In 2008, Tom Hardy painted his face white and stepped onto a velvet stage, immortalizing a grinning, charismatic brawler. The film sold audiences a cinematic legend. The real man behind the movie is something far different. He is Michael Gordon Peterson, a man who has spent more than half a century inside the British prison … Read more
Growing up in Iowa, he was surrounded by duck dogs. Labs and retrievers mostly, doing blind work in the field. Duck hunting was a big part of life there, and several close friends and their fathers kept four or five dogs each. He was around it, but never fully part of it. What stayed with … Read more
Growing up in Iowa, he was surrounded by duck dogs. Labs and retrievers did blind work, retrieving ducks for friends and their fathers who hunted. Duck hunting was a popular pastime there, and although he was never fully part of it, he was always around it. His fascination went deeper than that of most kids. … Read more
São Paulo — Der Mann, der als „Engel des Todes” in die Geschichte einging, starb allein und unbeachtet, doch sein Name bleibt für immer mit den dunkelsten Verbrechen des 20. Jahrhunderts verbunden. Josef Mengele, der SS-Arzt von Auschwitz, der tausende Menschen in den Tod schickte und unzählige Opfer grausamen medizinischen Experimenten unterzog, entzog sich über … Read more
Michael Franzese has often been asked what finally drove him to walk away from organized crime. His answer is that no single moment was responsible. Instead, it was a combination of events and losses that accumulated over his years in the life. One of those losses involved a man he had known since childhood. His … Read more
Marguerite Alibert rose from a troubled childhood in France to become a courtesan, a mistress of royalty, an Egyptian bey's wife, and finally a defendant in one of the most sensational murder trials of the 1920s. Her life was defined less by romance than by survival, and she treated love as a means to wealth … Read more
In 1960, the city of Washington emptied a cemetery on Rhode Island Avenue. Thirty-seven thousand graves were moved to a field in Maryland. The headstones were not moved with them. A newspaper offered them as free stones. A farmer in Virginia hauled them by truck and dumped them along two miles of riverbank to stop … Read more
St. John Cemetery in Queens, New York, is one of the largest and most imposing burial grounds in the United States. The 169-acre site is filled with mausoleums, gravestones, and family plots, and it is run by the Catholic diocese. It is also known by another name: a kind of boot hill for the mob. … Read more
At 2:00 in the afternoon on July 3, 1863, the ground outside Gettysburg was still shaking. For nearly two hours, more than 150 Confederate cannons had been firing into Cemetery Ridge in the largest artillery bombardment the North American continent had ever heard. The noise was so enormous that people in Pittsburgh, 180 miles away, … Read more
At 4:10 a.m. on January 31, 1945, in the walled garden of a small French chateau outside the village of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France, twelve American soldiers of the 109th Infantry Regiment raised their Springfield rifles and fired one volley into the chest of a 24-year-old private from Detroit, Michigan. His … Read more