JR'S Free Thought Pages
                                                                       No Gods  ~ No Masters    ~ No Bullshit

                                                        The Psychopaths in our Midst                                       

Foreword

In the early 1960s University of California student at Berkeley Mario Savio was a huge part of the hopeful Student Free Speech Movement. Part of his speech was referring to the vile immoral capitalist system that has only become more contemptible in devouring, assimilating, exploiting and co-opting everything and anything in its totalitarian agenda in the name of greed, control monopolization and profit. Savio referred to this Godzilla monster as “the machine”:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon the entire apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!

On human behaviour, human nature misconceptions and the odious manipulations by capitalist hierarchies, conservative elites and other forms of sociopathic authoritarianism...

"The chairman of the board may sincerely believe that his every waking moment is dedicated to serving human needs. Were he to act on these delusions instead of pursuing profit and market share, he would no longer be chairman of the board."  - Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Pluto Press, 1991, p.19

During the countless recurring crises capitalism invariably turns to fascism to save itself as it did in the 1920s and 30s and is doing now; the cancer of capitalism ought to have ended after the global market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed but the dry rot of monopoly, gross inequality and depravity have only accelerated especially in the past fifty years. Recent studies claim that by 2030 the richest 1% will control two-thirds of global wealth. But up to and long before the second odious debacle of the global stock market meltdown and nauseating bailouts with trillions of phantom dollars there were ominous signs of moral decay and outright criminality by the financial oligarchies and the lickspittle government lackeys who enabled it. Capitalism is not only an undemocratic mentally ill patient void of an ethical compass that now has more rights than ordinary humans, if it was human, capitalism would be declared a deranged psychopath. This was the verdict of law professor Joel Bakan, author of the ground breaking 2006 book The Corporation and the follow-up New Corporation in 2020 and the excellent documentary based on the books. It is arguably the most authoritarian socio-economic doctrine of all the historical tyrannical precursors such as monarchy, theocracy and the myriad forms of dictatorship. In our abominable socio-economic system of greed and uncaring exploitation called Capitalism that is now a global disgrace, the bureaucratic hierarchies called corporations such as any of our banks, financial institutions and other parasitic corporations were actually human they would meet the criteria for a psychopath and be detained in an asylum for incurable psychopaths. This is the verdict of Bakan and UBC psychology professor and most well known expert on the nature of psychopaths, Dr. Robert Hare who created a checklist. Hare has written two books on his research, Without Conscience and Snakes in Suits, the latter on the moral pathology of corporations and their profit/greed ridden manipulations and total lack of empathy.

The American Psychiatric Association identified the pervasive and growing preponderance of psychopathic abominations and perversions of both humans and institutions as serious mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The consensus today is that at least 5% of the world population of homo saps are psychopaths which are listed in the DSM as “antisocial personality disorder”. In popular culture such as novels and film the affliction is depicted with horrifying images of violence, horror and evil. Many of us are aware of psychopaths from creeps like Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, the riveting and disturbing movie featuring the devious manipulator and full blown psychopathic Scott Wilson character in the the 1967 movie In Cold Blood (based on a true story by the way), the Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen characters in the 1973 movie Badlands, Jeffrey Dahmer and more recently the Hannibal Lector of the movie Silence of the Lambs. Psychopaths are however, not fictional monsters; they are among us, likely several of these self-serving assholes in your own neighbourhood. And like annoying manipulative harassing assholes they are thriving and on the increase in a culture of anything goes profit driven exploitation and greed. Studies by former University of British Columbia psychologist Robert Hare and others who have expanded on his work argue that psychopaths make up about 5% of the general population but for those in positions of power the percentage is far higher, some estimates as high as 20%.

In Canada there’s the shocking case of Ken and Barbie Doll psychopaths Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka which was so gruesome it was made into at least two movies. There are many more examples that could be cited. And surely the disturbing heartless uncaring commanding officers (“they died wonderfully”) in the 1957 anti-war movie , Paths of Glory that takes place during World War I - featuring a brilliant performance by Kirk Douglas - are classic instances of heartless psychopaths. Just read a book most Christians have never read from cover to cover; namely the Holy Bible. If they did, one conclusion would be irrefutable: the Christian god is a full blown psychopath.

Researchers who have expanded on Professor Hare’s inquiries claim that not 1% but rather currently 5% of the general population are incurable psychopaths; hence there would be several in your neighbourhood. One of these entitlement bullies and manipulative and harassment jerks lives across the street from my wife and I. I’m no fan of cops, but I and at least one of my neighbours have had to call the police on this intimidating know nothing asshole on several occasions in the past few years. In The Psychopathy of Everyday Life, Martin Kantor (2006) argues how the majority of psychopaths are not necessarily lawbreakers or violent, but are living everywhere among us. Kantor gives a profile of those less serious and more common psychopaths, showing how they are blended in with our friends; families and neighbourhoods informing us that they are in some ways more dangerous to society than severe psychopaths who could potentially maim or kill you. Most of us naturally trust our fellow human beings and tend to think that people generally have good intentions. We can hardly imagine that there are people who deliberately try to exploit, manipulate and even destroy us. In fact, encountering a psychopath can turn our notion of humanity completely upside down. The aforementioned psychopath expert professor Robert Hare offered a profile of those psychopaths as people “without conscience”, the title of one of his books. In his book Hare mentions the checklist he created a litany of symptoms and behaviours pointing to their primary characteristics as lack of caring about others, remorse or empathy along with pathological egocentricity, lying, callousness, superficial charm and phony friendships that are part of his manipulations, selfishness and egotism. Many also suffer from the Dunning Kruger effect of narcissism, inflated egos and exaggeration of their intelligence, abilities and skills. Donald Trump anyone?

I highly recommend Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test. Also the reader may be interested in several other informative and entertaining books he has written.

JR

Chapters 4 & 6 from Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test

Chapter 4: THE PSYCHOPATH TEST

 They had psychopaths naked and talking about their feelings!” Bob Hare laughed. “They had psychopaths on beanbags! They had psychopaths acting as therapists to their fellow psychopaths!”

He shook his head at the idealism of it all.

“Incredible,” he said.

It was an August evening and I was drinking with Bob Hare in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, West Wales. He was a quite feral-looking man with yellow-white hair and red eyes, as if he’d spent his life in battle, battling psychopaths, the very forces of evil. It was exciting to finally meet him. While names like Elliott Barker and Gary Maier had all but faded away, surviving only in obscure reports detailing crazily idealistic psychiatric endeavors from days long gone, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. It was the one used to diagnose Tony at Broadmoor and get him locked up for the past twelve years.

Bob Hare saw the Oak Ridge program as yet more evidence of psychopaths’ untrustworthiness. Try to teach them empathy and they’ll cunningly use it as an empathy-faking training exercise for their own malicious ends. Indeed, every observer who has studied the Oak Ridge program has come to that same conclusion. Everyone, that is, except Gary Maier.

“Yeah,” Gary had told me, “I guess we had inadvertently created a finishing school for them. There had always been that worry. But they were doing well in the program. . . .”

They were doing well and then, suddenly, he got fired.

“When they saw their leader be trashed like that, I think it empowered them,” Gary said. “There was like a ‘This is bullshit!’ And we got a rebound.”

Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.

He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.

I had e-mailed Bob Hare to ask if he’d meet me and he’d replied that he’d be teaching his checklist to a group of psychiatrists and brain imagers and care workers and psychologists and prison officers and budding criminal profilers on a three-day residential course, and if I was willing to pay the £600 registration fee, I was welcome to join them, although a copy of the thirty-page checklist wasn’t included in the price. That would cost an extra £361.31. I negotiated his office down to £400 (media discount) and we were all set.

This was the Monday evening before the first day and the attendees were milling around. Some, clearly impressed to be in the same room as Bob Hare, approached him for his autograph. Others looked skeptical from a distance. One care worker had told me earlier that she’d been sent by her employers and she wasn’t happy about it. Surely it was unfair to doom a person to a lifetime of a horrifying-sounding psychopathy diagnosis (“It’s a huge label,” she said) just because they didn’t do well on the Hare Checklist. At least in the old days it was quite simple. If someone was a persistent violent offender who lacked impulse controls, they were a psychopath. But the Hare Checklist was much wilier. It was all to do with reading between the lines of a person’s turn of phrase, a person’s sentence construction. This was, she said, amateur-sleuth territory.

I told Bob about her skepticism and I said I shared it to an extent, but that was possibly because I’d been spending a lot of time lately with Scientologists.

He shot me a grumpy look.

“We’ll see how you feel by the end of the week,” he said.

“So, anyway,” I said, “how did all this begin for you?”

He looked at me. I could tell what was going through his mind: “I’m tired. Telling the story will take up a lot of my energy. Does this person really deserve it?”

Then he sighed. And he began.

 In the mid-1960s, just as Elliott Barker was first conceiving his Total Encounter Capsule over in Ontario, Bob Hare was in Vancouver working as a prison psychologist. His was the maximum-security British Columbia Penitentiary. Nowadays it is a prison themed bar and diner where the servers wear striped prison uniforms and dishes are named after famous inmates, but back then it was a tough facility with a brutal reputation. Like Elliott, Bob believed that the psychopaths in his care buried their madness beneath a façade of normality. But Bob was less idealistic. He was interested in detection, not cure. He’d been tricked so many times by devious psychopaths. On his very first day working at the prison, for example, the warden had told him he needed a uniform and he should give his measurements to the inmate who was the prison tailor. So Bob did, and was glad to observe how assiduously the man took them. He spent a long time getting everything just right: the feet, the inside leg. Bob felt moved by the sight. Even in this awful prison, here was a man who took pride in his work.

