Erzsebet Bathory, also known as Elizabeth Bathory, is one of the most infamous figures in history. Her crimes caused her to become a legendary and feared figure. Even after the legends have been lifted her crimes still seem unimaginable.

Bathory was born in 1560 to a well-established family. Her family had produced many powerful people in her time, including the Kings of Transylvania and Poland. She was married off for political reasons to Count Ferencz Nadasdy. Before the marriage took place she became pregnant with a child from a peasant. She was taken away to a family castle under the excuse that she was sick. She had a daughter, which was given away. She began a practice of torturing servants and was introduced into the occult while her husband was away at battle. The fascination with torture began for her as she saw her family deal with political enemies.

After her husband's death her fears of growing old began to grow more and more. When striking a servant girl for combing her hair too hard some of her blood fell on her hand. She thought the blood made her skin look younger and become convinced that blood was the secret of eternal youth. She was also convinced that blood from virgin girls would be the most effective. The maid was murdered so that Erzsebet could bathe in her blood. From here her most notorious deeds began. The tortures the girls would be put through would last for weeks, months. They were then cut in several different ways to provide blood for Bathory to wash herself with. More than six hundred women died because of Erzsebet. These women ranged from peasants to members of the nobility.

Investigations on Erzsebet's activities began in 1610. Some claim that she was investigated not because of her crimes but because of the finances involved with her family. These investigations also came only after four noble women were found murdered. Laws forbade she be put to trial because of her royal standing. These laws were removed to deal with her. Erzsebet did not admit to the crimes but she was sent to a small, walled in, room in her castle. Only a small opening to provide food was allowed. She stayed four years in that room until her death in 1614. Many of her accomplices were also found guilty and put to death but Bathory avoided that punishment due to her status.

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (Italian: [be?ni?to musso?li?ni];[1] 29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the Fascist coup d'état in 1922 to his deposition in 1943, and Duce ("Leader") of Italian Fascism from the establishment of the Italian Fasces of Combat in 1919 to his execution in 1945 during the Italian Civil War. As dictator of Italy and founder of the fascist movement, Mussolini inspired other totalitarian rulers such as Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and António de Oliveira Salazar.

She and her family gained notoriety for living a lavish lifestyle during a period of economic crisis and civil unrest in the country. She spent much of her time abroad on state visits, extravagant parties, and shopping sprees, and spent much of the State's money on her personal art, jewelry and shoe collections. She and her husband Ferdinand hold the Guinness World Record for the Greatest Robbery of a Government. The subject of dozens of court cases around the world,[14] she was eventually convicted of corruption charges for her activities during her term as governor of Metro Manila in 2018

Agamemnon was the son of Atreus and the brother of Menelaus. He was the king of either Mycenae (in Homer) or of Argos (in some later accounts), and was the leader of the Greek forces during the Trojan War. He married Clytemnestra and had several children by her, including Orestes, Electra, and Iphigenia.

When the Greeks sailed for Troy, their fleet was trapped by unfavorable winds at Aulis. The seer Calchas revealed that their misfortune was due to Agamemnon, who had boasted that he equalled Artemis in hunting; the winds would only change if Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia was sacrificed. Agamemnon reluctantly agreed to the sacrifice, but Artemis herself whisked Iphigenia away from the altar and substituted a deer in her place.

During the seige of Troy, Agamemnon offended the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles, when he took the girl Briseis from him. Achilles' anger with Agamemnon furnished the mainspring of the plot in the Iliad. After the sack of Troy, Agamemnon acquired Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam, as his concubine, and took her home with him to Greece.

Agamemnon had an unhappy homecoming. He was either blown off course and landed in the country of Aegisthos, or he came home to his own land to find Aegisthus waiting for him. In either case, Aegisthus had become the lover of Clytemnestra, and the two together murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra shortly after their arrival. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra then ruled Agamemnon's kingdom, but were eventually killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes (or by Orestes and Electra in some accounts). The homecoming of Agamemnon and its aftermath were favorite subjects for Greek tragedy.

