The Château de Candé sits in a quiet patch of the French Loire, surrounded by woodland and the silence of old money. On June 3, 1937, the gravel drive carried one motor car after another, but the audience was small. Sixteen guests had been invited. A handful of journalists waited at the gates, kept far … Read more
It cost $5,000 to have someone killed in Harlem in the late 1980s. That was the standard rate for a professional murder-for-hire operation run by a crew that included a former police officer, a military veteran, and a network of men who cleaned up the crime scenes with acid. They called themselves janitors, and some … Read more
Anthony Armstrong-Jones arrived on March 7, 1930, into a marriage that was already failing. His father, Major Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a successful Welsh barrister described by biographers as having a highly sexed personality. His mother, Anne Messel, was a glittering London society beauty who appeared in the gossip columns. The marriage lasted five years. By … Read more
On the morning of October 6, 1977, a man named Danny Greene walked out of a low office building on Brainard Place in Lyndhurst, Ohio, after a dental appointment and headed for his car. For two years he had been at war with the Cleveland mob, and he had survived everything they threw at him. … Read more
For more than half a century, the Queen Mother and Prince Philip shared a family, a dynasty, and a public life. Behind the lavender, the courtesy, and the photographs, they conducted one of the longest and most carefully managed cold wars the House of Windsor ever produced. The Queen Mother smiled at almost everyone. The … Read more
When the German Army launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, its invasion of the Soviet Union presented a situation unlike anything it had faced in Poland, France, or the Low Countries: female combatants in the ranks of the enemy. The war on the Eastern Front was an ideological conflict. On one side stood German … Read more
Carl Hanke was born on August 24, 1903, in the small Silesian town of Lauban, then part of the German Empire and today the Polish town of Luban. His father, Wilhelm Robert Hanke, was a railway engineer. During the First World War, Carl's older brother was killed, but Carl himself was too young to fight. … Read more
In March 1959, a blackmail operation orchestrated by the Italian mafia to eliminate Harlem crime boss Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson collapsed without a single gunshot, dismantled from within by the very man they targeted. The plot began when Vincent Duca, an emissary, confronted one of Johnson’s soldiers, known as Little T, in a parked Lincoln Continental. … Read more
Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, the second Duke of Westminster, was one of the richest men alive. He owned much of Mayfair, Belgravia and Pimlico, a Cheshire castle with 54 bedrooms, more than 130,000 acres across Britain, two ocean-going yachts and half a million acres of hunting ground in France. He was known to almost everyone … Read more
On July 18, 1996, inside the recreational room of the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, a man walked up to John Gotti and punched him in the face. The man's name was Walter Johnson, a bank robber serving a 10-year sentence. Gotti was the former boss of the Gambino crime family, the most famous Mafia … Read more