As a reporter, you meet a lot of famous people.
A few are scary; I met three…fortunately, one was already dead.
Big Man
I knew little about Ugandan strong man Yoweri Museveni when I met him in 2004.
The occasion was the quadrennial assembly of the United Nations Trade and Development Agency (UNCTAD), of which redoubtable Brazilian diplomat Rubens Ricupero was then Secretary-General. The conference venue was São Paulo.
I was working the event for Associated Press when we received an “urgent” from the AP Bureau in the Ugandan capital of Kampala indicating that the land-locked African country was being “invaded” by a Sudanese guerrilla group known as the Janjaweed. The message went on to say that the Ugandan Foreign Ministry had declined comment, alleging that “only the President” could offer a statement and he was attending a conference in far-off Brazil.
Reading the missive, one felt the breathless haste of the AP correspondent in Kampala and the Ugandan Foreign Ministry spokesman’s delight in having frustrated an international press organization.
The AP would show him a thing or two!
As senior reporter on site, I drew the assignment.
I located Museveni on the schedule. I listened to his folksy speech, full of what Shakespeare called “wise saws and modern instances.” I followed his entourage out of the plenary. Approaching the Green Room, I was joined by a Reuters reporter, who must have received the same demanding message from his bureau in Kampala. It was friendly competition.
We were greeted by a pair of Museveni aides; they proved helpful. One gestured toward a frosted glass partition. “The President will receive you,” he intoned. Through the frosted glass, we could make out the corpulent but mobile outline of Yoweri Museveni and another, leaner figure. Voices were raised; fingers wagged. Things were not going well for the thin man.
“It will be just a few minutes,” the aide told us.
I took advantage of the short interval. Confessing limited knowledge of contemporary Uganda, I asked about Museveni’s path to power.
The aide told me.
In a few strokes, delivered in clipped, Oxford-accented English, the aide sketched a tale of appalling atrocities perpetrated by dictator Idi Amin, violent uprisings, guerrilla wars, desperate imprisonments and shocking betrayals. Bloated bodies floated down the White Nile; refugees spilled into fetid camps; blood ran down the streets in rivers. But the entire sordid story was related in the most matter-of-fact of tones, as if quoting from a travel brochure.
When the aides became momentarily engaged with other matters, I turned to my colleague and whispered, “We’re about to meet a mass killer.”
And we were not disappointed.
Politicians operating at the highest levels protect themselves from snoopy reporters with layers of bodyguards, bureaucrats and hacks but, if you manage to pierce the shell, you’ll be well received. Smiling is their stock in trade. But Yoweri Museveni was not an ordinary politician; he was a ruthless guerrilla fighter who had become an entrenched dictator.
Presently, we found ourselves on the other side of the frosted glass. Museveni was dressed in a tweedy suit and wore a colorful tie. He reminded me of a dour version of B.B. King.
The President was not pleased to see us. Plainly, he had no wish to discuss the Janjaweed. He was dismissive of what he called “a minor border incident” involving guerrilla fighters who would be “brushed away” by Ugandan forces like so many pesky flies. As a reporter, I sensed a certain tendency to slay the messenger. We asked a couple of follow-up questions and were “brushed away” ourselves as efficiently as the Janjaweed fighters and the White Nile flies.
I filed the story—not a headliner but satisfactory. The incident offered a glimpse of the Big Man phenomenon, prevalent even now in many parts of the world. As of this writing (2026), Museveni, at 81, is still President of Uganda, thanks to throttling of the press and suppression of opposition.
Big man, bad impression.
Made Man
Tommaso Buscetta turned Mafia folklore on its head—he started out as an organized crime captain, turned traitor, and, despite omertà, The Godfather and Joe Valachi, still ended up on top. Mario Puzzo couldn’t have come up with a more compelling story line.
I spoke to Buscetta in 1984; he didn’t speak to me.
The occasion was an extradition hearing in São Paulo, where I was United Press International correspondent. Buscetta had been picked up by Brazilian Federal Police while living in São Paulo under an assumed name. Italy wanted him.
The courtroom was crowded with lawyers, gawkers and print and broadcast journalists. Everyone stood except the judge. There was little decorum, no barriers, only a few chairs and lots of cables and lights.
Buscetta, bound in chains at the wrists and ankles, answered questions put by attorneys for both sides. His Portuguese was passable.
The judge called a short recess, stepped down from the bench and mingled in the general hub-bub. A couple of court employees distributed tepid coffee in little plastic cups.