Francisco Pizarro was a Spanish conquistador who traveled through much of the Pacific coast of America along Peru. He "discovered" the Incan empire and conquered it brutally and quickly, stealing immense hoards of gold, silver, and other treasures.

After looting and generally destroying the Incan capital of Cusco, Pizarro founded Lima (which he called Ciudad de los Reyes, which means "City of the Kings"). Pizarro was assassinated in Lima, Peru, in 1541, by followers of Pedro de Almagro (Cortes' captain) who wanted to seize Lima for its riches.

Phalaris is credited with many construction projects: he strengthened the walls of Acragas, built an aqueduct, and added several other beautiful buildings. He also improved trade with Carthage and organized impressive athletic contests. All this is plausible. In a new city like Acragas, we can expect construction works, economic measures, and the establishment of festivals.

The tyrant is also credited with war against native cities -one of them was Vessa- and capturing them. Their territories were added to that of Acragas.

Phalaris became the prototype of an evil dictator. One of the most famous stories about him is that of the iron (or brazen) bull made by Perilaus of Athens, a well-known bronze-worker. The victims of the tyrant were shut up inside this artifice and then a fire was kindled underneath the bull. The poor prisoners were them roasted alive, and by some sort of acoustic mechanism, the shrieks of his agony resembled the bull's bellowing. The first victim is said to have been Perilaus himself.

One of the major deities of the Aztec, Toltecs, and other Middle American peoples. He is the creator sky-god and wise legislator. He organized the original cosmos and participated in the creation and destruction of various world periods. Quetzalcoatl ruled the fifth world cycle and created the humans of that cycle. The story goes that he descended to Mictlan, the underworld, and gathered the bones of the human beings of the previous epochs. Upon his return, he sprinkled his own blood upon these bones and fashioned thus the humans of the new era. He is also a god of the wind (the wind-god Ehecatl is one of his forms), as well as a water-god and fertility-god.

He is regarded as a son of the virgin goddess Coatlicue and as the twin brother of Xolotl. As the bringer of culture he introduced agriculture (maize) and the calendar and is the patron of the arts and the crafts.

In one myth the god allowed himself to be seduced by Tezcatlipoca, but threw himself on a funeral pyre out of remorse. After his death his heart became the morning-star, and is as such identified with the god Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. In dualistic Toltec religion, the opposing deity, Tezcatlipoca ("Smoking Mirror"), a god of the night, had reputedly driven Quetzalcoatl into exile. According to yet another tradition he left on a raft of snakes over the sea. In any case, Quetzalcoatl, described as light-skinned and bearded, would return in a certain year. Thus, when the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés appeared in 1519, the Aztec king, Montezuma II, was easily convinced that Cortés was in fact the returning god.

The Aztec later made him a symbol of death and resurrection and a patron of priests. The higher priests were called Quetzalcoatl too. The god has a great affinity with the priest-king Topiltzin Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl, who ruled the Toltecs in Tula in the 10th century. The cult of Quetzalcoatl was widespread in Teotihuacan (ca. 50km northeast of Mexico City), Tula (or Tullán, capitol of the Toltecs in middle Mexico), Xochilco, Cholula, Tenochtitlan (the current Mexico City), and Chichen Itza.

At his birth (1420, Torquemada, Castile, Spain) Tomás already had something to hide: his grandmother was a converso; a converted Jew; a New Christian.
Spain had more converted Jews than any other country; some had converted by choice, many more by force, but they were all regarded with suspicion and mistrust by the Old Christians. Some, called Marranos, were only nominally converted, and continued their Jewish customs in secret.

The result was the Spanish cult of sangre limpia, "pure blood", that is, pure white Christian blood. Actually, since Spain had the largest Jewish population in medieval Europe and conversion and intermarriage were common, hardly anyone had sangre limpia, but many claimed to, and it was a constant preoccupation of the nobility. Torquemada's life work was an attempts to achieve sangre limpia for Spain.