But then, when the uniform arrived, Bob found that one trouser leg rode up to his calf while the other trailed along the ground. The jacket sleeves were equally askew. It couldn’t have been human error. The man was obviously trying to make him look like a clown.

At every turn, psychopaths were making his life unpleasant. One even cut the brake cables of his car while it was in the prison’s auto repair shop. Bob could have been killed. And so he started devising tests to determine if psychopaths could somehow be rooted out.

He put word around the prison that he was looking for psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers. There was no shortage. Prisoners were always looking to relieve the boredom. He strapped them up, one by one, to various EEG and sweat and blood-pressure measuring machines, and also to an electricity generator, and he explained to them that he was going to count backward from ten and when he reached one, they’d receive a very painful electric shock.

The difference in the responses stunned Bob. The non-psychopathic volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful electric shock was just the penance they deserved, and as the countdown continued, the monitors revealed dramatic increases in their perspiration rates. They were, Bob noted and documented, scared.

“And what happened when you got to one?” I asked.

“I gave them an electric shock,” Bob said. He smiled. “We used really painful electric shocks,” he said.

“And the psychopaths?” I asked.

“They didn’t break a sweat,” said Bob. “Nothing.”

I looked at him.

“Sure,” he added, “at the exact moment the unpleasant thing occurred . . .”

“The electric shock?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Bob. “When the unpleasant thing occurred, the psychopaths gave a response . . .”

“Like a shriek?” I asked.

“Yes, I suppose like a shriek,” said Bob. But the tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear over to the central nervous system, wasn’t functioning as it should.

It was an enormous breakthrough for Bob, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different from regular brains. But he was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they’d be in when he reached one, and still: nothing. No sweat. Bob learned something that Elliott Barker wouldn’t for years: psychopaths were likely to re-offend.

“They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock even when the pain had occurred just moments before,” Bob said. “So what’s the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them.”

He did another experiment, the Startle Reflex Test, in which psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, like crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and then when they least expected it, Bob would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.

Bob knew we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we’re on the edge of our seats anyway. If we’re watching a scary movie and someone makes an unexpected noise, we leap in terror. But if we’re engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Bob deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces, they aren’t horrified. They’re absorbed.

It seemed from Bob’s experiments that psychopaths see blown-apart faces the same way we journalists see mysterious packages sent in the mail, or the same way we see Broadmoor patients who might or might not have faked madness—as fascinating puzzles to be solved.

 Thrilled by his findings, Bob sent his readings to Science magazine.

“The editor returned them unpublished,” he said. “He wrote me a letter. I’ll never forget it. He wrote: ‘Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people.’”

Bob paused and chuckled.

“Couldn’t have come from real people,” he repeated.

 My guess was that Science magazine behaved coolly toward Bob because they believed him to be yet another maverick psychopath researcher running rampant in a Canadian mental institution in the late 1960s. Those places were the Wild West of psychopath study back then, with lots of big ideas and practically no regulation. It was inevitable that civil rights groups would eventually force a reining in of the experiments. And sure enough, disastrously for Bob, electric shocks were outlawed in the early 1970s.

“Even mild ones,” he told me. He seemed annoyed by the legislation even now, years later. “We could still startle them with loud noises but they couldn’t be anywhere near as loud,” he said.

Bob was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in a more hands-off way? Were there patterns of behavior? Would they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase, imperceptible to unsuspecting civilians? He devoured Hervey Cleckley’s seminal  1941 book, The Mask of Sanity. Cleckley was a Georgia-based psychiatrist whose analysis of psychopathic behavior—how they bury their psychosis beneath a veneer of engaging normalness—had come to influence the field. Bob began quietly scrutinizing his own psychopaths, looking out for linguistic clues.

 In 1975 he organized a conference on the subject.

“I invited the top people in the world who might have something to say about psychopaths,” he said. “We ended up with eighty-five people. We took over a hotel in a ski resort near Saint Moritz called Les Arcs.”

It began disastrously, Bob said, with one psychiatrist standing up and dramatically announcing to the group his contention that Bob was himself a psychopath. A ripple of shock passed through the conference hall.

Bob stood. “Why do you believe that?” he asked.

“You’re clearly impulsive,” replied the psychiatrist. “You can’t plan ahead. You invited me to participate as a speaker in this conference only a month ago.”

“I invited you only a month ago because the person I wanted to come couldn’t come,” Bob said.

“Oh, you’re cold-blooded and callous,” the psychiatrist said.

 “Did he mean it?” I asked Bob now.

“Yeah, he meant it,” said Bob. “He was a nasty man.”

 The purpose of the Les Arcs conference was for the experts to pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths’ behavior, the verbal and nonverbal tics. Were there patterns? Did they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basis for his now famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this:

Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm

Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth

Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom

Item 4: Pathological lying

Item 5: Conning/manipulative

Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt

Item 7: Shallow affect

Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy

Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle

Item 10: Poor behavioral controls

Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior

Item 12: Early behavior problems

Item 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals

Item 14: Impulsivity

Item 15: Irresponsibility

Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships

Item 18: Juvenile delinquency

Item 19: Revocation of conditional release

Item 20: Criminal versatility

 And first thing the next morning, we were going to learn how to use it.

 Tuesday morning. The attendees milled around in the tent that was to be ours for the next three days. Some were Bob Hare fans. When he stood in a corner telling stories about how he “packs heat, because a lot of psychopaths blame their incarcerations on me,” we gathered to listen. The tent stood next to a pretty tidal estuary. The peach-silk drapes fluttered in the summer morning breeze. Bob brought up the occasion—now famous in psychopath-analyzing circles—when Peter Woodcock had explained that the reason he’d killed Dennis Kerr on his first day of freedom from Oak Ridge was because he wanted to know what it would be like to kill someone, and the interviewer had said, “But you’d already killed three people,” and Woodcock had replied, “Yes, but that was years and years and years and years ago.”

Bob turned to me. “You see?” he said. “Short memories. Just like during that electric shock test.”

 Some of the people listening in chuckled wryly. But there were skeptics here, too. Psychiatrists and psychologists and care workers and criminal profilers and neurologists tend not to like being told what to do by so-called gurus of the movement. I could feel in the room a sense of “Impress me.”

We took our places. Bob flicked a switch. And onto the screen came a video of an empty room. It was a drab, municipal-looking room painted in a blue so dull it was barely a color. There was a plywood desk, a chair. The only splash of cheerfulness was a bright red button on the wall. Into the room walked a man. He was good-looking, neatly dressed. He had a bit of a twinkle in his eye. He moved his chair until it was underneath the red button. It made a slight scraping noise as he pulled it across the floor.

“Do you see what he just did?” said Bob. “He moved his chair to right below the panic button. He did it to intimidate my researcher, who’s standing behind the camera. Just a little display of control. That feeling of control is important to them.”

And the man began to talk.

We never learned his name, or which prison this room was situated inside. Throughout the morning we referred to him only as Case Study H. His accent was Canadian.

 It all began, quite innocently, with the researcher asking Case Study H about his school days.

“I enjoyed the social atmosphere of school,” he replied, “enjoyed learning and seeing new things.”

“Did you ever hurt anyone in a schoolyard fight?” the researcher asked.

“No,” he replied. “Just schoolyard shenanigans.”

These were critical questions, Bob later explained, because the answers might inform Item 12 of his checklist: Early Behavior Problems. Almost all psychopaths display serious behavior problems as a child, Bob said, starting around age ten to twelve, like persistent bullying, vandalism, substance abuse, arson.

“I had a couple of incidences of fisticuffs,” said Case Study H. “Well, one time I broke this kid’s arm. It was really distasteful. I was holding him down and I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped. It was not something I wanted to happen.”

There was, we noted in our assessment sheets, something weirdly disconnected about his description of the event: “I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped.” It was like he couldn’t properly place himself there.

Item 7: Shallow Affect—An individual who seems unable to experience a normal range and depth of emotions.

Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy.

Item 10: Poor Behavioral Controls.

I remembered a time I perforated my eardrum on a plane and for days afterward everything around me seemed faraway and hazy and impossible to connect to. Was that foggy sensation a psychopath’s continual emotional state?

“One of my old buds from the FBI was investigating this woman, Karla Homolka,” Bob had told me earlier. “She and her husband had videotaped themselves torturing and raping and murdering these young women. The police were taking her through the house where they’d cut up the bodies, carved them up, and Karla was saying, ‘My sister would like that rug . . .’ They took her into the bathroom and Karla was saying, ‘Can I ask you something? I had a bottle of perfume here . . .’ Totally disconnected. It was stunning.”

Bob said it’s always a nice surprise when a psychopath speaks openly about their inability to feel emotions. Most of them pretend to feel. When they see us non-psychopaths crying or scared or moved by human suffering, or whatever, they think it’s fascinating. They study us and learn how to ape us, like space creatures trying to blend in, but if we keep our eyes open, we can spot the fakery.

“What happened to Karla Homolka in the end?” I asked him.

“She’s out now,” he said. “They believed her little-girl act. Hair in braids. All sweet and lovely. Very convincing. She blamed it all on her husband. She did a plea bargain. They gave her twelve years.”

Item 5: Conning/Manipulative.

Item 4: Pathological Lying—An individual for whom lying is a characteristic part of interactions with others.

 Case Study H’s video testimony continued. Around the time he broke the kid’s arm he locked his stepmother in a closet—revenge for her trying to discipline his brother.

Item 14: Impulsivity.

“She was in the closet for nearly twelve hours. And then my father came home. He let her out. It was pathetic. She just sobbed.”

