Bob Ross kept his battle with cancer largely private, revealing his diagnosis to only a handful of people. But when he finally told his business partners he was dying, their reaction was far from supportive. Ross became one of the most beloved figures in television history through his show “The Joy of Painting,” yet his … Read more
Steve Wynn walked out of the company that bore his name for the final time on February 6th, 2018. He was 76 years old, worth $3. 1 billion, and widely credited with transforming Las Vegas from a desert outpost into a global entertainment capital. Three weeks earlier, he had appeared untouchable. His fall took 21 … Read more
In May 1945, the war in Europe was over. Inside a secret Allied interrogation center known as Ashcan, the highest-ranking survivors of the Third Reich were gathered. Field marshals and generals, the architects of the German war machine, sat in simple chairs smoking American cigarettes. They had been stripped of their power. An American intelligence … Read more
In November 1957, roughly 50 of the most powerful Mafia bosses in America fled through the woods of upstate New York to escape state police. One of them was from San Jose, California, and almost nobody noticed. It was the most embarrassing day in American mob history. And somewhere in that chaos, a man named … Read more
In December 1944, a 22-year-old private first class from Scranton, Pennsylvania, found himself in a frozen Belgian farmhouse, holding a Nazi colonel who might know where thousands of American soldiers were about to die. His name was James Walker. He had enlisted in the United States Army in June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, … Read more
Tony Accardo spent over six decades at the top of the most dangerous criminal organization in the United States, and he did it without ever spending a single night in prison after 1946. No rival ever successfully moved against him. Every mob boss before him fell, and every boss after him fell too. Accardo simply … Read more
In December 1944, American infantrymen in the Ardennes Forest were fighting two enemies at once: the German army and the cold. Temperatures plunged, foxholes filled with freezing water, and soldiers survived on frozen lard and a single hard biscuit a day. Their boots stayed soaked, their feet rotted with trench foot, and their metal spoons … Read more
For decades, Graceland has drawn hundreds of thousands of Elvis Presley fans each year, all eager to walk through the colorful rooms and gold-record displays that defined the King of Rock and Roll’s public image. But at the top of the mansion’s main staircase, a velvet rope blocks the way. That upstairs area, Elvis’s private … Read more
A Civil War-era photograph that historians had long dismissed as a routine studio portrait has turned out to be a coded historical document with links to one of the most famous escapes from slavery in American history. The 1860 portrait, donated anonymously to the Smithsonian in January 2019 with only a note reading “1860 Philadelphia,” … Read more
On July 8, 2004, an 85-year-old man named Albert Brown died quietly in Auburn Lake Trails, California, a small foothill town northeast of Sacramento where neighbors kept to themselves and nobody asked questions. There were no screaming ambulances and no reporters camped outside. His local obituary mentioned his education in South Florida, his surviving relatives, … Read more