By 1479, when Spain was unified under Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada was a Dominican priest and Isabella's confessor. Four years later he had established himself as the head of the Spanish Inquisition.

The purpose of the Inquisition was to root out heresy, and for Torquemada this meant destroying the Marranos. The Inquisition published a set of guidelines so that Catholics could inform on their Marrano neighbors:


If you see that your neighbors are wearing clean and fancy clothes
on Saturdays, they are Jews.
If they clean their houses on Fridays and light candles earlier than
usual on that night, they are Jews.
If they eat unleavened bread and begin their meal with celery and
lettuce during Holy Week, they are Jews.
If they say prayers facing a wall, bowing back and forth,
they are Jews.
The mildest penalty imposed on Marranos began with the forfeiture of their property, which proved to be a convenient fund-raising technique for the war against the Moors. This was followed by the public humiliation of being paraded through the streets wearing the sambenito, a sulfur-yellow shirt emblazoned with crosses that came only to the waist, leaving the lower body uncovered. They were then flogged at the church door. This was the punishment suffered by Juan Sánchez de Cepeda, the grandfather of Teresa de Avila.

The scale of punishments continued up to burning at the stake, which was performed as a public spectacle called an auto-da-fé ("act of faith"). If the condemned recanted and kissed the cross, they were mercifully garroted before the fire was set. If they recanted only, they were burned with a quick-burning seasoned wood. If not, they were burned with slow-burning green wood.

In 1490 Torquemada staged a famous show-trial, the LaGuardia trial. This involved eight Jews and conversos, who were accused of having crucified a Christian child. No victim was ever identified and no body was ever found; nevertheless all eight were convicted, on the strength of their confessions which were obtained through torture. They were burned at the stake.

Rumours about Jews committing ritual murder of Christian children have circulated around Europe for centuries and are known collectively as "the blood libel." While there is no evidence to support the blood libel, its opposite, the ritual murder of Jews by Christians, is well known. The Spanish Inquisition alone committed the ritual murder of about thirty thousand Jews.

Torquemada used the LaGuardia trial to argue that the Jews were a danger to Spain. His intention was to convince Ferdinand and Isabella to order their expulsion. Hearing of this, two influential Jews raised thirty thousand ducats and offered it to Ferdinand and Isabella, saying they could give them even more if they would allow the Jews to remain. Ferdinand and Isabella, always hard up for cash, wavered at this; but Torquemada said, "Judas sold his Master for thirty ducats. You would sell Him for thirty thousand ... Take Him and sell Him, but do not let it be said that I have had any share in this transaction."

On March 31st, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued their Edict of Expulsion. "[We] have decided to command all of the aforesaid Jews, men and women, to leave our kingdoms and never to return to them." The Jews were given until July 1st to leave the kingdom; any found within its borders after that date would be killed. Some fled to Portugal or North Africa, where they faced more persecution; some took ship with a foolhardy explorer named Christopher Columbus; some remained in Spain as "Secret Jews", and their descendants are still Secret Jews today.

Having accomplished the expulsion of the Jews, Torquemada retired to the monastery of St. Thomas in Avila, which he had designed himself. In his last years he was convinced that he would be poisoned, and kept a unicorn's horn by his plate as an antidote. He was not poisoned, however, but died a natural death in 1498

Jean David Nau, also known as François l'Olonnais, was reputed to have been one of the most ruthless and barbaric pirates to have ever sailed under the black flag. His career dates from the early part of the golden age of pirates when Tortuga was a safe haven for the pirates and Spanish vessels were the primary target for the buccaneers' depredations. As a child he was sent as an indentured servant, from France, to the French island of Martinique. After serving his term of servitude he moved to the island of Hispaniola, where he joined up with the buccaneers. He seems to have distinguished himself for the French governor of Tortuga, Monsieur de la Place, gave him command of a small ship and sent him out to win his fortune.

