Most of us float through life rather effortlessly. We go to work, we go out for food; some drink, some smoke, some work out, and we all grow older – until the end.
However there is another world, a dark world that almost none of us ever enter. A world that is going on in every city across the globe. A world of crime, drugs and territory, of gangs, barbarous brawls and murders.
One man who teetered his way into the midst of this terrifying firefight was Shaun Attwood, a regular young man from Widnes, England, who took his business degree to the U.S. and became an award winning stock broker making millions of pounds a year.
In Arizona in the early noughties Shaun noticed a huge gap in the market for ecstasy, and having experienced the Madchester scene just a few years before, Shaun knew he could make a lot of extra money.
So what did he do? He began hosting raves where he would take and distribute ecstasy. It didn’t take long before he had a small empire on his hands.
After numerous run ins with the mafia, as well as the police, Shaun was eventually arrested and sentenced to nine and a half years in ‘America’s toughest jail’, Maricopa County, which Shaun writes about in his book Hard Times.
Inside Maricopa County Shaun met countless dark characters – but one man he became incredibly close to was a Mafia hitman and associate by the name of Two Tonys, who was serving a 141 year sentence for numerous murders.
Speaking to UNILAD, Shaun revealed how he first met Two Tonys, saying:
After I got attacked in prison, my new cellmate introduced me to Two Tonys because he knew he could protect me. Having murdered only rival gangsters, he was at the top of the respect in the prison.
At first, I played chess with him and then he asked me to write his life story. After I became his official biographer, I never got attacked again and he saved my life when some shot-caller in prison put out a hit on me for blogging about how prisoners make their own syringes.
However, one of the most interesting things Shaun said about Two Tonys was his method for disposing of bodies after running a hit on them – and yes, it’s about as dark as it gets.
With no holds barred, Two Tonys explained to Shaun how he disposed of bodies during his mob days, saying:
One of the problems transporting a body is the stink. It releases gasses and fluids and crap. It’s best wrapped in plastic sheets that catch paint drops, so you don’t get a trace of blood on your car or clothes – which could be used as evidence against you – and transported in a sleeping bag as camouflage in case you get pulled over.
If you’re in a truck, you can use a fifty-five- gallon industrial drum. If the corpse is too big for the drum, you might have to saw an arm or a leg off.
Ideally, you cocoon the corpse in plastic sheets like a mummy with its hands at its sides before rigor mortis kicks in. A corpse rots underground, destroying the evidence. It rots faster in the heat, so summer is the best time to whack someone.
Heat will rot a corpse down to a skeleton in a few weeks, so it’s easier to get away with whacking someone in Arizona than Alaska. I ran into problems in Alaska ’cause the motherfuckers froze and what I’d hoped for didn’t happen: bears eating the corpses. In heat, worms and maggots chow-down on the evidence.
Two Tonys went onto explain the disposal differences between premeditated murders and hits that came out of nowhere, saying:
For premeditated killings, it’s best to dig a hole in advance ’cause of the time it takes to get deep enough: about five or six feet. We ain’t talking about no little sandpit here. You don’t wanna get caught with a shovel loitering off some dirt road in the boonies with a stiff in the trunk. If you don’t dig deep enough in Arizona, monsoonal rain might wash the soil away and expose the corpse, or coyotes might dig the motherfucker up and start chomping on an arm or a leg.
In Tucson, bears and lions come down from the mountains when they’re hungry. There’s more rain in Tucson than Phoenix and it’s slightly cooler, so you’ve got better desert soil to dig. In Phoenix in the summer, the desert is baked so hard that it’s impossible to dig.
A good trick is to bury the stiff several feet under the grave of a large dead dog or any other big carcass. If the cops come out with cadaver dogs, which pick up a corpse’s scent, they’ll stop digging when they discover the carcass.
If you whack someone on the spur of the moment and you need to get rid of the stiff fast, take it to the nearest cemetery. Find fresh-looking graves, and check no cameras are scoping you out. Dig a grave up and drop the corpse in. Who the fuck’s gonna notice that? Or better yet, invest in a funeral home.
Back in 2010, Two Tonys died after a short battle with pneumonia. Guess it’s not a bad way to go for somebody who spent their life killing people and making sure their remains are never found.
If you want to read more of Two Tonys’ horrific stories then fortunately for you they live on through the books of Shaun Attwood, which can be found here.
