The 10 Most Horrible Real-Life Bosses

Here at Complex, we’re all for a little girl-on-girl smooching, but let’s not forget about tact. Unfortunately for then-Vogue publisher Richard Beckman in 1999, he totally neglected discretion of any kind in his attempt to get two female employees to lock lips.

During a staff meeting, Beckman wanted advertisement executive Carol Matthews to kiss the magazine’s international fashion director, Emily Jahncke Davis, which, presumably, neither one of the women wanted to do. But that didn’t stop Beckman, acting quite thirsty for some action, from smashing Matthews’ face into Davis’ and breaking the former’s nose in the process.

It’s never OK to steal from a boss; not only will you lose your job, but you’ll also have a permanent stain on your record, thus tainting any chances of obtaining future employment. That is, of course, if you work a regular nine-to-five somewhere, and you’re not employed by a ruthless drug lord of Pablo Escobar’s caliber.

We can’t imagine that it was much fun to work for the Colombian narcotics kingpin even if you kept your nose clean and followed the boss’s orders; however, pissing a check-writer like Escobar off is enough to ruin anyone’s day, and life.

As the story goes, Escobar punished a servant for stealing silverware from him by having him tied up and thrown in the swimming pool to drown—in front of partygoers at his estate—as a message to his other workers. Personally, we’d prefer a pink slip.

For such a beautiful woman, Naomi Campbell is one hell of a psycho freak. At this point, accepting a job under the infamous supermodel’s employ is akin to signing up for an S&M session, only her physical abuse doesn’t come with any twisted sexual thrills—the shit just hurts. A lot.

When it comes to her assistants and other assorted subordinates, Campbell oversees with an iron fist, as well as her mobile weaponry. First, in 2000, the English beauty pled guilty to beating her assistant with a cell phone; years later, a housekeeper claimed that Campbell kicked and slapped her silly, before another housekeeper said that the model tossed a Blackberry at her face. And then another assistant accused Campbell of using her Blackberry as a face-masher.

The moral of the story here: Don’t work for Naomi Campbell, and, if you’re foolish enough to do so, pray that she never invests in an iPad, a.k.a. a Blackberry on steroids.

Apparently, female primates can have fetishes for fleshy knockers. At least that’s what Francine “Penny” Paterson, trainer of celebrity gorilla Koko, and president of The Gorilla Foundation, believed. Back in 2004, Paterson, seemingly hoping to promote beastiality, tried to force two of her female employees to flash their breasts in front of Koko; after the workers, names Nancy Alperin and Kendra Keller, refused to reveal any nip to the famous gorilla, they were both fired, which prompted a $1 million lawsuit, and, we’re guessing, tons of uproarious laughter inside the judge’s chamber.

In Keller’s formal complaint, she stated that Patterson once said, directly to Koko, “You see my nipples all the time. You are probably bored with my nipples. You need to see new nipples. I will turn my back so Kendra can show you her nipples.” Maybe Koko had a thing for areolas specifically; whatever the case, Patterson deserves kudos for reimagining the notion of “sexual harassment.” She’s a sick bastard, sure, but she’s certainly not conventional.

Here’s one massage parlor without any happy endings. In January 2010, Alex Campbell, small-time owner of the Day And Night Spa, in Mount Prospect, Illinois, barreled headfirst into a shit-storm of legal turmoil. Campbell, along with a younger female employee, were found guilty of attempted extortion, after former female employees, who were also illegal immigrants, claimed that Campbell forced the girls to shell out upwards of $10,000 for him to take care of their citizenship situation.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Campbell was also attacked for his sexual dysfunctions, basically turning an already awful employer into a tyrannical pervert. Campbell forced the ladies to “brand” themselves with horseshoe tattoos, some of which included the number “917,” for his birthday (September 17). And, inside his bedroom, he demanded sex and videotaped one of the immigrant workers knocking boots with another female against her will. And, no, those tapes haven’t leaked online, sickos.

Now here’s a biopic we’d love to see. Though his story isn’t widely known outside of the history teacher circuit, steel producer Henry Clay Frick and his cold-blooded business practices sparked all kinds of mayhem back in 1892. That year, leaders of a union that worked under Frick tried negotiating for a raise, but Frick, who was quite the dick, countered with a 22-percent pay cut.

Before hiring workers who’d do the job for mere pennies, Frick paid for a barbed wire fence to be built around his plant, locking the disgruntled union members out. Then, to add potential physical damage to insult, he erected sniper towers all around the plant, each armed with powerful cannons that shot ferocious water streams and, in some cases, piping-hot liquids.

