Worked with a guy (who creeped me out back then) whose late wife now has a women’s shelter named after her. 
My sister’s former boyfriend spent several hours tormenting/attacking his then-wife with a knife in their home. He’s the guy in Milwaukee who claimed he was dreaming when he did it. He may be one of Qadgop’s clients now.
Yes, dozens. My extended family when I was young consisted of mainly thieves, but didn’t mind a little violences every now and then. I knew one “leg-breaker” (serving a life term for murder now). I also met two rapists (a father and son team) that had been tried twice but never convicted. Wife beating was pretty common as well.
There was a guy who worked for my stepdad doing maintenance work for years and years- a tiny Puerto Rican guy named Ernie, who looked a bit like a very short and very tanned George Carlin.
He’d been in the joint a few times, mostly for theft, and he’d participated in the rape and murder of a child molester while he was in (for which he’d gotten a couple of extra years tacked on to his sentence).
He was really, really nice- used to take me fishing and drive me to school when I missed the bus, and stuff- but you couldn’t trust him any farther than you could throw him.
He eventually went back to the joint when somebody figured out he was moving ceiling tiles in order to sneak into the business’ back office and steal from the cash drops in there.
You know how parents always tell you as a kid that bullys are really cowards that will leave you alone if you face them down? I think kids know that is generally true, but there’s always the one exception to the rule that scares the hell out of the neighborhood kids, because we all knew he had no upper limit on what he’d do.
Ours was named Ricky. He was a kid a few years older than me that enjoyed terrorizing us. Once he got into high school, he joined the wrestling team and seemed to be doing better under the influence of the coach. Then something happened, he got kicked off the team, dropped out of school, joined the Marines, got dishonorably discharged, robbed a bank with a gun, carjacked someone passing by and forced him to drive across a state line. Instant Federal case.
About two months out of jail (years later), he was driving drunk and had an accident (pretty much right in front of the local police station). He pulled a pistol from under the seat (who’d have thunk?), shot at the driver of the other car, missed but killed the guy’s date. The cops came out of the station, Ricky shot at them, hit one cop in the thigh, then another cop (he had been the goalie on my high school soccer team) shot Ricky in the head. Didn’t kill him.
The irony of the whole thing is that due to the brain damage from being shot, Ricky was found to be (temporarily) not competent to stand trial. He ended up being held at a low-security facility in the area that used to be a sanitorium. When people found out he was there, there was an uproar to get him moved to a more secure facility. Instead, a local lawyer used a state law to force his release (on the grounds that he would never be competent to stand trial - such is Rhode Island). He was released to the care of his mother.
In the spirit of the StraightDope, I tried to find cites on his case, but I couldn’t (which suprises me). This would have been late seventies, early eighties, and the local big paper’s online archives only go back to 1983, but it was still enough of a big deal in the area (Cumberland, RI) that there should have been something.
Only professionally.
A guy I know fairly well, a former president of our model car club, murdered his parents a few months ago in what appears to have been a drug-fueled rage, pleaded guilty, and appears to be headed for prison for the rest of his life. Nice guy otherwise.
Wow. I live a very sheltered life. I’d like to keep it that way.
Many professionally, none personally. My professional experience has been that the vast majority of criminals are manipulative, self-centered, and dishonest when it furthers their agenda. A clear majority of the lower level types (i.e., non-violent offenders) also have substance abuse issues and frequently are not very smart.
Violent criminals are all that, and also are severely socially maladaptive, narcissistic, and have anger management problems. They can be pleasant when it suits their interests to be, and some are very smart indeed, but they tend to be unstable and frequently see injustice only as it pertains to themselves.
When I was young, I had neighbor kids who were kinda sorta my friends and visited my house regularly. They ended up stealing some things before my parents banned them from our household. I hear that one of them is now in prison for second degree murder.
More recently, an acquaintance who my friends invited over for parties is now in jail and being charged for threatening his mother with a gun.
My next door neighbor, whose family had moved in when I was probably about 10 and he was 8 or so. We played together a lot into our early teens, along with the rest of our siblings.
In his early 20s he and some other guys beat a neighborhood drug dealer to death in a playground they all used to hang out at. Although others were involved, he ended up taking the rap because the others could not be identified. IIRC, he spent six years in prison for second-degree murder.
I don’t think he was ever actually a “violent criminal,” but rather someone who got caught up in something that got out of hand. He “went straight” after getting out, got a decent job, and is married with kids. He’s dropped by the house a few times to visit, and as far as I can tell seems to be a decent guy.
Three that I’m aware of.
Former co-worker who got into a fight a couple of jobs after we worked together. He spent a few months in county lockup. This guy was always kind of “off”, and had anger and self-control issues. And lots of racism, sexism, and other bad isms. IMNSHO he needs therapy, and will probably never get or accept it. He’ll probably be in and out of jail the rest of his life.
