortly after winning his freedom through his literary efforts, Abbott inexplicably stabbed a young waiter to death.

Living in foster homes as a child, Abbott proved incorrigible. He was a troublemaker and was given to so many violent outbursts that he was sent to a Utah reform school at age nine. Released at age eighteen. Abbott quickly began passing bad checks and was soon arrested for forgery and convicted. He was sent to the Utah State Penitentiary where, in 1966, he murdered an inmate.

Abbott maintained that he killed in self-defense, that he was the victim of a vicious homosexual attack, but the court tailed to believe him. He then feebly tried to prove himself insane by throwing a pitcher of water at the presiding judge. He was examined by psychiatrists who reported him sane Abbott was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years for the killing.

Escaping from the Utah State Penitentiary in 1971, Abbott quickly robbed a Denver bank but he did not enjoy the loot for long, being recaptured and becoming a federal prisoner. As a maximum-security prisoner, Abbott's energies turned inward. He became to read endlessly, the subject of philosophy consuming him. He became enamored of Karl Marx and began telling other prisoners. guards, anyone within earshot, that he was a dedicated Marxist. In the course of his reading, Abbott reamed that his favorite novelist, Norman Mailer, was writing a book entitled The Executioner's Song, a portrait of condemned murderer Gary Gilmore, who was scheduled to die at the Utah State Penitentiary.

It undoubtedly hit upon the conniving Abbott that Mailer was a novice criminologist who would be grateful for inside information dealing with prison life. He began to write to the author, sending him long missives, fifteen pages or more each time. Abbott, in excruciating detail, profiled his own life in prison as a "state-raised" inmate. The prisoner's letters were ingratiating, and, most importantly, written in a clinical style that imitated with astonishing accuracy the writing of Mailer himself, a subtle flattery that the novelist accepted and interpreted as talent on Abbott's part. Abbott proved himself a terrier-like researcher devouring all of Mailer's work and parroting back to the author his own images, even those Abbott found in Mailer's The Naked and the Dead.

The nightmare prose Abbott offered Mailer described in horrific detail how he had undergone all manner of prison cruelties, how, standing naked, he had been chained by one arm to his bunk in strip-search cells, eaten cockroaches to survive, beaten by guards who tortured him with antipsychotic drugs. Abbott's seemingly endless correspondence with Mailer fixed upon hate and violence, subjects of the deepest concern to the author.

Mailer became so impressed with Abbott's murky prose that he convinced the editors of the New York Review of Books to publish some of the missives in 1980. This led to a book contract with Random House wherein Abbott received a $12,000 advance for a work he entitled, In the Belly of the Beast. Mailer wrote prison officials that Abbott was "a powerful and important American writer," lobbying for his release and stating that he had offered the murderer a job as a researcher.

Others joined the chorus to sing Abbott's praises. Errol McDonald, Abbott's editor at Random House, wrote prison officials urging a parole, stating that the killer "could support himself as a professional writer if he were released from prison and that he could very well have a bright future."

The pleas from the powerful brought Abbott's release on June 5, 1981. He was transferred to a Manhattan hallway house and Mailer personally welcomed him when his plane landed. The killer's book was published at this time and it immediately met with torrents of praise from New York's literati. One of those initially applauding Abbott was Jerzy Kosinski, author of Being There. Kosinksi, however, was one of the few literary figures to later recant his endorsement of Abbott and express regrets for having praised the killer's written work, likening the kudos showered upon Abbott to the wrongly placed praise the literati had heaped upon the lethal Black Panthers two decades earlier.

In New York Abbott was wined and dined at parties, embraced as a celebrity and peer by New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, author Jean Malaquais, and powerful literary agent Scott Meredith. He babbled about Camus and Sartre to these and others, cleverly building an image of himself as an intellectual giant. He began to promote among this clique the idea that he should be named a writer-in-residence at the esteemed MacDowell Colony in Petersborough, N.H. He was sure that he would acquire this lofty goal through his connections.