One time, Bob said, one of his researchers interviewed a bank robber who told him how a cashier had soiled herself from fear as he pointed his gun at her.

“It was pathetic,” the bank robber had told Bob’s researcher, “seeing her soil herself like that.”

 I glanced at one or two of my fellow skeptics in the crowd. We were looking a bit less skeptical now. We took notes.

Item 6, I wrote on my pad. Lack of Remorse or Guilt.

“How did it feel to lock your stepmother in a closet?” the interviewer asked Case Study H.

“It felt invigorating,” he replied. “It felt good. I had some power. I was in control.”

Item 2: Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth.

“I became the night clerk at a local place,” he continued. “If people came in drinking, swinging around, if they wouldn’t respond to politeness, well, then I would get physical with them. I beat a couple of people pretty bad.”

“How did you feel about that?” the interviewer asked.

“I didn’t really have any feelings about it,” he replied.

We attendees glanced excitedly at each other and scribbled notes. I began thinking about the people I knew who didn’t have as many feelings as they ought to have.

“Ever injure anyone badly enough to get them into hospital?” the interviewer asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t care. It wasn’t my problem. I won the fight. No room for second place.”

I was good at this, good at reading between the lines, at spotting the clues, the needles in the haystack. It’s what I’ve been doing for twenty years as a journalist.

Case Study H reminded me of a blind man whose other senses had become enhanced to compensate. His enhanced qualities, compensating for the lack of guilt and fear and remorse, included the ability to skillfully manipulate—“I was able to manipulate those people that were close to me, for drugs, for money, using my friends, the more I know about them the better I am at knowing what buttons to push,” he told Bob’s researcher (Item 9: Parasitic Lifestyle)—and also an aptitude for not feeling bad about his crimes afterward.

“It was a business.” He shrugged, recounting one robbery he committed. “They had insurance.”

Psychopaths, Bob said, will invariably argue that their victims had no right to complain. They had insurance. Or they learned a valuable life lesson getting beaten up like that. Or it was their own fault anyway. One time Bob interviewed a man who had impulsively killed another man over a bar tab.

“He only had himself to blame,” the killer told Bob. “Anybody could have seen I was in a rotten mood that night.”

Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions.

All this was building toward the moment Case Study H would detail his most awful crime. His recounting of it began quite vaguely. I didn’t quite know what he was talking about at first. There was a kid he knew. The kid hated his parents. It was a real weakness of the kid’s. Case Study H thought he could get something out of this hatred. Maybe he could provoke the kid into robbing them and then they could share the money. So he started needling the kid. All his troubles were the fault of his parents. Case Study H really knew which buttons to push to rile a boy who was already on the edge.

“The more he told me about himself, the more leverage I had for manipulation,” he told Bob’s researcher. “I just kept fueling the fire; the more fuel I added to the fire, the bigger payoff for me. I was the puppet master pulling the strings.”

Eventually the kid became wound so tight he got a baseball bat, jumped into his car, with Case Study H in tow, and drove to his parents’ house. When they arrived, “I sort of gave him that mocking look,” Case Study H said. “‘Show me.’ And he showed me. He went into the master bedroom equipped with a baseball bat and I sort of shrugged it off. And then the beatings started. It was endless. It seemed to last an eternity. He came back into the hall brandishing a baseball bat covered in blood. I came face-to-face with one of the victims. He didn’t look real. He just didn’t look real. He was looking right at me. It was just a vacant expression. There were three people in the house. One person died. The other two were severely injured.”

This was what happened when a psychopath got control of the emotions of a troubled, thuggish kid.

Bob’s researcher asked him if he could go back in time and change things from his life, what would he change?

“I have often pondered that,” Case Study H replied. “But then all that I have learned would be lost.” He paused. “The hotter the fire when forging a sword, the tighter the bond on the blade,” he said.

“Is there anything else you want to say?” said Bob’s researcher.

“No,” he replied. “That’s it.”

“Okay, thanks,” said Bob’s researcher.

The video ended. We broke for lunch.

 And so passed the three days. And as they did, my skepticism drained away entirely and I became a Bob Hare devotee, bowled over by his discoveries. I think the other skeptics felt the same. He was very convincing. I was attaining a new power, like a secret weapon, the kind of power that heroes of TV dramas about brilliant criminal profilers display—the power to identify a psychopath merely by spotting certain turns of phrase, certain sentence constructions, certain ways of being. I felt like a different person, a hardliner, not confused or out of my depth as I had been when I’d been hanging around with Tony and the Scientologists. Instead I was contemptuous of those naive people who allowed themselves to be taken in by slick-tongued psychopaths, contemptuous of, for instance, Norman Mailer.

In 1977, Mailer—who was working on The Executioner’s Song, about the recently executed convicted murderer Gary Gilmore—began corresponding with a tough Utah prisoner, a bank robber and murderer named Jack Henry Abbott. Mailer came to admire Abbott’s writing, and then to champion him when he was up for parole in 1981. “I love Jack Abbott for surviving and for having learned to write as well as he does,” Mailer wrote the Utah Board of Corrections.

“Mr. Abbott has the makings of a powerful and important American writer,” Mailer went on, promising that if the board paroled Abbott he’d give him a job as a researcher for $150 a week. Surprised, and somewhat dazzled, the Board of Corrections agreed. Jack Abbott was free. And he headed straight for literary New York.

 This was no surprise. New York City was where his champions were. But even so, Bob said, psychopaths tend to gravitate toward the bright lights. You’ll find lots of them in New York and London and Los Angeles. The psychologist David Cooke, of the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence, was once asked in Parliament if psychopaths caused particular problems in Scottish prisons.

“Not really,” he replied. “They’re all in London prisons.”

It wasn’t, he told them, a throwaway line. He had spent months assessing Scottish-born prisoners for psychopathy, and the majority of those who scored high were in London, having committed their crimes there. Psychopaths get bored easily. They need excitement. They migrate to the big cities.

Item 3: Need for Stimulation/Proneness to Boredom.

They also tend to suffer from self-delusions about their long-term prospects. They think if they move to London or New York or L.A., they’ll make it big, as a movie star, or a great athlete, or whatever. One time one of Bob’s researchers asked a grossly overweight prison psychopath what he hoped to do when he got out, and he replied that he planned to be a professional gymnast.

Item 13: Lack of Realistic Long-Term Goals.

(Unless the guy had been joking, of course.)

Jack Abbott thought he’d be the toast of literary New York. And, as it turned out, he was. He and Mailer appeared together on Good Morning America. He was photographed by the great New York portraitist, and wife of Kurt Vonnegut, Jill Krementz. The New York Times expressed gratitude to Mailer for helping get Abbott out on parole. He signed with the powerhouse agent Scott Meredith and was guest of honor at a celebratory dinner at a Greenwich Village restaurant, where Mailer, the editorial directors of Random House, Scott Meredith, and others toasted him with champagne.

And then, six weeks after getting out of prison, at 5:30 a.m. on July 18, 1981, Abbott stopped at a twenty-four-hour Manhattan restaurant, the Binibon. He had with him (according to reports the next day) two “attractive, well-educated young women he had met at a party.”

Item 11: Promiscuous Sexual Behavior.

Although, in fairness, Item 11 may not have applied to that threesome. It is impossible to know if they all were intending to have sex. Because everything was about to be altered. Everything was about to get worse.

Behind the counter at the Binibon was a twenty-two-year-old aspiring actor named Richard Adan. Abbott asked to use the toilet. Adan said it was for employees only. Abbott said, “Let’s go outside and settle this like men,” and so they did, and Abbott got out a knife and stabbed Richard Adan to death. Then he walked away, vanishing into the night.

 “What happened?” Scott Meredith said to The New York Times. “Every conversation I had with Jack we talked about the future. Everything was ahead of him.”

What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn’t need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn’t bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn’t control his impulses.

“When the police finally caught up with him, you know what he told them about the guy he stabbed?” Bob said. “He said, ‘Oh, but he would never have made it as an actor.’ ”

 “These motherfucking psychologists and psychiatrists are going to tell the administration and the police what you are going to do next. Even Jesus Christ could not predict what the fuck his apostles were going to do.”

These were the words of another of Bob’s videoed case studies—Case Study J. We laughed shrewdly when we heard him say this, because we did now know. That cryptic, powerful knowledge of how to decipher and identify psychopaths and anticipate their next move, even when they were feigning normalcy, was ours now. What we knew was that they were remorseless monsters and they would do it again in a heartbeat.

 As I sat in the tent, my mind drifted to what I could do with my new powers. If I’m being honest, it didn’t cross my mind at that point to become some kind of great crime fighter, an offender profiler or criminal psychologist, philanthropically dedicated to making society a safer place. Instead I made a mental list of all the people who had crossed me over the years, and wondered which of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic character traits. Top of the list of possibilities was the Sunday Times and Vanity Fair critic A. A. Gill, who had always been very rude about my television documentaries and had recently written a restaurant column for The Sunday Times in which he admitted to killing a baboon on safari.

I took him just below the armpit. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative?

 “Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy,” I thought.

I smiled to myself and zoned back in to Bob. He was saying that if he were to score himself on his checklist, he’d probably get a 4 or a 5 out of the possible 40. Tony in Broadmoor told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he got around a 29 or a 30.

 Our three days in West Wales came to an end. On the last day Bob surprised us by unexpectedly flashing onto the screen a large scale, close-up photograph of a man who’d been shot in the face at very close range. This came after he’d lulled us into a false sense of security by flashing photographs of ducks on pretty lakes and summer days in the park. But in this picture, gore and gristle bubbled everywhere. The man’s eyes had bulged all the way out of their sockets. His nose was gone.