His early career while fairly successful seems to be more of note for the fact that it distinguished l'Olonnais for his unusually ferocious treatment of prisoners and earned him a reputation for cruelty that few have surpassed. During the peak of his early successes his ship was wrecked in a storm off the Yucatan coast. While most of the crew survived the wreck, all but l'Olonnais were kill when a group of Spaniards attacked. He managed this feat of cunning by smearing blood and sand over his face and body and hiding among his fallen comrades on the beach. Later, disguised as a Spaniard, he entered Campeche. While the city celebrated his death, he schemed with a band of French slaves to escape the city and return to Tortuga.

L'Olonnais' rein of terror in the Caribbean continued. He partnered with the famous freebooter Michel de Basco and with a fleet of eight ships and 400 men they sacked Maracaibo and Gibraltar in the Gulf of Venezuela. He and his crew made the townspeople's lives into a waking nightmare with rape, murder, and pillage a daily occurrence. Sailing away to Corso Island, a rendezvous of French buccaneers, the pirates shared out the treasure of some 260,000 pieces of eight as well as large amounts of silver plate, silk and jewels.

The reputation for cruelty and depravity of this buccaneer was by now well known throughout the West Indies. One graphic occurrence during the attack on San Pedros places, l'Olonnais questioning the unlucky survivors of a party sent to ambush him. During the questioning, l'Olonnais, becoming frustrated with the prisoners' silence, drew his knife and cut the heart from one of the Spaniards and began to gnaw upon it. Not long after the above incident much his crew defected leaving him with a single craft. Shortly thereafter his ship ran aground on a sand bank and was lost off the Las Petras Islands. Before his plans to outfit a new ship and sail away could be realized he was captured and killed by the native Indians.

Pol Pot, who become responsible for the deaths of over two million of his own people, was born Saloth Sar in a small Cambodian village about 140 kilometers north of Phnom Penh. His date of birth is uncertain although French records give it as May 25, 1928. At age six he went to live with his brother at the Royal household in Phnom Penh. Here he learned Buddhist precepts and discipline. At age eight he went to a Catholic primary school, where he remained for six years. It was here that he picked up the basics of Western culture, as well as the French language.

In 1949, Pol Pot went to study in Paris on a government scholarship. It was here that he got his introduction to Communism, joining the French Communist Party. After four years of exposure to Stalinist Communism he returned to Cambodia in 1953. Within a month he had joined the Communist resistance, becoming a member of the Indochina Communist Party (IHC) which was dominated by the Viet Minh.

The 1954 Cambodian elections saw the Communists throw in support with the Democrats. The Democrats were soundly defeated, however, by the incumbent Government of Prince Sihanouk who now held absolute power. Pol Pot now took up a post as a teacher in a private college. He also spent his time recruiting the educated classes to the Communist cause. The Government, however, began a Communist crackdown and Pol Pot was forced to flee to the Jungles near the Vietnam border to avoid arrest. For the next seven years he would spend his time in the Cambodian jungle hiding from the police.

Over the ensuing years the communists bided their time as they built up their strength for a take-over attempt. They were bolstered by the North Vietnamese who were waging warfare against the Cambodian Government. A major Vietnamese victory in 1971 allowed the Communists to take control of certain areas of the country. In 1973 the communists launched a major attack on the Government but this was halted by American bombing. A final Communist assault began on January 1, 1975. This time they were victorious. On April 17, Communist forces entered Phnom Penh. Within 24 hours they had ordered the entire city evacuated. This process was repeated in other cities resulting in more than 2 million Cambodians being forced out of their homes. Many of them starved to death.

Pol Pot was now Prime Minister of Cambodia, which he promptly renamed Kampuchea. In August, 1976 he unveiled his Four Year Plan, which detailed the collectivisation of agriculture, the nationalization of industry and the financing of the economy through increased agricultural exports. This plan caused untold misery to the nation with many thousands dying in the paddy fields. Crops needed to feed the population were marked for export. Malnutrition was rampant, made worse by the Communist insistence on traditional Cambodian medicine. Pol Pot also started the infamous S-21 interrogation center where more than 20,000 men, women and children were tortured to death.

