In the summer of 1948, Harlem sweltered under a heat that made tempers short and the city feel dangerous. For Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, the heat was not the real problem. The real problem was a wind of change blowing down from the Italian neighborhoods, carrying a new kind of threat. The old guard of the … Read more
Gert Schramm was born on November 28, 1928, in Erfurt, the capital and largest city of Thuringia, then part of the Weimar Republic. His mother was Marianne Schramm, a white German woman. His father was Jack Branson, a black American engineer with a steel company from San Francisco who had come to Thuringia on a … Read more
Organized crime has always had its famous names, the ones that became shorthand for the American underworld. But behind the headlines were other men and women who lived by the same codes, made the same money, and took the same risks. When their time ran out, they slipped quietly into the cracks of history. Their … Read more
On the afternoon of October 22, 1934, a tired and filthy man sat down to eat in a farmhouse kitchen in eastern Ohio. His suit was ragged and his shirt was gray with dirt. He had been sleeping rough in the woods for two days, living on whatever he could find, covered in thistles and … Read more
Hélène Cordet was born Helen Foufounis in 1917, three and a half years before the boy who would one day become the Duke of Edinburgh. Both children belonged to families scattered by the collapse of the Greek monarchy, and both grew up in the borrowed villas and shared holidays of a displaced royalist circle. In … Read more
In the basement archive of the Greenwood County Historical Society, where the air smells of old paper and dust, genealogist James Mitchell was finishing a long day of research. The 38-year-old from Chicago had spent the morning examining a leatherbound ledger of property transfers from 1920 Mississippi, finding only routine transactions. At 4:30, with the … Read more
In August 1939, Harlem was a neighborhood that understood bad news arrived eventually. There was no point rushing it. That summer, the heat pressed down on the streets like a hand that refused to lift. Inside a barber shop on 135th Street, the air smelled of pomade, cigarette smoke, and something older — the kind … Read more
Helena Citronova was born on August 26, 1922, in Humenne, then part of Czechoslovakia. She was one of four children of Jewish parents. Her father was a cantor, and Helena loved not only to sing but also to dance. Her older brother joked that one day he would take her to Prague to develop her … Read more
At 3:00 in the afternoon on April 17, 2021, a 94-year-old woman dressed in black walked into St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle and sat down alone. The seats to her left and right had been deliberately left empty. Before her stood a coffin bearing a naval cap and a sword. The woman was Queen … Read more
In March 1945, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the notorious Harlem crime figure, was serving time at Sing Sing Prison when he was ambushed and stabbed seven times by three inmates acting on behalf of the Luciano crime family. The attack was meant to send a message and eliminate Johnson, who had been building a quiet network … Read more