Sandor Gosztony (19 April 1883-1929) was a Hungarian-born German gangster who was affiliated with the Berlin Mafia during the Weimar era. In September 1929, he carried out a series of murders of people associated with the film Demons of Passion while cloaked in Tristan Rot's film costume, and the papers nicknamed the cloaked killer "the Phantom". He was eventually captured by the Berlin Police and assassinated by Mafia bosses Edgar Kasabian and Walter Weintraub in retribution for his acts against their film project.
Biography[]
Sandor Gosztony was born in Hungary, the younger brother of Bela Gosztony. The two brothers fled the Hungarian Revolutions of 1918 and settled in Berlin, where they became major players in the Berlin Mafia by bootlegging 35,000 bottles of arrack a year during the 1920s. In 1929, the Gosztony brothers secretly switched out the arrack for cheap booze, leading to customers complaining to their boss Edgar Kasabian. Kasabian punished the Gosztony brothers by cutting out Sandor's tongue and feeding it to Bela, who initially thought it to be octopus before spitting it out on Kasabian hinting that it was his brother's tongue.
Bela and Sandor planned their revenge, and they decided to sabotage the film Demons of Passion, which was financed by Kasabian's Babelsberg Film Studio. The Gosztony brothers initially hired the lighting technician Felix Krempin to sabotage a spotlight above the stage, but he backed out upon discovering that they intended him to murder lead actress Betty Winter. Forced to do the work himself, Sandor stole one of lead actor Tristan Rot's cloak costumes before unscrewing the spotlight, leading to it falling on Winter during a musical rehearsal. Days later, Gosztony killed Krempin before detective Gereon Rath could give up the name of his employer.
Berlin Police ballistics expert Leopold Ulrich identified the Gosztony brothers as the perpetrators from the bullet used in Krempin's murder, and he blackmailed them into continuing to murder people associated with Demons of Passion in a patterned manner, while cultivating the image of the murderous "Phantom" who had already killed Winter and Krempin; he privately intended to frame Walter Weintraub for the murder as part of a social experiment to prove the power of forensic science. Sandor went on to murder Tilly Brooks in her dressing room and throw Vera Lohmann and Weintraub from the roof of the studio after draping Weintraub in a cloak identical to his, seemingly framing Weintraub for a "murder-suicide" attempt. Ulrich was later arrested while attempting to frame Rath for his planned murder of homicide department chief Ernst Gennat, and he confessed that he had helped the Gosztony brothers with their revenge plot against Kasabian in exchange for their help with his experiment.
Rath apprehended Gosztony after some resistance, but, as Gosztony was being loaded into a prison van, Kasabian and Weintraub bribed his police protection to turn a blind eye as they sprayed Gosztony with Thompson submachine gun fire, avenging the trouble he had caused.
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