The 5 Craziest Black Sheep from Famous Families

The early '70s were a good time to be a wealthy heir from one of the Motor City's most prominent DNA pools, the Fords. Japan hadn't quite started kicking fuel-inefficient butt yet, and plenty of drugs and marginal religions were happy to relieve those kids of their trust funds.

Benson Ford Jr. and Alfred "Alfie" Ford are great-grandsons of Henry. Benson was born to the Ford Motor Company's top shareholder. Alfie's maternal grandfather was the famed Edsel, but his dad was ALSO a Ford from a chemical manufacturing offshoot of the clan. That's a lot of Ford in one man. Too much. Too much Ford.

Benson (who certainly became an even greater embarrassment once the Soap butler-turned-governor character came into existence) took the low road of party boy and hot rod enthusiast. He was famously slighted in his father's will, which left him plenty of money, but didn't allow him any voting rights in connection with his Ford stock, probably so he couldn't wield his shareholder power to take over the company and insist on the production of nothing but souped-up Model-Ts run on amphetamines. This didn't sit well with Benson. He started suing the hell out of everyone and took to wearing hidden wires at family functions. He also alluded to a posse that was ready to kill to have him placed on the Ford board of directors. Probably a hot rod gang -- like the gang in the 1958 AIP film Hot Rod Gang.

But that whole agenda got sidetracked when Benson was busted at the San Francisco airport with pockets stuffed full of hash and coke. And also when people started suing the hell out of him for shady dealings. Because people will still do business with a screwed-up kid who took 10 years to finish college as long as he has a famous name.

Alfie, on the other hand, let the sun shine in and joined the Hare Krishnas. He claims George Harrison introduced him to orange sheets and sitars, but it could just be that he wanted to answer the age-old question, "How can I still get attention and out-crazy my wiretapping, hot-rod-gang-leading, drug-addicted asshole cousin?" In pursuit of that answer, Alfie changed his name to "Ambarish Das," which, while translating to "servant of Krishna," phonetically sounds very much like "embarrass us" and therefore proves our point.

Eventually Alfie purchased and refurbished a Detroit mansion once owned by the founder of Cadillac and transformed it into a sprawling Krishna temple and cultural center. Further twisting the knife into his family's gut, he embarked on this project in cahoots with fellow Krishna devotee Lisa Reuther, daughter of former United Auto Workers union head and Ford nemesis Walter Reuther. It was like cats and dogs -- living together! A bunch of bald cats and dogs!

Gross!

Alfie likes to give away his vast wealth to Krishna causes, and Krishnas are known for luring all comers into their temples with free vegetarian suppers. So that means he's probably the only Ford left in Detroit of any practical use. Joining him may be the city residents' only hope of survival.

As for Benson, the family eventually let those death threats be bygones and allowed him to crawl back into their good graces through a management trainee program in Ford's parts and service division, though it is unclear whether that path was strewn with hot-rod-gang-slain corpses.

While this ransom dance was going on, things with the actual kidnapping victim took a weird turn when photos surfaced of a beret-wearing, machine-gun-toting "Tania" (Patty rechristened herself after a communist revolutionary) assisting in an SLA bank holdup. It was claimed that she was a victim of Stockholm syndrome, where a captive eventually identifies with and becomes attached to her captor, and that she was brainwashed into participating. That may have initially been the case, but she really ran with this refreshing new persona for quite some time, far longer than most "syndrome" expiration dates. This led to her being sentenced to seven years in prison (which was cut short by President Carter before she served out two years because, hey, that's what famous families are for).

But for all of Patty's criminal revolutionary play-acting, perhaps her most scandalous pursuit was to come after she did her time. In the late '80s she took up acting for real and began appearing in a number of John Waters' films. Remember, grandfather William Randolph Hearst was Citizen Kane, Orson Welles' inspiration for what many consider to be the greatest film of all time. And his heir joined the acting stable of a director perhaps best known at that time for filming an obese transvestite eating fresh dog poop on camera.

Thus is the career of Dorothy Hulseman, stage name Dora Hall and wife of Solo Cup Company founder Leo Hulseman. Dora developed a late-in-life ambition to be a singing sensation and recorded over 20 albums containing covers of then-current hits like "King of the Road" and "These Boots Are Made for Walkin.'"

What sets Dora apart in this list is that these banana-land ideas were actually encouraged and financed by her husband. While Dora wasn't an heiress, she must have been mortifying to every employee whose personal identity was somehow wrapped up in the public image of the disposable cup empire.

Was it a problem that record labels weren't really looking to sign the next Mrs. Miller? Nope! Her records were given away as Solo Cup premiums, allowing her music to be enjoyed by every family that would rather ditch a crumpled cup out a car window than wash one extra glass.

But our songstress wasn't content to merely have a string of LPs and singles attainable with proofs of purchase. She also had delusions of television stardom! Lucky for her, her husband also happened to own a production company, allowing Dora to headline several "television specials" of the comedy/variety nature. These featured honest-to-goodness celebrity guests such as Frank Sinatra Jr. and Scatman Crothers, who obviously just pocketed their massive paychecks and did whatever the grinning old lady in the sequined bowler hat told them to do.

Granted, it certainly didn't look good, particularly considering that planes weren't supposed to be in U.S. airspace at all. But imagine for a moment if members of Walmart's Walton family were stuck in Saudi Arabia after one of their spawn grew himself a ZZ Top beard, assembled a personal army, and started murdering thousands. Someone would have been hauling their fabulously wealthy butts out of that country with a quickness.

Saudi Binladin Group is the largest construction company on the planet, with an annual revenue of $30 billion. To put that into perspective, Nike made $24 billion last year. To put it into even more perspective, holy shit.

It's not just about revenue; the Saudi Binladin Group must have some serious brand loyalty if they haven't bothered to scrub their name and logo by now. In a twist of horrible but lucrative irony, the company is currently erecting the tallest building in the world -- Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Tower, which is supposed to cost a cool $1.23 billion. It will likely go over budget into numbers that don't exist because they're so high that the Binladin Group still needs to build them.

Osama, who had already been disowned by the early 1990s, had 53 brothers and sisters. And with all the cousins and "special uncles" thrown in, it's really more like a tribe than a family. That's not to say they're all squeaky clean, but it looks like they are far more interested in making a buck than making threatening videotapes in caves.

As reviled as the name "bin Laden" has become, it's difficult to remember that it is attached to a sprawling bunch of people, many of them insanely rich and of great privilege, who, like their American counterparts, happened to have a black sheep in their midst. Except that particular black sheep didn't just embarrass them, but happened to provoke the War on Terror.