Greediest people of all time

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Marcus Licinius Crassus, 115 BC - 53 BC

Crassus didn't need foreclosure proceedings to claim his real estate. This Roman general and supporter of Julius Caeser routinely increased his property holdings during 'fire sales.' During the city's occasional fires, he would arrive with his soldiers at a home that interested him and offer to buy the burning property for a song. Once the transaction was done, he’d put his minions to work dousing the flames. Crassus is depicted here ransacking the Temple of Jerusalem.

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Genghis Khan, 1162 -1227

He wanted to own the whole world, and came closer to accomplishing that than anybody else, before or since. After his death, his kingdom stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Adriatic Sea.

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Pope Sixtus IV, 1471

This pope (seated) greatly enriched himself and his top cardinals (who may have been his sons) by licensing and taxing brothels and claiming he could retroactively get the troubled souls of dead people into heaven by selling indulgences to their living relatives. Oh, and he sanctioned the Spanish Inquisition, too.

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William H. Vanderbilt, 1821-1884

He inherited vast wealth, built it into a whole lot more and lacked any sense of noblesse oblige. Arguably the most wealthy and powerful man of his time, he controlled the world's largest railroad network and became notorious for saying: 'The public be damned!... I don't take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody but our own.'      

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William M. “Boss” Tweed, 1823-1878

One of the original fat cats, Tweed weighed in at almost 300 pounds. Tweed used his Tammany Hall political machine to separate New York taxpayers from as much as $200 million (roughly $8 billion in 2009 dollars). His avarice was regularly lampooned in political cartoons of the day like this one by Thomas Nast.