Throughout 1976 and ’77 skirmishes with Vietnam continued. In December 1977 The Vietnamese made real inroads in Kampuchea. Pol Pot, however, held on for another year. By January, 1979 the Vietnamese forces had actually reached Phnom Penh. The Kampuchean Government fled by train while Pol Pot was taken by helicopter to Thailand. His last public appearance was an interview in December 1979. For the next 19 years he remained in exile in the Thai jungle. Pol Pot died in 1998.

The first child-snatching attributed to Gilles de Rais occured, historians believe, sometime in 1432, when Gilles de Sille, a cousin of de Rais, reportedly abducted a young apprentice whom de Sille wanted to carry a message to the castle at Machecoul. The anonymous 12-year-old boy, apprenticed to Guillaume Hilairet, a furrier, was the son of Jean Jeudon. When the boy disappeared and Hilairet sought out the nobleman de Sille, he was told the boy had been kidnapped by thieves in the village of Tiffauges. In Gilles’ trial, the events were testified to by Hillairet and his wife, Jean Jeudon and his wife, and five others from Machecoul. There is no evidence linking Gilles de Rais to this kidnapping, but he was charged with the boy’s death.

In Jean Benedetti’s biography of Gilles de Rais, he speculates what happened to the youngster:

“He was pampered and dressed in better clothes than he had ever known. The evening began with a large meal and heavy drinking, particularly hippocras, which acted as a stimulant. The boy was taken to an upper room to which only Gilles (de Rais) and his immediate circle was admitted. He was then confronted with the true nature of his situation. The shock thus produced on the boy was probably an initial source of pleasure for Gilles.”

An accomplice in many of the crimes, Etienne Corrillaut, known as Poitou, testified that de Rais then raped the boy as he was hanged from a hook by the neck. Before the child died, Gilles took him down, comforted him, repeated the act and either killed him himself or had him slain.

Poitou testified that the child victims were murdered “sometimes by decapitating them, sometimes by cutting their throats, sometimes by dismembering them, sometimes by breaking their necks with a stick, and that there was a weapon specifically for their execution, known as a braquemard.” A braquemard is a short, thick double-edged sword.

Gilles de Rais rarely left a child alive for more than one evening’s pleasure, Poitou claimed. Many times they were dealt mortal wounds before de Rais sodomized them. He would then take his pleasure as the child died. Occasionally, he would perform a sex act with a dead child.

In his own confession, Gilles testified that “when the children were dead he kissed them and those who had the most handsome limbs and heads he held up to admire them, and had their bodies cruelly cut open and took delight at the sight of their inner organs; and very often when the said children were dying he sat on their stomachs and took pleasure in seeing them die and laughed…”

Many of the bodies were disposed of through cremation in the chamber of horrors. The fires burned slowly over time so as to minimize the smell, testified Henriet Griart, another co-conspirator. Poitou also claimed the ashes were then dumped in the cesspool or moat.

The name 'Ivan the Terrible' conjours up images of senseless cruelty and paranoia. Yet, for many in Russia, he is a national hero. Ivan appears to be a man of huge contradictions - a man of God who personally tortured his victims and beat his own son to death; a hardened despot who often behaved like a coward, asking his ally, Elizabeth I of England, for political asylum; a man who believed himself chosen to save the souls of his people, but who brutally put thousands to death in carefully orchestrated purges.

Born in 1530, Ivan was only three when he inherited the Russian throne following his father's death. At the age of seven, tragedy struck again when his mother was poisoned by nobles at court. By his early teens, he was already displaying some of his uglier traits. He would throw live animals from towers and appeared to derive pleasure from doing so.

Ivan was crowned Russia's first Tsar at the age of 17. Three weeks later he married, having chosen his bride in a national virgin competition. Virgins over the age of twelve were brought to the Kremlin to be paraded before him. He chose Anastasia, the daughter of a minor noble, and their marriage proved to be a very close one.