Another former co-worker who tried to settle his marital problems by setting himself, his estranged wife, and her boyfriend on fire. Nobody was hurt, and I suspect he walked the straight and narrow since, but yeah, that’s violent. He did at least a few days time in county lockup for that one. I lost contact with him after that. Why the marital problems? I don’t know - he never talked about his wife, but he always talked about going out drinking with his guy buddies. :rolleyes: Nice guy, very friendly, just went over the edge. I hope that was the last problem he had with the law.
Ex-husband of a friend was molesting her daughter (his step daughter). He’s in a federal pen for a very long time. I would not be comfortable expressing what I think of him, even under the old Pit rules.
I know at least one major non-violent criminal. He set up a Ponzi scheme and made most of one billion dollars disappear. That’s billion with a “B”. He’s most of the way through a ten year federal sentence. I don’t know what he’ll do for a living when he gets out - I don’t see anyone trusting him to handle money in any way. The guy was always a bit full of himself, but when the money came rolling in he apparently went nuts over it. Very sad.
And I’m not in law enforcement, or associated with it in any way.
Most of my friends went through a violent thug phase in their youth (we’re mostly in our 30s/40s now). Lots of drunken fights with strangers, some involving rocks, bats, weapons like that. One buddy of mine cracked a guy’s skull in a small street fight by hitting him in the head with an unopened quart of beer. Another friend once kicked a guy down a flight of stairs for stealing his bottle of whiskey while visiting my friend’s roommate. Another has dealt out some “U-lock justice” on a guy who threw something at him while on his bike and then got out of the car to engage when cussed at for it. Not all of it dates back all that far, either - one of my best bros, his wife, and his oldest daughter have been united in physical violence against more than one opponent in the parking lot at a punk show within the last 5 years.
No rape that I am aware of. No murder that I am aware of. No wife/girlfriend beating that I am aware of. None of my friends have done time for any of this, though almost all have records involving alcohol or drug use (I may be the only one in that circle without a DUI under my belt, because I have a long standing rule of simply not driving drunk).
We come from different races and places. Things we have in common: working class, not too much formal college education, mostly heavy drinkers, a willingness to “take it outside”, and a long time involvement in the punk/hardcore/nonracist skinhead scene.
Are we only counting the ones that got caught?
If we’re counting everyone, that would be me. Someone threatened to call the cops on me after I punched him in the face, which resulted in a bloody nose. My response was, “Don’t grab my ass, and your face won’t bleed.” I never went to jail, the cops were never called, I never got arrested, nobody cared, and the guy totally deserved it.
I don’t myself, but my wife, Pepper Mill, has a history of encountering them. She met one of the Menendez brothers, for instance, down in NJ. And when she was working in the North End of Boston, sevweral of her clients were members of the local gangs, some of whom got killed in a shoot-out in a Charlestown restaurant. She knew that there were certain people she couldn’t have in the office simultaneously, because they’d have gone after each other.
She says that, outside of that possible homicidal streak, they were remarkably like anyone else.
I lived in the same cul de sac as one of the Brown’s Chicken murderers (infamous in the Chicago area). He’s currently rotting in prison, just waiting to be tried (he’s been there around 5 years I think! speedy-trial my ass). His “partner” has already been given a life-sentence. Jim was a bit of a punk, in a I’m-slightly-too-redneck-for-Hoffman-Estates kinda way. I always stuck out to me that him and his brothers were willing to eat bugs. I moved away from them when I was 10.
I also went to High School with 2 kids that later got married, and ended up starving their second baby to death (I guess they fed the first). They both got life sentences. I knew the girl. She was the picked-on weird girl on my bus.
By the way, my wife also knows a convicted murderer down in NC - crazy ass sob who, in a drug fueled freak out, killed his 8mo pregnant wife, chopped her up, and put her in garbage bags he dumped in the river (with some of his own mail, :smack: ).
This chap worked at a local restaurant that I frequent. He actually waited on me twice. Quiet guy, but a decent server.
As it turned out, he had already committed one murder, that would not be linked to him until later.
Uh, yeah, me too.
I have told one guy “you are going to be hanged tommorrow” and managed to riggle out of having to attend an execution. In court most days and often in conferance with the scum of the earth.
Too damn many!
I went to a relatively tough Jr. High and High School that had a lot of gang activity. There is no doubt that more than several of my classmates ended up as violent criminals.
I lived in a tough neighborhood during one of my college years. The area has since been regentrified. We made friends with the guy who “ran” our area early on. It was dumb luck but he took a liking to the college boys so no one fucked with us. I later found out that the dudes who lived in our apartment the year before were broken into three or four times. Anyway, we got to know a few of the local badasses who had been in and out of prison as a matter of course. One for sure was a murderer who killed someone while on parole and went to jail for life. The rest had all been involved with drug dealing and violent assaults at the very least.
A neighbor at another place was in jail for welfare fraud. While there he stabbed another inmate.
A former roommate of some friends of mine went to jail for bank robbery. I had met him and hung out a few times.