“Oh GOD,” I thought.

An instant later my body responded to the shock by feeling prickly and jangly and weak and debilitated. This sensation, Bob said, was a result of the amygdalae and the central nervous system shooting signals of distress up and down to each other. It’s the feeling we get when we’re suddenly startled—like when a figure jumps out at us in the dark—or when we realize we’ve done something terrible, the feeling of fear and guilt and remorse, the physical manifestation of our conscience.

“It is a feeling,” Bob said, “that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing.”

Bob said it was becoming clearer that this brain anomaly is at the heart of psychopathy.

“There are all sorts of laboratory studies and the results are very, very consistent,” he said. “What they find is that there are anomalies in the way these individuals process material that has emotional implications. That there’s this dissociation between the linguistic meaning of words and the emotional connotations. Somehow they don’t put them together. Various parts of the limbic system just don’t light up.”

 And with that our psychopath-spotting course was over. As we gathered together our belongings and headed toward our cars, I said to one attendee, “You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it’s all because of their amygdalae? If it’s not their fault?”

“Why should we feel sorry for them?” he replied. “They don’t give a shit about us.”

 Bob Hare called over to me. He was in a hurry. He had to get the train from Cardiff to Heathrow so he could fly back to Vancouver. Could I give him a lift?

He saw it before I did. A car was upside down. The driver was still in his seat. He was just sitting there, as if good-naturedly waiting for someone to come and turn him right way up again so he could continue on his journey. I thought, “He looks patient,” but then I realized he wasn’t conscious.

His passenger sat on the grass a short distance away. She was sitting cross-legged, as if lost in her thoughts. She must have been thrown clean through the window a moment or two earlier.

I saw the scene only for an instant. Other people had already parked their cars and were running toward them, so I kept going, pleased that I didn’t have to be the one to handle it. Then I wondered if I should worry that my relief at not having to deal with the unpleasant responsibility was a manifestation of Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy—“He is only concerned with Number 1.”

I glanced in my rearview mirror at the good Samaritans rushing over and surrounding the overturned car and continued on my way.

“Jon?” said Bob, after a moment.

“Mm?” I said.

“Your driving,” said Bob.

“What about my driving?” I said.

“You’re swerving all over the road,” said Bob.

“No, I’m not,” I said. We continued in silence for a moment. “It’s the shock of seeing the crash,” I said.

It was good to know that I had been affected after all.

Bob said what was happening was my amygdala and central nervous system were shooting signals of fear and distress up and down to each other.

“They certainly are.” I nodded. “I can actually feel it happening. It’s very jarring and jaggedy.”

“You do realize,” said Bob, “that psychopaths would see that crash and their amygdalae would barely register a thing.”

“Well then, I’m the opposite of a psychopath,” I said. “If anything, my amygdala and my central nervous system shoot far too many signals up and down to each other.”

“Can you concentrate on the road, please,” said Bob.

“I came to you,” I said, “because of this guy called Tony. He’s in Broadmoor. He says they’re falsely accusing him of psychopathy and he hopes I’ll do some campaigning journalism to support his release. And I do have warm feelings for Tony, I really do, but how do I know if he’s a psychopath?”

Bob didn’t seem to be listening. It was as if the crash had made him introspective. He said, almost to himself, “I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well.”

I looked at Bob. “Really?” I said.

He nodded.

“But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,” I said.

“Serial killers ruin families.” Bob shrugged. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

This—Bob was saying—was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn’t function right. You’re standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains, you would see we aren’t all the same. We aren’t all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They’re the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond.

 It wasn’t only Bob who believed that a disproportionate number of psychopaths can be found in high places. In the days after Essi Viding had first mentioned the theory to me, I spoke to scores of psychologists who all said exactly the same. One was Martha Stout, from the Harvard Medical School, author of The Sociopath Next Door. (You may be wondering what the difference is between a psychopath and a sociopath, and the answer is, there really isn’t one. Psychologists and psychiatrists around the world tend to use the terms interchangeably.) They are everywhere, she said. They are in the crowded restaurant where you have your lunch. They are in your open-plan office.

“As a group they tend to be more charming than most people,” she said. “They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us. They’re the boss or the coworker who likes to make other people jump just for the pleasure of seeing them jump. They’re the spouse who marries to look socially normal but inside the marriage shows no love after the initial charm wears off.”

“I don’t know how many people will read this book,” I said to her. “Maybe a hundred thousand? So that means around a thousand of them will be psychopaths. Possibly even more if psychopaths like reading books about psychopaths. What should my message to them be? Turn yourselves in?”

“That would be nice,” Martha said. “But their arrogance would hold up. They’d think, ‘She’s lying about there being conscience.’ Or, ‘This poor dear is restrained by conscience. She should be more like me.’ ”

“What if the wife of a psychopath reads this?” I asked. “What should she do? Leave?”

“Yes,” said Martha. “I would like to say leave. You’re not going to hurt someone’s feelings because there are no feelings to hurt.” She paused. “Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there’s not much left except the will to win.”

“Which means you’ll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “The higher you go up the ladder, the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.”

“So the wars, the injustices, the exploitation, all of these things occur because of that tiny percent of the population up there who are mad in this certain way?” I asked. It sounded like the ripple effect of Petter Nordlund’s book, but on a giant scale.

“I think a lot of these things are initiated by them,” she said.

“It is a frightening and huge thought,” I said, “that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there.”

“It is a large thought,” she said. “It is a thought people don’t have very often. Because we’re raised to believe that deep down everyone has a conscience.”

At the end of our conversation she turned to address you, the reader. She said if you’re beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you’re feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

 Everyone in the field seemed to regard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces, whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible to identify unless you’re trained in the subtle art of spotting them, as I now was. The only other way would be to have access to some expensive fMRI equipment, like Adam Perkins does.

Adam is a research fellow in clinical neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, South London. I had visited him shortly after meeting Essi because he’s an expert in anxiety, and I wanted to test out my theory on him that suffering from anxiety is the neurological opposite of being a psychopath when it comes to amygdala function. I imagined my amygdala to be like one of those Hubble photographs of a solar storm, and I imagined psychopaths’ amygdalae to be like those Hubble photographs of dead planets, like Pluto. Adam verified my theory, and then to demonstrate, he strapped me up to some wires, put me into a dummy fMRI scanner, and without any warning, gave me a very painful electric shock.

“Ow!” I yelled. “That really hurts. Would you please turn down the level of the electric shock? I mean, I thought that had been outlawed. What was that level?”

“Three,” said Adam.

“What does it go up to?” I asked.

“Eight,” he said.

Adam performed various tests on me to monitor my anxiety level, and for much of it I glared suspiciously at the button that administered the electric shock, sometimes letting off little involuntary spasms, and when it was over, he confirmed from his EEG readings that I was indeed above average on the anxiety scale.

“Ooh!” I thought, unexpectedly pleased to hear that there really was something identifiably wrong with me. Then I said, “I suppose it probably isn’t a great idea for a man like me who suffers from excessive anxiety to chase after people who have a pathological deficit of anxiety.”

Adam nodded. He said I really had to be careful. Psychopaths are truly dangerous, he said. And they’re often the people you least expect them to be.

“When I was doing my Ph.D.,” he said, “I devised this personality test, and I advertised for volunteers amongst the student population. I put notices on the notice board, and a girl turned up. Young girl. She was a second-year student. About nineteen. She said, ‘This is a personality test, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I’ve got a bad personality. I like to hurt people.’ I thought she was winding me up. I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ So we went through the tests. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center—it’s a sexual thing—was fired up by blood and death. It’s subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant.”

I looked over at Adam. Describing the moment was obviously making him feel uncomfortable. He was an anxious man, like me, hence, he said, his decision to dedicate his life to the study of the relationship between anxiety and the brain.

“She told me she’d tried to join the RAF,” he said, “because they’re the only part of the Ministry of Defence that allows women to operate weapon systems, but they sussed her out and rejected her. So she ended up doing history. Hers wasn’t psychopathy in terms of being a manipulative con man. She told me about her homicidal desire the minute she met me, which suggests she wouldn’t score high on the trait of smooth deceptiveness. But at the core of psychopathy is a lack of moral restraint. If a person lacks moral restraint and also happens to get turned on by violence, then you end up with a very dangerous serial-killer type who lusts after killing and doesn’t have any moral hang-ups about doing so. There must be people in the population who get turned on by killing but have moral restraints that prevent them from acting out their fantasies, unless they’re drunk or tired or whatever. I guess she falls into this category, which is why she tried to join the RAF, so she could obtain a socially respectable opportunity to gratify her homicidal urges.”

“So what did you do about her?” I asked. “Did you call the police?”

“I was put in a difficult position,” he said. “She hadn’t done any crimes. My hands were tied. There are no mechanisms in place to stop her.”

Adam and Bob and Martha seemed sure that, with psychopaths, chaos was a foregone conclusion. This girl, forbidden from killing in a socially acceptable way, will probably end up as “one of those angel-of-death nurses or something,” Adam said. Someone who just has to murder.

I wondered if it ever crossed Adam’s and Bob’s minds that the logical solution to the psychopath problem would be to lock them up before they’d actually done anything wrong—even if proposing such a measure would make them the villains from an Orwell novel, which isn’t something anyone imagines they’ll be when setting out on their career path.

“Where is this woman now?” I asked Adam. “Maybe I could meet her for my book? In a busy café or something.”

“I’ve no means of tracking her down,” Adam said. “Participants in my studies are recorded only by numbers, not by name.” He fell silent for a second. “So she’s gone,” he said.