Ivan had huge ambitions for his new Imperial dynasty. He launched a holy war against Russia's traditional enemy - the Tartars - showing no mercy to these Muslim peoples and decimating their cultural heritage. Ivan's conquest of Kazan and later Astrakhan and Siberia gave birth to a sixteenth century personality cult glorifying him as the Orthodox crusader.

His wife Anastasia helped to hold his cruelty in check, but in 1560 she died. He accused his nobles of poisoning her, and became even more mentally unstable. Until recently, most scholars have dismissed Ivan's accusation of murder as evidence of his paranoia. But recent forensic tests on Anastasia's remains have revealed more than ten times the normal levels of mercury in her hair. It is likely, that Anastasia was indeed murdered, sending Ivan into a downward spiral of murder and cruelty.

He set up a bodyguard that has been described as Russia's first 'secret police' - the Oprichniki - as a religious brotherhood sworn to protecting God's Tsar. In reality, they became marauding thugs, ready to commit any crime in the Tsar's name. Ivan sentenced thousands to internal exile in far flung parts of the empire. Others were condemned to death; their families and servants often killed as well. Ivan would give detailed orders about the executions, using biblically inspired tortures to reconstruct the sufferings of hell. More than 3,000 people lost their lives in Ivan's attack on Novgorod alone. In a fit of rage, Ivan struck his son and heir dead with his staff. Mad with sorrow and guilt, he had a dramatic volte face, posthumously forgiving all those he'd executed and paying for prayers to be said for their souls. Before his death, Ivan was re-christened as the monk Jonah and buried in his monk's habit - in the hope of finding ultimate forgiveness.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1907, François Duvalier had a front seat for an era of Latin American political turmoil. The invasion of US Marines on Haitian soil in 1915, followed by incessant violent repressions of political dissent, and American installed puppet rulers left a powerful impression on the young Duvalier, as did the latent political power of the resentment of the incredibly poor black majority against the tiny, powerful Haitian elite.

Lucky enough to be schooled and literate in a country where all but a tiny handful were illiterate, François attended medical school and participated in a US funded public health campaign to eliminate yaws (a common bacterial disease that had crippled thousands). Parlaying his modest involvement into tales of his single handed eradication of the disease, Doctor Duvalier became more and more involved in the negritude (black pride) movement of Haitian author Dr. Jean Price Mars, and began an ethnological study of voudou, Haiti's native religion, that would later pay enormous political dividends.

When FDR withdrew the Marines, the puppet governments left in power by the Americans were quickly chased out of office as years of resentment from the populace exploded. The reigns of power shifted with dizzying speed, with the average President holding power for less than two years. Military brasshats came and went, as did senators and populist rabble rousers, but through it all, the "quiet country doctor" held his cards to his chest, seeking his foothold in Haitian politics. He finally got it when elections were held in 1957 to replace deposed military strongman Paul Magloire, and through hook and crook (not to mention outright election fraud by the Haitian army), François Duvalier was inaugurated as president of Haiti that same year.

No sooner had Duvalier assumed power when he made immediate moves to consolidate it. The formerly timid and passive appearing Doctor Duvalier (who had affectionately nicknamed himself Papa Doc, noting that "the peasants love their doctor, and I am their Papa Doc") transformed himself, to everyone's amazement, into a firebrand. He reformed the loosely controlled gang of thugs he'd utilised to annoy his opponents in the 1957 election into a tightly controlled secret police, nicknamed the Tontons Macoute after a mythical Haitian boogeyman that grabs people and makes them the disappear forever. Papa Doc's opposition was fractured and jockeying for their own share of government kickbacks and fraud. Papa Doc wasted no time in sending his enemies to the ghastly Fort Dimanche to be tortured to death. The country's leading newspaper editors and radio station owners were jailed for specious sedition charges, and it soon became clear that the good doctor would not simply be a transit ory authority figure as his predecessors had been. And being a friend of Papa Doc was not much safer than being an enemy, as Papa Doc quickly learned to dispose of his allies when he thought them too ambitious, including his dear friend and Tonton Macoute chief Clement Barbot.