When not being feted in posh penthouse apartments, Abbott drifted to the lower depths, moving among his true peers, thieves and prostitutes inhabiting the Lower East Side. After roaming the streets in the early hours of July 18, 1981, Abbott, accompanied by two women, walked into the Bonibon restaurant on Second Avenue and Fifth Street.

The trio sat down and 22-year-old Richard Adan walked up to take their order. The Cuban-born waiter was a struggling actor who had also finished a play about the Lower East Side, which was about to be produced. He was known to be courteous and polite by his customers and friends. Before Adan could take Abbott's order, the killer demanded to use the washroom. Adan explained that the facilities were restricted to employees only because of insurance reasons.

Abbott exploded, screaming abuse, obscenities, and threats. Adan sought to calm him down by asking him to step outside where they could quietly settle the matter. As soon as the pair stepped outside. Abbott drew a knife and, without a word of explanation, plunged it to the hilt into Adan's heart, killing him instantly

Dashing back into the restaurant, Abbott shouted to Susan Roxas, one of the women with him: "Let's get out of here! I just killed a man!" He fled and soon vanished from the city.

Police and federal agents searched for Abbott across the country for two months. He was, at that time, holed up in a small Mexican village near the Guatemalan border. Here Abbott languished, unable to speak Spanish or find work. He spent his last dollars to return to the U.S., going to the Louisiana oil fields. Detectives picked up his trail, following his nomadic course through the oil towns of Algiers, Harvey, and Marrero.

Hundreds of itinerant, nameless oil workers were rousted from their beds in rickety dark bunkhouses and examined by flashlight. The officers seemed always to miss their man, often only by a few minutes. Abbott found work by using a social security card that bore the alias of Jack Eastman. He labored sixteen hours a day and was paid four dollars an hour, like the thousands of other drifters who kicked back a third of their wages to the oil firms to sleep in dirty bunkhouses and eat in open-air canteens. The rest of their pay was spent on cheap liquor and the whores who swarmed into the camps at dusk.

Detectives reamed that Abbott was working in the oil fields of the Ramos Oil Company in St. Mary's Parish. Pretending to be workers, plainclothes officers approached Abbott as he was unloading pipe from a truck. He stopped to raise his arms and comb his hair. At that moment detectives rushed forward leveling eight shotguns at him.

"Keep your hands in the air!" a detective ordered.

Abbott froze. He was then handcuffed and led away. He wore a filthy T-shirt, pants caked with dried oil, and boots so worn they were falling off his feet.

Flown to New York, Abbott was held at Riker's Island. He was tried before Judge Irving Lang of the Manhattan Supreme Court. His defense lawyer was criminal attorney Ivan Fisher and he was prosecuted by James Fogel. The killer no longer displayed his normal aloof attitude. He appeared nervous, anxious.

Abbott explained his murder of Adan as a "tragic misunderstanding." He then used the same excuse he had used after killing a prison inmate, that he had only acted in self-defense, that he had anticipated an attack from Adan.

"You intended to do it, you scum!" shouted a courtroom spectator who had jumped to his feet. The man was the father-in-law of the dead Adan, Henry Howard Judge Lang ordered Howard removed from the courtroom. Throughout the trial, the frustrated Howard languished in the hallway, waiting for justice to be done.

Among the several prosecution witnesses, Wayne Larsen proved to be the most damning of Abbott. He testified that he witnessed Abbott's ruthless knife thrust into the helpless Adan, an impact Larsen claimed "still rings in my ears. "

Fisher portrayed his client as the victim of the inhuman prison system that had created him, the same plaintive plea Abbott had so successfully used in engineering his release from prison. "He was mistreated for so long and in so horrible a way," argued Fisher. "If it was, in fact, the poison of prison that brought about these events, how can it be urged that a lot more is the cure?"

Prosecutor Fogel minced no words: "This is a killer, a killer by habit, a killer by inclination, a killer by philosophy, a killer by desire." Fogel asked for a maximum sentence of life.