Adam’s point was that now I was in the psychopath-spotting business, I should be very vigilant. This was a perilous game. I had to trust nobody. These people were unsafe to be around. And sometimes psychopaths were nineteen-year-old women studying history in a London university.

“They come in all shapes and sizes,” he said.

 Now, as Bob Hare and I neared Cardiff, I considered his theory about psychopathic CEOs and psychopathic politicians and I remembered items 18 and 12 on his checklist—Juvenile Delinquency and Early behavior problems—An individual who has a history of serious antisocial behavior.

“If some political or business leader had a psychopathically hoodlum childhood, wouldn’t it come out in the press and ruin them?” I said.

“They find ways to bury it,” Bob replied. “Anyway, Early Behavior Problems doesn’t necessarily mean ending up in Juvenile Hall. It could mean, say, secretly torturing animals.” He paused. “But getting access to people like that can be difficult. Prisoners are easy. They like meeting researchers. It breaks up the monotony of their day. But CEOs, politicians . . .” Bob looked at me. “It’s a really big story,” he said. “It’s a story that could change forever the way people see the world.”

Suddenly Tony in Broadmoor felt a long way away. Bob was right: this really could be a big story. And my desire to unearth it outweighed any anxieties that were bubbling up inside me. I had to journey, armed with my new psychopath-spotting abilities, into the corridors of power.

Chapter Six: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Shubuta, Mississippi, was a dying town. Sarah’s House of Glamour (a beauty salon), the Jones Brothers Market Basket Meats and Groceries Store, the Bank of Shubuta, all boarded up, alongside other storefronts so faded you couldn’t even make out what they once were. The odd teddy bear or inflatable Santa peering through a dusty window display offered some clues to the abandoned business. Even the Shubuta Masonic Lodge was overgrown and rotting. So much for the power they thought they wielded! It didn’t save them.

The jail was gone, too, its iron cages crumbling and corroding inside a stone building just off Main Street, near a decaying old basketball hoop.

“You know you’re in a depressed place when even the jail has shut down,” I said.

“Depressed is right,” said Brad, the local man who was showing me around.

Decomposing timber protruded violently from abandoned homes, looking like that photograph of the blown-apart face Bob Hare had shown us back in the tent in West Wales, with the gore and gristle bubbling through what remained of the man’s skin.

Shubuta was not empty. A few remaining residents still wandered up and down. Some were drunk. Some were very old.

 Shubuta had once been a thriving place.

“Bustling!” said Brad. “Every day! Unbelievable! It was always real busy. It was wonderful growing up here. Crime was low.”

“We rode our bicycles everywhere we wanted to go,” added Brad’s friend Libby. “We rode on roller skates. Our mothers never worried about us.”

“Everyone worked up at Sunbeam,” said Brad.

Sunbeam, the local plant, made toasters. They were beautiful, Art Deco–looking things.

A Sunbeam toaster.

Brad and I climbed over rubble and into a long building in the middle of Main Street. Its door hung from its hinges. The exit sign lay in the dust on the ground. Torn-off strands of what looked to have once been red velvet curtains hung limply from masonry nails, like a scene from an abattoir.

“What did this place used to be?” I asked Brad.

“The old movie theater,” he replied. “I remember when it opened. We were all real excited. We were going to have a movie theater! We were going to have something to do! They showed one movie and that was it. They shut it down.”

“What was the movie?” I asked.

“Night of the Living Dead,” said Brad.

There was a silence.

“Appropriate,” I said.

Brad scanned the remnants of Main Street. “Al Dunlap doesn’t understand how many people he hurt when he closed down the plant,” he said, “To a small town like this? It hurt.” His face flushed with anger. “I mean, look at this place,” he said.

 The old Sunbeam plant was a mile out of town. It was big—the size of five football fields. In one room three hundred people used to make the toasters. In another room three hundred other people used to package them. I assumed the place would be abandoned now, but in fact a new business had moved in. They didn’t have six hundred employees. They had five: five people huddled together in a vast expanse of nothingness, manufacturing lamp shades.

Their boss was Stewart. He had worked at the plant until Al Dunlap became Sunbeam’s CEO and shut the place down.

“It’s good to see productivity still happening in this room,” I said.

“Mm,” said Stewart, looking slightly concerned that maybe productivity wouldn’t carry on happening in here for long.

 Stewart and his friend Bill and Brad’s friend Libby gave me the tour of the plant’s emptiness. They wanted to show an outsider what happens when “madmen take the helm of a once great company.”

“Are you talking about Al Dunlap?” I asked.

“At Sunbeam there was madman after madman,” said Stewart. “It wasn’t just Dunlap. Who was the first madman? Buckley?”

“Yeah, Buckley,” said Bill.

“Buckley had a little security guy with a machine gun following him around,” said Stewart. “He had a fleet of jets and Rolls-Royces and $10,000 ice sculptures. They were spending money freely and the company wasn’t making much money.”

(I later read that Robert J. Buckley was fired as Sunbeam CEO in 1986 after shareholders had complained that even though the company was flailing, he kept a fleet of five jets for himself and his family, installed his son in a $1 million apartment at company expense, and put $100,000 on the company tab for wine.)

“Who came after Buckley?” I asked.

“Paul Kazarian,” said Bill. “I believe he was a brilliant man, smart and a hard worker. But . . .” Bill fell silent. “I have a story I could tell you about him, but it isn’t for mixed company.”

We all looked at Libby.

“Oh, sure,” she said.

She took a long walk away from us across the barren factory floor, past cobwebs and broken windowpanes and dumpsters that were empty except for dust. When she was far out of earshot, Bill said, “One time I was failing to get some sale and he screamed at me, ‘You should suck this bastard’s DICK to get the sale!’ Right in front of a room full of people. Why would he act that way? He was a foul-mouthed . . .”

Bill’s face was red. He was shaking at the memory.

According to the John Byrne book Chainsaw, which details the history of the Sunbeam Corporation, Paul Kazarian would—during his tenure as CEO—throw pints of orange juice over the company’s controller and fire a BB gun at executives’ empty chairs during board meetings. But he was also known to care about job security and workers’ rights. He wanted the company to succeed without having to close down plants. He brought production jobs back from Asia and started an employees’ university.

We indicated to Libby that it was okay for her to return. She did.

“And after Paul Kazarian?” I asked.

“Then it was Al Dunlap,” said Stewart.

“I’m seeing him tomorrow,” I said. “I’m driving down to Ocala, Florida, to meet him.”

“What?” Stewart said, startled, his face darkening. “He’s not in jail?”

“He’s in the opposite of jail,” I said. “He’s in a vast mansion.”

For a second I saw the veins in Stewart’s neck rise up.

 We headed back to Stewart’s office.

“Oh,” I said. “I was recently with a psychologist called Bob Hare. He said you could tell a lot about a business leader if you ask him a particular question.”

“Okay,” he said.

“If you saw a crime-scene photograph,” I asked, “something really horrifying, like a close-up picture of a blown-apart face, what would your response be?”

“I would back away,” Stewart replied. “It would scare me. I would not like it. I would feel sorry for that person and I would fear for myself.” He paused. “So what does that say about me?”

I glanced out of Stewart’s window at the plant floor beyond. It was a strange sight—a tiny huddle of five lamp shade manufacturers inside this great, bleak expanse. I had told Stewart how gratifying it was to see a business flourishing in here, but the truth was obvious: Things weren’t great.

“So what does that say about me?” Stewart said again.

“Good things!” I reassured him.

 Sunbeam was, in the mid-1990s, a mess. Profligate CEOs like Robert Buckley had left the company flailing. The board of directors needed a merciless cost-cutter and so they offered the job to someone quite unique—a man who seemed to actually, unlike most humans, enjoy firing people. His name was Al Dunlap and he’d made his reputation closing down plants on behalf of Scott, America’s oldest toilet-paper manufacturer. There were countless stories of him going from Scott plant to Scott plant firing people in amusing, sometimes eerie ways. At a plant in Mobile, Alabama, for instance, he asked a man how long he’d worked there.

“Thirty years!” the man proudly replied.

“Why would you want to stay with a company for thirty years?” Dunlap said, looking genuinely perplexed. A few weeks later he closed the Mobile plant down, firing everyone.

Dunlap’s autobiography, Mean Business, was replete with anecdotes about firing people, such as this:

The corporate morale officer at Scott [was] a pleasant enough person being paid an obscene amount of money, her primary job was to ensure harmony in the executive suite. The hell with harmony; these people should have been tearing each other’s hair out. I told [Scott’s CFO Basil] Anderson to get rid of her. . . . Later that week one of the in-house lawyers fell asleep during an executive meeting. That was his last doze on our payroll. A few days later he was a memory.

 And so on. He fired people with such apparent glee that the business magazine Fast Company included him in an article about potentially psychopathic CEOs. All the other CEOs cited were dead or in prison, and therefore unlikely to sue, but they took the plunge with Dunlap anyway, referring to his poor behavioral controls (his first wife charged in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and muttered that he always wondered what human flesh tasted like) and his lack of empathy (even though he was always telling journalists about his wise and supportive parents, he didn’t turn up at either of their funerals).

 On the July 1996 day that Sunbeam’s board of directors revealed the name of their new CEO, the share price skyrocketed from $12.50 to $18.63. It was—according to Dunlap’s unofficial biographer John Byrne—the largest jump in New York Stock Exchange history. On the day a few months later that Dunlap announced that half of Sunbeam’s 12,000 employees would be fired (according to The New York Times, this was in percentage terms the largest work-force reduction of its kind ever), the share price shot up again, to $28. In fact the only time the price wavered during those heady months was on December 2, 1996, when Business Week revealed that Dunlap had failed to show up at his parents’ funerals and had threatened his first wife with a knife. On that day, the share price went down 1.5 percent.

