The 6 Worst Ways People Made Money (Includes Boiling Kids)

... and some of her clients had very ... particular tastes.

What a destitute population most likely to trip face-first into a puddle of tuberculosis needed more than anything was hope, and Marti happily sold it to them: She made miracle potions that promised to do everything from improving your love life to making you practically immortal.

And here's the catch: Marti's kidnapping business and Marti's witchcraft business were one and the same. Her potions were made by boiling down children. Probably the most popular concoction of all, the one that promised immortality, was nothing more than the fresh blood of an 8-year-old. Marti wasn't above partaking of that one herself, earning her the nickname the Vampire of Barcelona.

Her little artisanal apothecary went out of business in 1912, when a neighbor spotted Teresita Guitart Congost, the latest in a long line of kidnapping victims, peeking out of a window in Marti's flat. Police stormed the apartment, rescued Teresita, and whisked Marti off to jail. Teresita reported that Marti had kept her fed by forcing her to cannibalize other children. Marti died prior to sentencing -- the cause of death was either terminal uterine cancer or a terminal mob of angry fellow inmates, depending on who you ask and how literally you believe karma should be applied.

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Real, real low.

Because she never planned to give the babies back, find them loving homes, or even so much as feed them. She simply tossed them in a room to starve to death (or worse) and hired a crooked doctor named Shiro Nakayama to write up fake death certificates, in case authorities became suspicious. It's estimated that the duo was responsible for the deaths of as many as 169 newborns in their "baby farming" scheme, which is a term we could have died without knowing.

Ishikawa's crops dried up in 1948, when the police discovered a literal pile of dead babies and traced the bodies to Kotobuki Hospital. She and her cohorts were arrested and served four years in prison. That's not a typo. Four.

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When it appeared that the jig might be up, the Copelands fired their faithful farmhand -- by "blast him in the back of the head with a rifle" -- and headed back to Springfield to start the process all over again.

Eventually they were apprehended and sentenced to life in prison. When the feds scoured the Copelands' farm during their investigation, they discovered the remains of five men -- four buried in the dirt floors of barns, and one tied to a concrete block and dropped into a well. In the house, they found a patchwork quilt that Faye had been sewing from strips of their victims' clothing, because you can take the murderer out of the grandma, but you can't take the grandma out of the murderer.

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Enter doctors Janusz Kuklinski and Pawel Wasilewski, who had a comfortable little skin-hunting racket going with a local group of undertakers back in the '90s. So comfortable, in fact, that they soon brought paramedics Karol Banas and Andrzej Nowocien into the fold.

Once the newcomers got a taste of that sweet, sweet corpse money, it didn't take them long to realize that the surest way to increase their proceeds was to increase their output. So they began taking matters into their own hands, driving around the block a few extra times with dying patients in tow, or even speeding up the process by injecting them with literally heart-stopping amounts of muscle relaxant.

The Polish media blew the scandal wide open in 2002, leading to a five-year investigation and trial that ended with Kuklinski and Wasilewski being sentenced to six and five years in prison, respectively, while Banas was sentenced to 25 years and Nowocien was awarded a life sentence. He later boasted to his cellmate that he should have been given "a medal by the national health system in view of the number of old people he had taken off its hands." Most disturbingly of all, it appears the foursome was just the tip of an iceberg consisting of more than 40 medical professionals and undertakers who had been carrying on a widespread skin-hunting scheme for more than two decades.

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Obviously, this posed a problem for the Panama Railroad Company. Never let it be said, however, that the PRC didn't know how to turn life's lemons into history's most ghastly lemonade. You see, there was no shortage of medical schools that would pay top dollar for cadavers on which to hone their students' skills. Thus opened a whole new revenue stream for the PRC: The company pickled the corpses of its countless fallen workers in wooden barrels, then shipped them off for med students to pry open like some kind of horrific Kinder Egg.

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Courtney targeted cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy, because life and pharmaceutical pricing hadn't already fucked them quite enough. Whenever Courtney filled a prescription for chemotherapy drugs like Taxol and Gemzar, he first diluted them with a hefty dose of purified water, thereby earning himself a quick couple hundred bucks per dose. It's estimated that in the nearly 12 years Courtney was carrying on his scheme, he diluted 98,000 prescriptions, affecting 4,200 patients. While his patients died in their beds, wondering why their medication wasn't working, Courtney was out tooling around in his Mercedes, buying his wife diamond rings, and donating a cool million to his church -- hey, that should offset all the evil, right? It's such a nice, round figure.

Of course, Courtney being a pharmacist and not an accountant, his ledgers didn't make a whole lot of sense (namely, he was selling a shit-ton more drugs than he was buying). Investigations into his books led to investigations into the medicine itself, and it quickly came to light that prescriptions procured from Courtney's pharmacy were about as effective as Facebook likes. He was slapped with a $2.2 billion judgment and a 30-year sentence in the big house, where presumably even convicted murderers think he's "kind of a dick."

Also check out The 6 Most Clueless Assholes To Ever Exploit Tragedies and The 8 Most Shameless Attempts to Cash In On 9/11.

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