On the evening of December 11, 1936, a man who had been king that morning sat before a microphone at Windsor Castle and told the world he could not carry the weight of the crown without the help and support of the woman he loved. It was the most successful sentence of his life. Millions … Read more
On November 15, 1986, at 2:45 in the afternoon, inside a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan, Mickey Featherstone raised his right hand and swore to tell the truth. He sat across from the man who had once tried to bury him under concrete. Jimmy Coonan did not blink. He simply stared at his closest friend, … Read more
On August 25, 1932, in a rented bedroom at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, Edith Rockefeller McCormick died of cancer at the age of 60. The room was comfortable but impersonal, a commercial suite on Michigan Avenue with nothing on the walls she had chosen and nothing on the nightstand that identified her. She had … Read more
On July 15, 1988, just after dawn, a convoy of Bolivian special forces moved along a dirt road toward a vast cattle ranch called El Sogal. Inside the main house, a 62-year-old man in a silk robe was drinking coffee and watching the sun rise over his 400,000 acres of forest and pasture. He heard … Read more
Carlo Gambino died in bed on October 15, 1976, in a comfortable brick house on Club Drive in Massapequa, Long Island. He was 74 years old. No handcuffs, no armed guards, no prison cell. His heart simply stopped, beat by beat. If you have seen the film "Boss of All Bosses," you saw this world … Read more
On the morning of August 27, 1979, a bomb hidden by the Provisional IRA tore apart a small cabin cruiser off the coast of County Sligo, Ireland. The explosion killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, aged 79, his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, and 15-year-old Paul Maxwell, a local boy helping with the boat. The Dowager Lady Brabourne, … Read more
On the morning of June 23, 1986, a farmer plowing a field near Ennis, Indiana, stopped his tractor because something in the dirt looked wrong. Two bodies lay in a shallow grave, so shallow that the plow had already clipped one of them. Both men were in their undershirts, and both had been beaten so … Read more
A newly surfaced historical exposé is reigniting global outrage by naming a dozen Nazi perpetrators whose atrocities rival those of Adolf Hitler, Josef Mengele and Heinrich Himmler, yet whose names remain largely absent from public consciousness. The investigation, compiled from wartime testimony, declassified American immigration files and Nuremberg trial records, argues that these lesser-known figures … Read more
ABOARD THE USS AUGUSTA, English Channel — In the gray, heaving darkness of the early hours of June 6, 1944, a heavy-set man in a wrinkled uniform stood alone at the rail of the USS Augusta, sleepless, staring into a blackness filled with thousands of ships carrying more than 150,000 men toward the coast of … Read more
On the night of March 21, 1978, Salvatore Briguglio stepped outside the Andrea Doria Social Club at 225 East 12th Street in Little Italy for a cigarette. He never finished it. Two gunmen emerged from the shadows and fired four rounds into his chest and head. Briguglio dropped on the sidewalk, blood running into the … Read more