It reminded me of that scene in the movie Badlands when fifteen-year-old Holly, played by Sissy Spacek, suddenly realizes with a jolt that her tough, handsome boyfriend, Kit, has actually crossed the line from rugged to lunatic. She takes an anxious step backward, but then says in her vacant monotone of a voice-over, “I could have snuck out the back or hid in the boiler room, I suppose, but I sensed that my destiny now lay with Kit for better or for worse.”

Much as in Badlands, Al Dunlap’s relationship with his shareholders bounced back fast after December 2, and together they went on a year-long rampage across rural America, closing plants in Shubuta and Bay Springs and Laurel, Mississippi, and Cookeville, Tennessee, and Paragould, Arkansas, and Coushatta, Louisiana, and on and on, turning communities across the American South into ghost towns. With each plant closure, the Sunbeam share price soared, reaching an incredible $51 by the spring of 1998.

 Coincidentally, Bob Hare writes about Badlands in his seminal book on psychopathy, Without Conscience:

If Kit played by Martin Sheen is the moviemaker’s conception of a psychopath, Holly is the real thing, a talking mask simply going through the motions of feeling deeply. Her narration is delivered in a monotone and embellished with phrases drawn straight from the glossies telling young girls what they should feel. If there was ever an example of “knowing the words but not the music,” Spacek’s character is it.

It all ended for Dunlap in the spring of 1998 when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating allegations that he had engineered a massive accounting fraud at Sunbeam. Sixty million dollars of their apparently record $189 million earnings for 1997 were, the SEC said, the result of fraudulent accounting. Dunlap denied the charges. He demanded from Sunbeam, and was given, a massive severance pay to add to the $100 million he earned in his twenty months at Scott.

Back then, in the pre-Enron days, there wasn’t quite the appetite for pursuing criminal charges when the cases were as complicated as that one was, and in 2002 Dunlap’s legal troubles ended when he agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle various lawsuits. Part of his deal with the SEC was that he would never again serve as an officer or a director of a public company.

 “What about his childhood?” I asked John Byrne before I set off for Shubuta. “Are there unusual stories about odd behavior? Getting into trouble with the police? Or torturing animals?”

“I went back to his high school but I don’t believe I interviewed any of his old classmates,” he replied. “I have no recall.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I know he was a keen boxer as a child,” he said.

“Oh?” I said.

“Yes, he made some comments about how much he enjoyed beating people up.”

“Oh REALLY?” I said.

“And his sister once said he threw darts at her dolls.”

“Oh REALLY?” I said.

I wrote in my notepad: Throws darts at sister’s dolls, enjoys beating people up.

“What was he like when you met him?” I asked.

“I never did,” he said. “He wouldn’t see me.”

There was a short silence.

“I’m going to meet him,” I said.

“Are you?” he said, startled and, I think, a little jealous.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes I am.”

 The first obviously strange thing about Al Dunlap’s grand Florida mansion and lavish, manicured lawns—he lives a ten-hour drive from Shubuta—was the unusually large number of ferocious sculptures there were of predatory animals. They were everywhere: stone lions and panthers with teeth bared, eagles soaring downward, hawks with fish in their talons, and on and on, across the grounds, around the lake, in the swimming pool/health club complex, in the many rooms. There were crystal lions and onyx lions and iron lions and iron panthers and paintings of lions and sculptures of human skulls.

Like Toto Constant’s army of plastic Burger King figurines but huge and vicious and expensive, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad.

“Lions,” said Al Dunlap, showing me around. He was wearing a casual jacket and slacks and looked tanned, healthy. His teeth were very white. “Lions. Jaguars. Lions. Always predators. Predators. Predators. Predators. I have a great belief in and a great respect for predators. Everything I did I had to go make happen.”

Item 5: Conning/Manipulative, I wrote in my reporter’s notepad. His statements may reveal a belief that the world is made up of “predators and prey,” or that it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses in others.

“Gold, too,” I said. “There’s a lot of gold here, too.”

I had been prepared for the gold, having recently seen a portrait of him sitting on a gold chair, wearing a gold tie, with a gold suit of armor by the door and a gold crucifix on the mantelpiece.

“Well,” said Al. “Gold is shiny. Sharks.”

He pointed at a sculpture of four sharks encircling the planet. “I believe in predators,” he said. “Their spirit will enable you to succeed. Over there you’ve got falcons. Alligators. Alligators. More alligators. Tigers.”

“It’s as if both Midas and also the Queen of Narnia were here,” I said, “and the Queen of Narnia flew above a particularly fierce zoo and turned everything there to stone and then transported everything here.”

“What?” said Al.

“Nothing,” I said.

“No,” he said, “what did you just say?”

He shot me a steely, blue-eyed stare, which I found quite debilitating.

“It was just a jumble of words,” I said. “I was trying to make a funny comment but it all became confused in my mouth.”

“Oh,” said Al. “I’ll show you outside. Would you like to walk or take the golf cart?”

“I think walk,” I said.

 We wandered past several extravagant oil paintings of his German shepherd dogs. There was a famous seven-week period during the mid-1990s, when he was laying off the 11,200 Scott employees, that he demanded Scott pay for two suites at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia—one for himself and his wife, Judy, and another for his two German shepherds. He has a son, Troy, from his first marriage, but I noticed there were no pictures of him anywhere, just lots of portraits of the German shepherd dogs and grand, gold-framed, life-sized oil paintings of Al and Judy, both looking serious but magnanimous.

We took a walk across his lawns. I spotted Judy standing near a stone sculpture of a sweet, tousle-haired child that overlooked the lake. Judy was blond, like Al, and wearing a peach sweat suit. She was just gazing out across the lake, hardly moving.

“You visited a plant one time,” I said to Al. “You asked a man how long he’d been working there. He said, ‘Thirty years.’ You said, ‘Why would you want to work at a company for thirty years?’ He saw it as a badge of honor but you saw it as a negative.”

“A negative to me,” he replied. “And here’s why. If you’re just going to stay someplace, you become a caretaker, a custodian. Life should be a roller coaster, not a merry-go-round.”

I wrote in my notepad, Lack of empathy. Then I turned to a clean page.

“Shall we get some ice tea?” he said.

On our way to the kitchen, I noticed a framed poem on his desk, written in fancy calligraphy, a few lines of which read:

It wasn’t easy to do

What he had to do

But if you want to

be liked

Get a dog or two.

 “Sean had it done for my birthday,” he said.

Sean was Sean Thornton, Al’s longtime bodyguard. “If you want to get a friend, get a dog,” said Al. “We’ve always had two. I hedge my bets!”

I laughed but I knew this wasn’t the first time he’d used this line. It was on page xii of the preface of his autobiography, Mean Business: “If you want a friend, get a dog. I’m not taking any chances; I’ve got two dogs.”

And in the unofficial biography Chainsaw, John Byrne writes about an occasion back in 1997 when Al invited a hostile financial analyst, Andrew Shore, to his home:

“I so love dogs,” Dunlap said, handing Shore photographs [of his German shepherds]. “You know, if you want a friend, you get a dog. I have two, to hedge my bets.”

Shore had heard the exact line before, in one of the many articles he had read about Dunlap. But he laughed.

 I wrote in my notepad, Glibness/Superficial Charm.

He is always ready with a quick and clever comeback [but] may actually provide very little useful information.

Michael Douglas says something like it in the 1987 movie Wall Street: “If you need a friend, get a dog. It’s trench warfare out there.” I wondered if the screenwriters had taken the line from Al Dunlap, but later I discovered that he hadn’t been the only bigwig to say it.

“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog,” Harry Truman had apparently said during his presidency, according to the 1975 biographical play Give ’em Hell, Harry!

“You learn in this business, if you want a friend, get a dog,” said the corporate raider and pharmaceutical chief Carl Icahn at some point during the mid-1980s.

“If you want to be liked, get a dog,” said the host of CBS’s Inside Edition, Deborah Norville, in the early 1990s. “The people you work with are not your friends.”

 We gathered in the kitchen—Al, Judy, and Sean the bodyguard.

I cleared my throat.

“You know how I said in my e-mail that your amygdala might not shoot the requisite signals of fear to your central nervous system and that’s perhaps why you’ve been so successful and so interested in the predatory spirit?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a fascinating theory. It’s like Star Trek. You’re going where no man has gone before. Why are some people enormously successful and others not at all? The kids I went to school with had a lot more privileges than me but they’re not successful. Why? What’s different? Something’s different! It’s a question that’s been on people’s minds for generations! And that’s why, when you mentioned this amygdala thing, I thought, ‘Hmm. That’s very interesting. I’ll talk to this fellow.’ ”

“I have to tell you that some psychologists say that if this part of your brain doesn’t work properly, it can actually make you . . .”

“Mmm?” he said.

“Dangerous,” I mumbled inaudibly.

I suddenly felt incredibly nervous. It was true that I had already asked two people—Tony and Toto—if they were psychopaths, and so I ought to have been used to doing this. But this was different. I was inside a man’s mansion, not a maximum-security prison or a mental hospital.

“Sorry?” he said. “I can’t hear you.”

“Dangerous,” I said.

There was a short silence.

“In what respect?” he said thinly.

“It can make you”—I took a breath—“a psychopath.”

