Changing Your Name With a Criminal Record

Fraud is not the only reason criminals are known by fabricated names – sometimes a bad guy’s appearance or reputation inspires his new title.
One of the few legal restrictions on changing your name is that you may not change it to help commit fraud. An unscrupulous person might want to assume false names to enable him to transfer property under one name, and then collect it under another. Then, police will have difficulty identifying the con because his new name makes him harder to identify. But some enterprising criminals gain new names for more colorful reasons.

The reputation a criminal develops among thieves can influence a new nickname. For instance, a budding offender might lack an alias because his peers do not know who he is. He basically lacks any criminal reputation among the underworld. After accomplishing various crimes, a criminal might assume a mundane alias like “John Baker” to help avoid arrest. Such an alias might not attract much respect from fellow offenders, but it shows that the criminal has achieved some recognition, which increases if police record the alias in their files next to his real name. Eventually, if someone is successful enough in his illicit endeavors, other criminals might give him a unique alias that spreads throughout the underworld. For example, if a getaway driver becomes very successful at his work, he might earn the nickname “Leadfoot” to signify his heavy use of the accelerator to speed away from robberies. Some criminal nicknames are simply based on appearance, like Pretty Boy Floyd’s (a bank robber during the 1920s and 1930s, whose real name was Charles Floyd). The name derives from a bank employee’s description of Floyd to the police after a robbery, telling them Floyd was “a mere boy [] a pretty boy.” Apparently a super serious tough guy, Floyd hated this moniker.

General trends in criminal nicknames may even coincide with trends in their field of crime. We all know the horror stories associated with drug cartel activity in Mexico – reports of 10, 20, or 50 rivals found tortured and butchered are increasingly common. Are cartel members’ names changing to reflect this brutality? In a less violent era, Mexican drug cartel leaders earned monikers that were not associated with violence. One drug lord whose given name was Amado Carrillo Fuentes earned the nickname “Lord of the Skies” after amassing a fleet of Boeing jets to transport tons of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico. More recently, cartel leaders and members are assuming or earning titles that indicate their violent methods. For example, Baltazar Saucedo Estrada, a member of the powerful, ruthless Zetas drug cartel, garnered the name “The Dog Killer.” Estrada allegedly masterminded the 2011 Monterrey Casino attack that left 52 people dead after gang members shot several people and set the building ablaze. Another cartel associate, known simply as “The Pig,” won the name because of the crude form of violence he employed. Today, Mexican cartel leaders’ aliases seem to reflect the central role of violence in their operations rather than their work in the drug business, as past aliases had.