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On April 12, 1968, Harlem racketeer Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson walked into a basement restaurant in Greenwich Village to settle a territorial dispute with Carmine Tessio, a mob figure who controlled much of lower Manhattan. The two men had negotiated before, but the meeting took a turn when Tessio, trying to pressure Johnson into ceding territory, … Read more

George Armstrong Custer was not found the way the public was told he was. When his body was discovered on the battlefield, he was stripped to his socks, leaning against fallen soldiers as if resting. He had been shot in the chest and head. His brother Tom lay nearby, disemboweled and scalped. The official story … Read more

A Union general stood on a rise at Spotsylvania Court House, mocking his men for flinching under sniper fire. “They couldn’t hit an elephant from that distance,” he said. Ten seconds later, he was dead, struck in the face by a bullet fired from a rifle he never saw, by a man he never knew … Read more

On the morning of July 3, 1863, Confederate General James Longstreet stood on a low ridge near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, looked across roughly a mile of open farmland, and told his commanding officer what no one wanted to hear. He said the plan before them would fail. Not that it might fail, or that it carried … Read more

In June 1876, a former sergeant of the Seventh Cavalry, Stannis Loss Roy, set down his recollections of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. His account, written in 1910, offers a rare enlisted man’s perspective on the desperate fight that became one of the most infamous defeats in American military history. Roy’s narrative begins on … Read more

One day after Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox, James Longstreet stood in the yard outside the McLean house and watched Ulysses Grant walk toward him. The Confederate general had spent four years trying to kill Grant’s soldiers, and had nearly died himself less than a year earlier when he was shot through … Read more

For over four decades, the disappearance of Margaret and Elizabeth Hensley from their home near Dante, Virginia, was a mystery relegated to local legend. That changed in 1961, when road workers expanding what is now Route 58 unearthed a metal box containing the sisters’ personal effects, prompting a renewed investigation into a case that had … Read more