Jackal - The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist Carlos the Jackal

John Follain

Summary

The true story of the world’s most wanted international terrorist, who sold his services to everyone from Saddam Hussein to Fidel Castro. On the night of August 14, 1994, French counterespionage officers seized the world’s most wanted terrorist from a villa in the Sudan. His given name was Ilyich Ramírez Sánchez—but the world knew him as the terrorist “Carlos the Jackal.” For years he had murdered, bombed, and kidnapped his way to global notoriety, constantly evading capture thanks to powerful backers, renegade regimes, and the ineffectual efforts of Western secret services. But finally, after more than two decades on the run, the Jackal had been caged.Jackal is the chilling biography of a self-proclaimed “professional revolutionary,” ladies man, and cold-blooded killer. John Follain sets the story against the larger political picture of the time, exposing how the then-Soviet bloc and certain Arab regimes sponsored terrorist actions for their own ends during the Cold War. A cautionary tale of governments that fostered the image of an invincible criminal mastermind—who in reality was only a pawn in the relentless and deadly chess game between East and West—Jackal also provides fascinating insight into the mind of the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Available since: 07/01/2011.

Print length: 320 pages.

Other books that might interest you

The Kidnap Years - The...

David Stout

The Great Depression was a time of desperation in America—parents struggled to feed their children and unemployment was at a record high. Adding to the lawlessness of the decade, thugs with submachine guns and corrupt law-enforcement officers ran rampant. But amidst this panic, there was one sure-fire way to make money, one used by criminals and resourceful civilians alike: kidnapping.

Jump into this forgotten history with Edgar Award-winning author David Stout as he explores the reports of missing people that inundated newspapers at the time. Learn the horrifying details of these abduction cases, from the methods used and the investigative processes to the personal histories of the culprits and victims. All of this culminates with the most infamous kidnapping in American history, the one that targeted an international celebrity and changed legislation forever: the Lindbergh kidnapping.

The Kidnap Years is a gritty, visceral, thoughtfully reported page-turner that chronicles the sweep of abductions that afflicted all corners of the country as desperate people were pushed to do the unthinkable.

Show book

Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths...

Nicholas Corder

In Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Staffordshire and the Potteries the chill is brought close to home as each chapter investigates the darker side of humanity in notorious cases of murder, deceit and pure malice that have marked the history of the area. For this journey into a bloody, neglected aspect of the past, Nicholas Corder has selected over 20 episodes that give a fascinating insight into criminal acts and the criminal mind. Recalled here are the Rugeley poisoner William Palmer, who disposed of his victims with strychnine, the vicious assaults on Issac Brooks and the miscarriage of justice that put George Edalji behind bars for three years and brought the creator of the world's greatest fictional detective to his rescue. The Canal boat killing of poor Christina Collins is described in graphic detail, as is the sad case of Thirza Tunstall's baby and the bizarre case of the headless corpse of Hednesford. The human dramas Nicholas Corder explores are often played out in the most commonplace of circumstances, but others are so odd as to be stranger than fiction. His grisly chronicle of the hidden history of staffordshire and the Potteries will be compelling reading for anyone who is interested in the darker side of human nature.

Show book

The Vory - Russia's Super Mafia

Mark Galeotti

The first English-language book to document the men who emerged from the Soviet-era gulags to become Russia’s international criminal class. Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western readers can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a criminal organization that has survived and thrived through Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment. The vory—as the Russian mafia is also known—was born early in the twentieth century, largely in the Gulags and criminal camps, where they developed their unique culture. Identified by their signature tattoos, members abided by the thieves’ code, a strict system that forbade all paid employment and cooperation with law enforcement and the state. Based on two decades of on-the-ground research, Galeotti’s captivating study details the vory’s journey to power from their early days to their adaptation to modern-day Russia’s free-wheeling oligarchy and global opportunities beyond.

Show book

Operation Family Secrets - How a...

Frank Calabrese Jr., Paul...