Abbott was found guilty of first degree manslaughter. Judge Lang had earlier ruled that Abbott's previous convictions had qualified him as a "persistent violent felon." He nevertheless gave the killer the minimum sentence of fifteen years to life. Judge Lang stated that Abbott's conviction was, in part, "an indictment which brutalized instead of rehabilitating.... It's perfectly clear that the defendant could not cope with the reality of a nonprison existence. "

Norman Mailer had been present throughout the trial. He had pled for a lenient sentence. "Culture is worth a little risk," he implored the court. "A major sentence would destroy him." Even after hearing Lang's minimum sentence, Mailer complained that it was so long as to be "killing." Carped the 59-year-old Mailer: "At the point he gets out, he'll be as old as I am now."

Lang's sentence enraged Henry Howard: "In twenty-four years Jack Abbott will be back on the street and he will kill again. Why are his rights better than Richard Adan's rights?"

The answer to that question might be easily found in the facts that Jack Abbott had been raised to literary stardom, that his book sold 40,000 copies and subsequently earned him $500,000 and that he had powerful friends whose influence was undoutedly effective. Abbott was resumed to the Utah State Penitentiary to serve out his remaining eight years. He was then resumed to New York to serve out the fifteen-year sentence for ruthlessly killing, a hopeful 22-year-old actor-playwright whose own writing never produced enough money to pay for his burial.

Jack Henry Abbott is scheduled for release in the year 2006.

ABDULLAH, MOHAMMED (JOSEPH HOWK, JR.) Murderer * (1939- )

BACKGROUND: BORN OF A WHITE FATHER AND NEGRO MOTHER, AND RAISED IN LONG BEACH, CALIF. GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL AT 15 WITH AN IQ OF 140. ATTENDED LONG BEACH CITY COLLEGE IN 1954: ATTENDED THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1958-60, MAJORING IN NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES AND ISLAMIC CULTURE: CHANCED HIS NAME IN 1956 TO MOHAMMED ABDULLAH AND EMBRACED MOHAMMEDANISM IN 1956. DESCRIPTION: 5'11", BROWN EYES, BLACK HAIR, HEAVYSET. ALIASES: NONE. RECORD: SHOT AND KILLED BERKELEY STUDENT SONJA LILLIAN HOFF OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIF. LIBRARY, BERKELEY 7/13/60: ATTEMPTED SUICIDE, BUT RECOVERED: TRIED AND SENTENCED TO DEATH: SENTENCE COMMUTED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE BY CALIF. GOVERNOR EDMUND G. BROWN ON REASONS OF INSANITY.

He was a brilliant child who began to read at the age of three and consumed myriad volumes of books before he was eight years old. By fifteen he had graduated from high school at the head of his class.

Howk's bookishness, however, did not tend to calm his emotions. He attempted to hang himself at age nine; the reason was never explained. At sixteen, the boy tried to burn down his parents' home after a violent argument with his mother. He was examined and studied at the Camarillo State Hospital and was diagnosed schizoid. No psychiatric care was provided, though it was recommended.

The racial differences in Howk's home have been suggested as the reason for the boy's discontent. Howk never openly talked about it but his unpredictable changes of religious beliefs tend to endorse this theory. First, he was a Roman Catholic. At fifteen he was an ardent Nazi, dropping out of Long Beach City College because his theories of Nordic supremacy were not supported in courses there.

Inside of two years, Howk swung completely over to Mohammedanism, becoming a fanatic Islamic follower and changing his name to Mohammed Abdullah.

Abdullah put on weight and began to sport a fez. He arrived in the Berkeley area in 1958 with a scholarship to the University of California. Overnight he became an habitue of the coffee houses by then more Beatnik than Bohemian. In one of these Abdullah met and befriended drifter and local eccentric Martin Horowitz, 34, a high school dropout who had himself been in and out of psychiatric care.

Horowitz began to practice his own weird brand of psychiatry on Abdullah, and the two became inseparable until 1959 when Abdullah met pretty, statuesque Sonja Hoff, 21, a home economics major intent upon entering social work. Her fascination with minority groups may have led her into her association with Abdullah, a group study in himself by some standards.