Al, Judy, and Sean the bodyguard stared at me. For a long time. I was in over my head. What did I think I was doing? I’m not a licensed medical professional or a scientist. Nor, if I’m being honest with myself, am I actually a detective. I blamed Bob Hare. He hadn’t told me to do this, but I never would have had I not met him. His checklist gave me false confidence that I could make my way in this land of psychopaths. I should have listened to Adam Perkins’s warnings. I’m not a detective, not a psychologist, and I didn’t even score that well when I self-diagnosed with the DSM-IV.

They looked at once deeply angry, befuddled, and disappointed. Al had let me into his home and I was being compelled by circumstance to ask him if he was a psychopath. It is not illegal to be a psychopath but, still, it’s probably very insulting to be asked if you are one.

“I’ve got a list of personality traits written down here that define psychopathy,” I said, pointing at my pocket.

“Who the hell are the people who make the list?” said Al. “What are their names? I bet I never heard of them!”

At this I realized I could turn the situation around to make Bob take the blame in absentia for the unpleasantness.

“Bob Hare,” I said. I pronounced his name quite clearly: “Bob Hare.”

“I never heard of him!” said Al, a triumphant glint in his eye.

“Never heard of him!” Judy agreed.

“He’s a psychologist,” I said. I exhaled to indicate that I felt the same way he presumably did about psychologists.

Al pointed toward a gold cabinet in his office, inside which were photographs of him with Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, Prince Charles, Ronald Reagan, Kerry Packer, Lord Rothschild, Rush Limbaugh, and Jeb Bush, as if to say, “Those are men I have heard of!”

“So, that list . . . ?” said Al. He looked suddenly intrigued. “Go ahead,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

“Okay,” I said. I pulled it out of my pocket. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

“Okay. Item one. Superficial charm.”

“I’m totally charming,” he replied. “I am totally charming!”

He, Judy, and Sean laughed, easing the tension.

“Grandiose sense of self-worth?” I asked.

This would have been a hard one for him to deny, standing as he was below a giant oil painting of himself.

 Item 2: Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth, I had written in my notepad earlier. His inflated ego and exaggerated regard for his own abilities are remarkable, given the facts of his life.

 In fact, on my way here I had made a detour to Florida State University in Tallahassee to see the Dunlap Student Success Center. It had been built with a $10 million donation from Al and Judy and was without doubt an ostentatious monument to them and their German shepherds. There was a huge painting of them and the dogs on the lobby wall in which Judy was wearing a leopard-print blouse and Al was wearing a gold tie. There was a bronze plaque into which Al’s and Judy’s faces had been carved above a button that, when pressed, played a recording of Al sermonizing on the subject of leadership. (There were no good leaders left, his oration basically said, and if America wanted to survive, they ought to develop some dynamic ones fast.)

I had asked Kelly, one of the building’s managers, to show me around the center.

“We are thrilled that the Dunlaps chose to give their money to an opportunity to develop citizenship and leadership and the career life story of Florida State students,” she told me.

“Al isn’t known for being the most charitable person,” I replied. “Have you reflected on why the change?”

“I can speak only to the opportunity to do good in this physical space that his gift has made possible,” she said.

“I’ve heard he collects sculptures of predatory animals,” I said. “Eagles and alligators and sharks and bears. Any animal that goes ‘ARGH!’ It strikes me as a strange hobby. Has he ever spoken to you about that hobby?”

“We have not had an opportunity to speak to that,” she said, looking like she wanted to kill me. “We have talked about the opportunity to be together in this space and for Florida State students to learn.”

“Al says life is all about winning,” I said. “What do you think about that?”

“I think I am thrilled that he chose to give his charity to Florida State University, and this building is a place where we can do amazing work because he’s chosen to give us this opportunity and we are so thankful for that,” she said.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“Thank you!” she said, wandering away.

 “Grandiose sense of self-worth?” I said to Al now in his kitchen.

“No question,” said Al. “If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will. You’ve got to believe in you.”

“Is there another list of good things?” said Judy, quite sharply.

“Well . . .” I said. We all fell silent. “Need for stimulation/ proneness to boredom?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Al. “I’m very prone to boredom. I gotta go do something. Yeah. That’s a fair statement. I’m not the most relaxed person in the world. My mind does not stop working all night.”

“Manipulative?” I said.

“I think you could describe that as leadership,” he said. “Inspire! I think it’s called leadership.”

“Are you okay with this list?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure, why not?” he said.

 And so the morning continued, with Al redefining a great many psychopathic traits as Leadership Positives. Impulsivity was “just another way of saying Quick Analysis. Some people spend a week weighing up the pros and cons. Me? I look at it for ten minutes. And if the pros outweigh the cons? Go!” Shallow Affect (an inability to feel a deep range of emotions) stops you from feeling “some nonsense emotions.” A lack of remorse frees you up to move forward and achieve more great things. What’s the point in drowning yourself in sorrow?

“You have to judge yourself at the end of the day,” he said. “Do I respect me? And if you do? Fine! You’ve had a great run.”

“You do feel good about yourself?” I asked.

“I do!” he replied. “Oh, I do! Looking back at my life is like going to a movie about a person who did all this stuff. My gosh! I did that? And through it all I did it my way.”

“What about the way you treated your first wife?” I asked.

“I . . .” Al furrowed his brow. He looked at me. “I’d been at West Point,” he said. “You go from this glamorous lifestyle to being some”—he screwed up his face—“young married lieutenant at some remote base someplace. At that young age it’s an extremely difficult transition. . . .” He trailed off.

“So you saw your wife as something that was holding you back?” I said.

Al shrugged and glanced at the floor for a moment. “I was stationed on a nuclear missile site,” he said. “You’re dealing with nuclear weapons. I was there during the Cuban missile crisis. The job’s very serious. You’ve got a mission. If you fail the mission, a lot of people could be seriously hurt. And does that commitment conflict with your family life? Of course it does. . . .”

Al was referring to the time during the Cuban missile crisis that he left his five-months-pregnant wife home alone with no food or access to money and in desperation she had to call her mother and sister for help.

“Oh!” I said. “One more thing. When you see a crime-scene photograph—something really grotesque, someone’s face blown apart or something—do you react with horror?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think I intellectualize it.”

“Really?” I said. “It makes you curious? It’s absorbing? Like a puzzle to be solved?”

“Curious.” Al nodded. “As opposed to, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s frightened me!’ I’m not going to go sit in the corner of the room. What enters my mind is, What happened here? Why did it happen?”

“Your body doesn’t feel debilitated in response to the shock of seeing the picture?” I said.

Al shook his head.

I was leaning forward, peering at him over my glasses, carefully scrutinizing him. He quickly clarified, “Yeah, what enters my mind is, What happened here and how can it be prevented from ever happening again?”

“How can it be prevented from ever happening again?” I asked.

“You cannot be a leader and cringe from evil and badness,” he said. “You’ve got to face it.” He paused. “The basic definition of leadership is the person who rises above the crowd and gets something done. Okay?”

 We had lunch before I left. Al seemed in surprisingly high spirits for a man who’d just been questioned on which psychopathic traits most applied to him. He had a little gold ax on his lapel. As we ate, he told me funny stories about firing people. Each was essentially the same: someone was lazy and he fired them with an amusing quip. For instance, one lazy Sunbeam executive mentioned to him that he’d just bought himself a fabulous sports car.

“You may have a fancy sports car,” Al replied, “but I’ll tell you what you don’t have. A job!”

Judy laughed at each of the anecdotes, though she had surely heard them many times, and I realized what a godsend to a corporation a man who enjoys firing people must be.

They took me into their TV room and showed me a speech Al once gave at Florida State University on the subject of leadership. At the end of the tape Judy applauded the TV. She clearly adored her husband, adored his no-nonsense approach to life, his practically Darwinian street smarts. I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.

I said, “Tell me about the Sunbeam years—”

He cut me off.

“Sunbeam didn’t work.” He shrugged. “Sunbeam’s a footnote in my career. It wasn’t the biggest corporation. It had products that were a bit fickle. Appliances. I don’t get too disturbed about it. In the scheme of things, it’s inconsequential.”

And that’s all he would say about Sunbeam. We talked about Lack of Empathy. Al said he did empathize “with people who want to make something of themselves,” but unfortunately that didn’t include his son, Troy, or his sister, Denise.

For Denise, the relationship ended for good in January 1994, when she called her brother to let him know that her daughter, Carolyn, a college junior, was diagnosed with leukemia.

“Can I just know that you’ll be there if I need you?” she asked him.

“No,” Dunlap tersely replied, she recalls.

—JOHN A. BYRNE, Business Week, DECEMBER 2, 1996

 “I haven’t spoken to my sister in years,” he said. “In high school I was very close to the top of the class. I was an athlete. And then I went off to West Point. And she resented it! To me that makes no sense. If I had a brother or an older sister, I’d be so proud. I’d be, ‘Wow! I want to be like my brother!’ Her attitude was just the opposite. ‘Look what he’s got.’ I earned it!”

Al’s relationship with Troy was just as frosty.

“I tried to help him on numerous occasions.” He shrugged. “I tried. Honestly, I tried. It just didn’t work out. And then he made some statements to the press. . . .”

Upon hearing the news of his father’s sacking [from Sunbeam], Troy Dunlap chortled.

“I laughed like hell,” he says. “I’m glad he fell on his ass.”

Dunlap’s sister, Denise, his only sibling, heard the news from a friend in New Jersey. Her only thought: “He got exactly what he deserved.”

—Business Week, 1998

 I wrote in my notepad, and then turned to a clean page so they wouldn’t spot my thoughts, Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have left are your memories.