No one spoke to Buscetta, who shuffled to the back of the room, unaided and unaccompanied. He sat down on a wooden bench, an oil painting of a famous jurist hanging over his head. All the doors to the courtroom were wide open. The atmosphere was more like a cocktail party than a hearing. Buscetta could have shuffled into the hall and down the stairs to the street and hailed a cab. Instead, he sat on the wooden bench—nobody saying a thing to him—like a wallflower…even though it was his party.
I approached him. I told him, in Portuguese, that my name was “Thomas” too. Buscetta looked up at me. He held my gaze. He was utterly silent. He offered no hint of either acknowledgment or disdain. He just looked at me. No gathering smile, no snarl, no emotional expression of any kind. I asked if he would answer a question or two. Nothing. I tried English. No change, just the icy stare.
Finally, I desisted. I hadn’t known much about Buscetta before I tried to talk to him. Now, I knew all I needed.
Buscetta was extradited, first to Italy and then to the United States. In both countries, he turned state’s evidence, something almost unheard of for a Sicilian-born Mafioso up to that time. His testimony in the U.S. Pizza Connection Trial led to 18 convictions. In Italy, at the 1986-87 Maxi Trial, Buscetta helped convict 338 Mafia soldiers, captains, and capos.
For his pains, Buscetta was given a broad grant of immunity and accepted into the U.S. Witness Protection Program.
But the story didn’t end there.
A few years later, Buscetta was spotted on a swank cruise ship. A Brazilian tourist recognized him and, furtively, took his picture, which circulated in a São Paulo magazine. This time it really was a cocktail party. The rumor was that Buscetta had subjected himself to plastic surgery. If so, it hadn’t worked; he was the same old Tommaso, enjoying wine, women, and at least some of the money from his previous crime career.
The photo caught him smiling. But I knew better—he was as cold-blooded as a lizard.
Tommaso Buscetta died of cancer in 2000 at age 71.
Dead Man
Josef Mengele was one of the most despicable human beings of all time.
I met him—or what remained of him—in 1985.
Mengele was a monster. At age 32 in 1943, the doctor turned SS officer became chief of medicine at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland. There, he decided which arriving prisoners would die immediately in the gas chambers and which would be worked to death at the site’s labor camp. He was dubbed the Angel of Death by colleagues. He also conducted gruesome “medical experiments”– surgeries without anesthesia, acid drops to the eyes, untested drugs—often employing children as lab subjects. Photos from the time show a young man with swept-back hair and crooked teeth set in a cock-sure grin. I would see that grin myself one day.
After the war, Mengele escaped, first to Argentina and eventually to Brazil, where he died in a drowning incident in 1979.
Investigations by West German and, later, Brazilian Police uncovered the story of Mengele’s life in Brazil, including his burial under an assumed name in a cemetery near São Paulo.
It became news when investigators obtained a court order to exhume his body.
I was UPI São Paulo correspondent. I had an on-call cab driver named Gustavo. Together, we rushed the 30 kilometers to the Rosário Cemetery in the São Paulo suburb of Embu. At the site, I got lucky. Officials had already gathered; grave-diggers were poised but there were few reporters. I sat down on the grass…right next to the plot set aside for one Wolfgang Gerhard but actually containing the remains of the world’s most wanted war criminal. No one hassled me, not the cops, not the coroner, not even the press photographers who gradually crowded in over the next half hour.
Coroner José Antônio de Mello gave a signal. The grave diggers started shoveling. Mello lugged a long plastic tub to the lip of the gravesite. He plopped it down right in front of me. I helped him settle it in the grass.
Soon, the dirt piled up; then a thud as shovels hit the lid of the wooden coffin; then clods and splinters were chucked up from the widening hole; finally, the coroner began tossing items of clothing—a shoe, a belt—and then bones and bone fragments into the plastic tub. They clicked and slid along the pale surface as I watched. The form of Josef Mengele slowly took shape before my eyes. It gained its full contours when the coroner threw Mengele’s skull into the tub. I was the second person that day, after Dr. Mello, to see that skull and to appraise its twisted grin. I felt a strange pride, the pride of the living, the pride of the just.
After weeks of deliberation, an international panel of forensic experts declared the Embu remains to be those of Josef Mengele. DNA analysis confirmed that finding in 1992.
Brazil offered to remit the remains to Mengele’s family in Germany. The family declined. The remains are still held by the São Paulo Morgue. Occasionally, Mengele’s skeleton is trundled out for use by students…as an aid in medical experiments.
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
Photo Credits: Paul Morse, whitehouse.gov; https://www.reddit.com/r/Mafia/comments/l3hvsw/tommaso_buscetta_or_don_masino_or_the_boss_of_two/; Album_Hocker
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