q1903

Deep in the southern Appalachian range, there is a place where the creek water runs the color of rust and the trees grow at angles that do not seem logical from a distance. The ridgeline curves inward like the spine of a creature curling around itself to protect something. The locals have a name for … Read more

Dominic Napolitano was born in Brooklyn in 1930 and came up the ordinary way — a petty thief who kept climbing until he reached middle management in a crime family. That is the level that actually runs the operation day to day. By 1981, he had it all working. He ran one of the best … Read more

On May 27, 1980, a Lucchese crime family earner sat down across a table from a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn and began to talk. He had spent 25 years working for Paul Vario's crew, and by the rules he grew up on, the man across that table was the enemy. A month earlier, narcotics agents … Read more

On June 23, 1986, a farmer named Michael Kins was walking his soybean rows outside Enos, Indiana, when his foot sank into soft earth. He assumed he had found a dead deer. He kept digging. What he pulled from the dirt was far worse: two human bodies stripped to their underwear, their faces beaten beyond … Read more

Angelo LaPietra died on March 28, 1999, at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois. He was 78 years old. His wife Mildred sat nearby, along with his daughter Joanne, his son Angelo Jr., three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. The machines beeped, then they didn't. One of the most feared men in the … Read more

On April 2, 1994, inside the security housing unit at Corcoran State Prison in California, four inmates were released into a small, high-walled concrete exercise yard. Two belonged to one gang faction. Two belonged to a bitter rival faction. The correctional officers in the control booth knew this, because they controlled the yard lists and … Read more