The Calabrese family of Chicago is a close-knit, middle-class, multi-generational Italian-Irish-American clan. They operate family businesses. They work day and night striving for the American Dream. All three sons forge a bond with their controlling father, Frank Sr., and their soft-spoken favorite uncle, Nick. As a boy, the oldest son, Frank Jr., realizes that his father and uncle are also "made" members of another close-knit family: the oufit.In Operation Family Secrets, Frank Calabrese, Jr., tells the turbulent tale of a family dominated by a violent patriarch who breaks a long-standing unwritten outfit code and "brings the street into his home" by enlisting two of his sons into the outfit's 26th Street/Chinatown crew. Calabrese reveals for the first time the outfit's "made" ceremony and describes being put to work alongside his father and uncle in loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, and extortion, and plotting the slaying of a fellow gangster, while they commit the bombing murder of a trucking executive, the gangland execution of two mobsters whose burial in an Indiana cornfield was reenacted in Martin Scorsese's blockbuster film Casino, and numerous other hits.The Calabrese crew's colossal earnings and extreme ruthlessness made them both a dreaded criminal gang and the object of an intense FBI inquiry. Eventually Frank Jr., his father, and Uncle Nick are convicted on racketeering violations, and "Junior" and "Senior" are sent to the same federal penitentiary in Michigan. Upon arrival, Frank Jr. makes a life-changing decision: to go straight rather than agree to his father's plans to resume crew activities afer serving his sentence. But he needs to keep his father behind bars in order to regain control of his life and save his family. Frank Jr. makes a secret deal with prosecutors, and for six months-unmonitored and unprotected-he wears a wire as his father recounts decades of hideous crimes. Frank Jr.'s cooperation with the FBI for virtually no monetary gain or special privileges helps create the government's "Operation Family Secrets" campaign against the Chicago outfit. The case reopens eighteen unsolved murders and also implicates twelve La Cosa Nostra soldiers and two outfit bosses. It becomes one of the largest organized crime cases in U.S. history.Operation Family Secrets intimately portrays how organized crime rots a family from the inside out while detailing Frank Jr.'s deadly prison-yard mission, the FBI's landmark investigation, and the U.S. Attorney's Office's daring prosecution of America's most dangerous criminal organization.

Show book

The Adventures of a Victorian...

David Lassman, Mick Davis

The true crime story of a master swindler and charming con-artist who became one of the most notorious female criminals of the Victorian Age.

‘The story of Mrs. Gordon Baillie is stranger than anything to be met with in the field of fiction.’

Mrs. Gordon Baillie, known throughout her life as Annie, was born in the direst poverty in the small Scottish fishing town of Peterhead in 1848. Illegitimate and illiterate, her beauty and intelligence nevertheless enabled her to overcome her circumstances and become a charming and wealthy socialite living a life of luxury while raising money for worthy causes and charitable works.

Behind her supposed perfect and contented life, however, lay one of the most notorious and compulsive swindlers of the Victorian Age. Her fraudulent fundraising and larger-than-life schemes played out across four decades and three continents, and involved land owners, crofters, aristocrats, politicians, bankers, socialist revolutionaries, operatic stars, and the cultural icons of the day.

She became mistress to a rich aristocrat, married a world-renowned male opera singer and later took as a lover a vicar’s son with anarchist tendencies. For most of her ‘career’ she kept one step ahead of the law and her nemesis, Inspector Henry Marshall of Scotland Yard, but finally becoming undone through her own compulsion for petty theft, despite her amassed fortune.

During her life she used more than forty aliases, produced four children and spent her way through millions in ill-gotten wealth. But at the turn of the twentieth century, her notoriety was such that she took refuge in America and disappeared from history.

“If you want to read about a Victorian woman who was able to hide her humble origins in Scotland to become one of the most notorious con-women in well-to-do society—an audacious figure who tried to live the life she felt she deserved rather than the one society wanted her to lead—then this book is highly recommended.” —Criminal Historian, Dr Nell Darby

Show book

Al Capone - “Scarface” the...

Kelly Mass

Al Capone was an infamous mob boss between the two world wars, in the city of New York and surrounding areas. His name and style have been emulated in movies. The mass shootings, tax evasion, and revenge on Italian murders in the mafia gangs on the United States east coast were so notorious that they have become iconic and stereotyped. 
How did Al Capone get the scars on his face? How did he manage to control so much of the gangs in the cities? How was he able to bribe the police, evade taxes, and become a terror for anyone who opposed him? And how did his life finally come to an end? 
Find out more about this Italian mobster who became a symbol for mobs throughout the United States for decades to come.

Show book