“It’s the tall poppy thing.” Al Dunlap was calling from across the room. “Everyone wants to cut the tall poppy. I’m sure since you’ve achieved a level of success, people are saying nasty things about you. And you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute. Nobody ever gave a damn before I got to this level.’ Is that true?”

“Yes. It’s true,” I said.

“Screw them,” Al said. “They’re just jealous. You do what you have to do. So, you understand?”

I glanced up at the oil painting.

Write something about Narcissus, I added on a fresh page. Write something about the moral barrenness of padding around a mansion that’s much too big for just two people, a mansion filled with giant reflections of yourself.

I smiled to myself at the cleverness of my phraseology.

“You understand, right?” said Dunlap. “You’ve had some success. You’re like me. When you reach a certain level, jealous people go for you. Right? They lie about you. They try and cut you down. You did what you had to do to get where you’ve gone. We’re the same.”

Also write something about the Queen of Narnia, I wrote.

And so it was that shareholders and boards of directors within the toaster-manufacturing world of the 1990s came to appreciate the short-term business benefits of employing a CEO who displayed many character traits that would, as it transpired, score him high on the Bob Hare Psychopath Checklist.

Bob Hare was spending the night at the Heathrow Airport Hilton. He e-mailed me to ask how things had gone with Al Dunlap. I replied that I’d tell him in person.

I met him in the hotel bar. He was more in demand than ever, he said, now that a big study he’d coauthored, “Corporate Psychopathy,” had just been published. In it, 203 “corporate professionals” were assessed with his checklist—“including CEOs, directors, supervisors,” Bob said—and the results showed that while the majority weren’t at all psychopathic, “3.9% had a score of at least 30, which is extremely high, even for a prison population, at least 4 or 5 times the prevalence in the general population.”

Bob clarified that we don’t have a lot of empirical data for how many psychopaths are walking around in the general population, but the assumption is that it’s a little less than 1 percent. And so, his study showed, it is four or five times more likely that some corporate bigwig is a very high-scoring psychopath than someone just trying to earn an okay living for their family.

 Over a glass of red wine I briefed him on my Al Dunlap visit. I told him how Al had pretty much confessed to a great many of the psychopathic traits, seeing them as business positives, and Bob nodded, unsurprised.

“Psychopaths say there are predators and prey,” Bob said. “When they say that, take it as factual.”

“It’s funny you should mention predators,” I said. “Try and guess what his house was filled with.”

“Eagles,” said Bob. “Bears . . .”

“Yes!” I said. “Panthers. Tigers. A whole menagerie. Not stuffed. Statues. How would you know that?”

“I have a few insights here,” he said, pointing at his skull. “I’m a researcher but I have clinical insights.”

Then I frowned. “But he did tell me he cried when his dog died,” I said.

“Yeah?” said Bob.

“Yes,” I said. “We had just had a conversation about Shallow Affect. He said he didn’t allow himself to be weighed down by nonsense emotions. But then I was admiring an oil painting of his dog Brit and he said he cried his eyes out when it died. He said he cried and cried and cried and that meant he couldn’t be a psychopath.”

I realized I was admitting this to Bob in an almost apologetic manner, as if it was sort of my fault, like I was a casting agent who had put forward an imperfect actor for a job.

“Oh, that’s quite common,” said Bob.

“Really?” I said, brightening.

“Dogs are a possession,” Bob explained. “Dogs—if you have the right dog—are extremely loyal. They’re like a slave, right? They do everything you want them to. So, yeah, he cried his eyes out when his dog died. Would he cry his eyes out if his cat died?”

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think he has a cat,” I said, nodding slowly.

“He’d probably cry his eyes out if he got a dent in his car,” said Bob. “If he had a Ferrari or a Porsche—and he probably does—and someone scratched it and kicked it, he’d probably go out of his mind and want to kill the guy. So, yeah, the psychopath might cry when his dog dies and you think that’s misplaced because he doesn’t cry when his daughter dies.”

I was about to say, “Al Dunlap doesn’t have a daughter,” but Bob was continuing. “When my daughter was dying, it was killing me inside. She was dying of MS. I put myself inside her skin so many times and tried to experience what she was going through. And many times I said to my wife, ‘Boy, what an advantage to be a psychopath.’ A psychopath would look at his daughter and say, ‘This is really bad luck,’ and then go out and gamble and . . .”

Bob trailed off. We ordered coffee. “With corporate psychopathy, it’s a mistake to look at them as neurologically impaired,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to look at them from a Darwinian slant. It all makes sense from the evolutionary perspective. The strategy is to pass on the gene pool for the next generation. Now, they don’t consciously think that. They don’t think, ‘I’m going to go out and impregnate as many women as I can,’ but that’s the genetic imperative. So what do they do? They’ve got to attract women. They like women a lot. So they’ve got to misrepresent their resources. They’ve got to manipulate and con and deceive and be ready to move on as soon as things get hot.”

“Ah,” I said, frowning again. “With Al Dunlap that really doesn’t hold up. He’s been married for forty-one years. There’s no evidence of affairs. None at all. He’s been a loyal husband. And a lot of journalists have dug around—”

“It doesn’t matter,” interrupted Bob. “We’re talking in generalities. There are lots of exceptions. What happens outside the marriage? Do you know? Do you have any idea?”

“Um,” I said.

“Does his wife have any idea what goes on outside the marriage?” Bob said. “A lot of these serial killers are married to the same person for thirty years. They have no idea what goes on outside the marriage.”

 In the clean, minimalist New York City office of an enormously wealthy moneyman—a man who would talk to me only if I promised to preserve his anonymity—I sat on my hands like a schoolboy and watched as he scrolled through my website, reading out descriptions of my various previous interviewees. There were the Special Forces soldiers in my book The Men Who Stare at Goats who believe they can walk through walls and kill goats just by staring at them. There were the conspiracy theorists in my book Them: Adventures with Extremists who believe that the secret rulers of the world are giant pedophile, blood-drinking reptiles from another dimension who have adopted human form.

“Wow,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I feel out of place even speaking with you. Wow. I’m about as boring a person as you’re ever going to chat with.”

He indicated his office, which was indeed filled with nothing crazy. In fact, it was filled with nothing at all. The desks and chairs were contoured in such a way to suggest they were impossibly expensive.

This man, whom I will call Jack, witnessed the Al Dunlap affair close up. He was around when a co-owner of the company, the billionaire financier and philanthropist Michael Price—at $1.4 billion the 562nd richest person in the world—lobbied to get Dunlap appointed as CEO, and, Al’s reputation preceding him, everyone knew what that would mean.

“I disagreed with the job cuts,” said Jack. “I said, ‘Don’t blame the people and the number of people.’ You ever seen what happens to a community when you close a facility?”

“I went to Shubuta,” I said.

“I’ve been to these places,” said Jack. “I’ve stayed at little inns. I’ve been to the schools. I’ve been to the training centers and the tech areas. It’s a joy. It really is a joy to go to these places. And then to see Wall Street applaud as they got destroyed . . .” Jack trailed off. “If you look at any research report from the time, it’s so transparent to anyone who understands what’s going on.”

“What do you mean by ‘research report’?” I asked.

The “research reports”—Jack explained—are written by hedge funds and pension funds and investment banks, advising their clients on which companies to invest in.

“Wall Street, or the darker side that writes these research reports, lionized the job cuts in places like Shubuta,” said Jack. “If you look at the community of support—if you were to grab research reports of the time—you’d be amazed at the comments.”

“Like what?”

“The level of callous jubilance over what he was doing. You’d probably wonder whether society had gone mad.”

“I guess those research reports are lost to the sands of time now,” I said.

“It might be possible to grab some of them,” he said. “It was like in the Coliseum. You had the entire crowd egging him on. So who really is the villain? Is it the one who’s making the cuts? Is it the analysts who are touting it? Is it the pension funds and the mutual funds who are buying?”

“Of course that was all twelve years ago now,” I said. “Has anything changed?”

“Not anything,” Jack said. “Zero. And it’s not just in the U.S. It’s everywhere. It’s all over the world.”

 A few weeks passed and then, as he promised, Jack dug up and sent me one of the research reports. He said he hoped I would agree it made for extraordinarily cold-blooded and bullish reading. It was from Goldman Sachs, dated September 19, 1996. It read:

We reaffirm our trading buy rating on SOC (Sunbeam) shares based on the company’s pending turnaround/restructuring, with CEO Al Dunlap leading the charge.

 Jack had double underlined the next part to indicate just how shocking it was:

Our EPS ests do not reflect SOC’s pending restructuring and are unchanged at 25c for 1996 and 90c for 1997.

 And then, finally, underlined and circled with an exclamation mark:

P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X

 “P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X” was the cruelest line in the paper, Jack had said. I found it incomprehensible. When I see phrases like that my brain collapses in on itself. But, this being the secret formula to the brutality, the equation that led to the death of Shubuta, I asked some financial experts to translate it.

“So,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak, of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in Claremont, California, “the PE is the average price of the stock divided by next year’s forecasted earnings. The increase in the PE means that the stock price was expected to rise faster than the increase in earnings. This means the investment house expected that the Draconian cuts would produce higher earnings for years to come, and next year’s stock price would reflect that higher earnings for years in the future.”

“For a company making low-priced appliances,” e-mailed John A. Byrne of Business Week, “it’s a very high PE. The analyst is assuming that if Dunlap can squeeze out overhead and expenses, the earnings will shoot up and investors who get in early will make a killing.”

“Bottom line,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak. “One investment house thought that most investors would cheer mass layoffs at Sunbeam. This is a remorseless view of people losing jobs. The only upside of this is that whomever followed this advice was seriously pissed at the investment house a year later when the stock tanked.”

As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

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