Within the space of two years, Papa Doc had politically castrated the Haitian Army, which had traditionally been the largest threat to the power of the Haitian presidency, with his Tonton Macoutes and his draconian "Palace Guard", his own personal army. He also survived scattered invasions from exiled opponents, including the one that came closest to toppling his regime, an eight man invasion team half composed of Haitian exiles and sheriff's deputies from Dade County, Florida. He'd also deliberately terrified the uneducated peasantry by posing as Baron Samedi - the vodou loa (spirit) of the dead. And indeed, when wearing his top hat and tails, Papa Doc was the spitting image of the Baron, and wasted little time printing posters that suggested quite straightforwardly that Papa Doc was one with the loas, Jesus Christ, and God himself. His endless harangues broadcast on the radio built his bizarre personality cult in a similar fashion. His most famous propaganda image shows a standing Jesus Christ with his right hand on a seated Papa Doc's shoulder with the caption "I HAVE CHOSEN HIM".

On the international scene, Duvalier quickly attempted to warm his regional rivals over to his regime with bald faced insincere flattery, and his penchant for promising to fight communism in Haiti. He quickly found ways to deal with his cross border rival, the infamous Dominican dicator Rafael Trujillo Molinas , who had planned various political intruiges against Papa Doc until they reached an understanding that amounted to "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours". Papa Doc was no less adept in Cuba, awarding Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista Haiti's highest (and newly invented) medal of honour for a small $4 million loan which went straight into Papa Doc's pockets. When Batista was ousted by Fidel Castro , Papa Doc didn't skip a beat and quickly lionized Castro without a trace of irony. Latin American embassies in Port-au-Prince were filled to bursting with Papa Doc's political foes seeking asylum, yet the doctor and his cronies always placated outraged embassadors wit h yet more bald faced (and often incomprehensible) flattery until things quieted down.

However, all the backyard foreign diplomacy paled when compared to the way Papa Doc played Washington like a fiddle. Papa Doc shamelessly played the race card, chiding Washington for cozying up to Trujillo while leaving the "poor negro Republic out in the cold". When Washington stopped falling for that, Papa Doc then shifted to the fight against communism. When Castro and America were at loggerheads during the Cuban missile crisis, Papa Doc shifted into high gear, promising Washington everything short of his bank account to help depose Castro. After the crisis, incredibly, Papa Doc resumed to cozying up to Castro, letting Washington know in no uncertain terms that more aid money would probably warm him back up to Washington's foreign policy directives. Papa Doc extorted Washington in this fashion until the day he died.

On the domestic front, kleptocracy was the law of the land. Citizens and foreign businessmen alike were shaken down to the last dime for a bizarre project to ostensibly build a utopian town called "Duvalierville". Needless to say, nearly every cent stolen for Duvalierville went straight to Papa Doc himself. Papa Doc similarly cowed the Vatican by expelling almost all of Haiti's foreign born bishops in the name of nationalism and replacing them with his political allies, an act that got him excommunicated from the Catholic church. With his enemies cowed and the entire nation in fear of his secret police, Duvalier declared himself "president for life", and rewrote the constitution after a rigged election to pass power onto his hefty and dim-witted son Jean-Claude upon his death. Through it all, the Haitian GDP plummeted as did the living standards in Haiti. Intellectuals and college educated professionals fled Haiti in droves, creating a brain drain that exacerbated an already serious lack of doctors and teachers. Peasant land holdings had been confiscated and alotted to Tonton Macoute bigwigs, the miserable slums in Port-au-Prince swelled with the homeless and desperate country folk who had fled to the capital seeking meagre incomes to feed themselves. Malnutrition and famine had become endemic. Almost none of the aid money given to Haiti was appropriated properly. Instead, it fattened the bank accounts of Papa Doc and his small handful of cronies.