There is a photograph from the early 1960s of Joan Kennedy standing beside her husband at a glittering Washington occasion, dressed in pearls and smiling brightly. Look at it long enough, and something unsettling emerges. The smile does not quite reach her eyes. Everyone knows the Kennedy name — the tragedies, the glamour, the myth. … Read more
Lieutenant Henry Sweet Jones Jr., the fresh-faced West Point graduate portrayed by Colin Hanks in the acclaimed HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers,” survived the frozen forests of the Ardennes, led a daring night patrol across a German river, and earned a Purple Heart for his wounds — only to die in a Berlin hospital bed … Read more
Inside a glass case at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston sits a carved coconut shell. It was scratched with a rescue message in August 1943, after a Japanese destroyer split PT-109 in two in the Solomon Islands. That shell stayed on the Oval Office desk through all 1,036 days of the Kennedy … Read more
In May 1945, four days after Germany's surrender, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army was shifting from combat operations to occupation duties. Patton was touring his sector, conducting the kind of unannounced, on-the-ground inspection he had carried out throughout the campaign to verify what was actually happening against what his reports described. He arrived … Read more
Twelve men walked into Bumpy Johnson’s Harlem club without masks, without hesitation, and without asking where the boss was. They weren’t there to gamble. The older man leading them delivered a demand loud enough for the whole room to hear: $100,000 today, and a monthly percentage of the take after that. The public humiliation was … Read more
On October 20, 1968, on the Greek island of Skorpios, Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis in a small Greek Orthodox chapel. She was 39 years old, five years removed from Dallas, and had spent those years as the most publicly mourned widow in American history. He was 62, the richest man in the world by … Read more
On September 28, 1947, in a basement of the First Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a man identified as James Wheeler walked to the front of a gathering of 400 Ku Klux Klan members, removed his hood, and revealed himself to be Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the notorious Harlem crime figure. The revelation stopped the ceremony … Read more
On the night of November 30, 2004, in an industrial section of Brooklyn, Randolph “Randy” Pizzolo was shot dead. His new BMW was found nearby. His wallet was still on him, and his valuables untouched. This was not a robbery. Pizzolo had spent years trying to climb inside the Bonanno crime family. He worked around … Read more
Exiled from the Swedish court as a violent young prince, Styrbjörn the Strong did not fade into obscurity. Instead, he carved a path of conquest across the Baltic, eventually seizing command of the Jomsvikings, the most feared warrior brotherhood of the Viking Age, before turning his fleet toward the land that had banished him. According … Read more
On the evening of March 17, 1952, a cold rain fell over Harlem as a group of influential downtown policy operators gathered in a private dining room at a restaurant near the Hotel Theresa. They had come uptown to discuss territory with local numbers runners, men they believed could be used and, more importantly, controlled. … Read more