Pretty bad, right? But, wait…it gets worse. Once the low-pay workers started, the union members started picketing outside of Frick’s plant. Frick’s response: sending hundreds of armed mercenaries into the crowd, resulting in gunfire, cannonball deployment, and several casualties. Soon after, an assassin shot Frick twice in the neck, though, in true G style, Frick shrugged the flesh-wounds off and NFL-tackled the shooter. Oh, yeah, and he ultimately survived. Sounds a bit like the plot of Horrible Bosses, only, in Frick’s version, the bad guy wins.

And you thought work-related retreats were a drag. In the 1880s, railroad titan George Pullman took his dreams of becoming a super-boss way too far, nudging all of his employees to move into a 4,000-acre stretch of land that the megalomaniac purchased and made into his own, self-ran town. For his employees, the commutes to and from work were made much easier, no doubt, but that’s where the perks ended.

Pullman, in real tyrant fashion, ran the town with a shitload of strict rules and swift action against insubordination. His workers, having unknowingly relocated into domestic prison, weren’t allowed to meet publicly or read newspapers; for currency, they were only permitted to spend Pullman Scrips, which had the financial value of Monopoly cash outside of the town’s perimeters; and, perhaps sickest of all, Pullman would send goons into homes unannounced to make sure each of the houses was fresh and clean, kicking the dirtier residents out of dodge without a chance to tidy up.

Unsurprisingly, Pullman’s employees eventually went on strike in 1894, historically known as the Pullman Strike, during which federal troops were sent in to dissuade the violence. But here’s the best part: After Pullman died of a heart attack in 1897, his body was buried in a coffin fastened with lead, which was placed inside a concrete vault, just so still pissed-off former workers couldn’t desecrate his remains. Even in death, George Pullman was a douche.

When you clean up shit for a living, any boss must be a horrible one; regardless of how pleasant he or she is, you’re still picking up after other people’s messes as a means of financial gain. But for Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, their boss, and the city’s mayor, Henry Loeb, was an asshole of the highest order.

Stuck on his racist power trip, Loeb punished his mostly black sanitation workforce with ridiculous rules such as allotting a mere 15 minutes for lunch and not allowing them to stand under trees when the sun became too overbearing. He also refused to listen to complaints about the employees’ run-down and problematic garbage trucks, an ongoing neglect on Loeb’s part that eventually led to two guys getting crushed to death and compacted into human garbage.

A massive sanitation strike went down after the fact, though Loeb, ever the prick, ordered cops to douse the protesters with tear gas and mace, even after the city council had come to an agreement with the workers. Needless to say, the shit had hit the fan.

William Bryant and Francis May, the English entrepreneurs behind the Bryant and May Match Company, definitely weren’t equal opportunity employers; though, men back in the 1860’s were no doubt fine with the lack of gender neutrality. To fill their factory, Bryant and May hired only teenage females, impoverished young ladies who were too desperate and afraid to stand up for themselves.

Since they were such English gentlemen, Bryant and May imposed a bunch of obnoxious restrictions on their female underlings, such as fines every time a girl would wipe tears off her eyes, which the bosses said was to protect their precious machinery from being tainted by tears. Also, the girls couldn’t take bathroom breaks, and employees were actually fired if their hands were torn apart by the machines.

Even worse, Bryant and May were cheapskates. Looking to cut their costs, they started using a less expensive phosphor to make their matches, a hazardous type that caused workers to suffer “phossy jaw,” which referred to workers who inhaled the new phosphor’s fumes and felt their jaw bones begin to rot away. Anything to save a buck, right?

How evil could a couple of chaps who distribute ladies’ blouses be, really? Possibly a bit suspect, yes, but horrific? One would think not, but that’s only if the names Max Blanck and Isaac Harris don’t ring any bells, and if the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory inferno of 1911 is an anonymous historical blip. If so, you’re clearly not up on your New York City back-stories.

Blanck and Harris hired a predominantly female staff of grunt workers, mostly down-and-out immigrants, and paid them merely six bucks a week for grueling manual labor. For that alone, they were pure scum; yet, meager payment is nothing compared to the beatings Blanck and Harris would hire goons to administer upon ladies who squawked about unfair conditions.

And then there was the duo’s lame-brained strategy to combat inter-staff robberies. Their plan: locking the main exit from the outside. And, unfortunately, that literally backfired on Blanck and Harris once a fire broke out inside their factory, trapping their workers, killing 146 employees, and ultimately going down in history as one of NYC’s worst blazes. Blanck and Harris, meanwhile, have earned an inarguable “horrible bosses” legacy. And two spiked seats somewhere in hell.