t1703

Frank Costello, the soft-spoken Calabrian immigrant who built the modern American Mafia into a corporate empire of cash, favors and political influence, and who survived a point-blank assassination attempt in his own apartment lobby that would go on to inspire the character of Don Vito Corleone, died of a heart attack at his Central Park … Read more

Russell Bufalino, the feared and enigmatic Mafia boss who allegedly ordered the murder of Jimmy Hoffa and controlled one of America’s most powerful crime families for 35 years, died quietly in his hospital bed at Nesbitt Memorial Hospital in Kingston, Pennsylvania, on February 25, 1994, at the age of 90. His death came not from … Read more

CHICAGO — Al Capone, the most feared gangster in American history, controlled the police, the politicians, the judges, and every square inch of Chicago’s criminal underworld. But there was one man he would not touch. One man whose territory the Chicago Outfit avoided for nearly two decades. One man who made the most violent mob … Read more

ATLANTA — For 128 years, a single Victorian-era photograph sat in archives and private collections, its central figure—a pale-skinned, blonde-haired toddler seated in the lap of a Black mother—defying every attempt at explanation. Now, a Duke University researcher has solved the mystery, identifying the child as Clara Marie Washington, a Black girl born with complete … Read more

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A single studio photograph, catalogued and forgotten for more than a century, has shattered the accepted timeline of American freedom after the Civil War, revealing that a prosperous Black family posing proudly in 1890 Alabama was in fact living under assumed names while carrying the physical proof of recent bondage on their … Read more

CHARLESTON, S.C. — A single photograph, dismissed for more than a century as a routine Victorian portrait, has detonated a long-buried secret at the heart of the Civil War, revealing that three Black women posed not for vanity but for espionage, encoding military intelligence in their hands, their dresses, and their unflinching gaze. The discovery, … Read more

A single gesture, frozen for 124 years in a sepia-toned studio portrait, has shattered the historical consensus on how Black families survived the terror of the post-Reconstruction South, revealing a covert communication network that scholars believed had vanished with the end of the Civil War. The photograph, cataloged but largely forgotten in a climate-controlled drawer … Read more

A single gesture, frozen for 124 years in a sepia-toned studio portrait, has shattered the historical consensus on how Black families survived the terror of the post-Reconstruction South, revealing a covert communication network that scholars believed had vanished with the end of the Civil War. The photograph, cataloged but largely forgotten in a climate-controlled drawer … Read more

A historian examining a routine auction lot of Civil War-era photographs in Richmond, Virginia has uncovered a coded intelligence network run by three Black women whose identities and contributions were erased from history for more than 150 years. Dr. Amelia Grant, a 43-year-old professor of American history at Howard University, made the discovery in 2019 … Read more