q1903

Allen Dorfman was shot twice in the head in a parking lot in Lincolnwood, Illinois, on January 20, 1983. He was dead before he hit the pavement. Most people who have seen the film Casino believe they know who he was. They do not. The movie reduced Dorfman to a background figure — a man … Read more

The final scene of "Goodfellas" shows Henry Hill standing outside a suburban house in a bathrobe, complaining that he can no longer get decent pasta. The credits roll, and audiences are left with a comfortable conclusion: he lost the mob life, but at least he got out alive. The real ending was far different. It … Read more

On the night of June 11, 1970, a made man walked into a Queens bar to celebrate his freedom after eight years in federal prison. By midnight, he had been beaten unconscious, stuffed into the trunk of a car, and buried in a shallow grave upstate. Most people know this story through Goodfellas. In the … Read more

On the afternoon of October 22, 1934, in a cornfield in Columbiana County, Ohio, a man went down running. Nine lawmen had fired at him. He fell, got up, ran a few more yards, and went down for good. He was still alive when they reached him. He died in that field. They drove the … Read more

In October 1931, a federal court bailiff walked a corridor in Chicago carrying a list of names. Those names belonged to the men who would decide Al Capone's fate that morning. Capone's organization had possessed the list for weeks. His people had visited the addresses. Thousand-dollar bills had changed hands, roughly $21,000 per juror in … Read more

On October 11, 2004, two backhoes began cutting slowly into a vacant lot off Ruby Street in a sunken neighborhood on the Brooklyn-Queens border known as the Hole, a few minutes from Kennedy Airport. Around them, FBI agents in yellow rubber boots raked through the dirt by hand while cadaver dogs worked the edges. They … Read more

On the morning of April 19, 1951, a woman walking through the tall marsh grass near Avenue Y and East 72nd Street in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, found a man lying face down in the dirt. She had found a body on almost the same spot two years earlier, so she knew what she was looking … Read more