Roy Albert DeMeo was found dead in the driver’s seat of his Cadillac near a canal in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn on January 10, 1983. He had been shot multiple times. The car was frozen in the bitter winter cold, the windows iced over. There was no fanfare and no spectacle—just the silent … Read more
Joseph Valachi, an American mobster in the Genovese crime family, became the first member of the Italian-American Mafia to publicly acknowledge its existence when he testified before a U. S. Senate committee in 1963. His decision to break the Mafia’s blood oath of silence, known as omertà, exposed the inner workings of organized crime to … Read more
On the morning of Saturday, November 14th, 1936, two funerals were held less than 200 feet apart on West 137th Street in Harlem. The larger service, which began at 10:00 in a wide brownstone near Seventh Avenue, was for a wholesale coal and ice dealer who supplied much of the neighborhood. The procession that left … Read more
On the night of February 15, 1934, Bumpy Johnson was trapped inside his Buick as two Molotov cocktails exploded around him. Flames consumed the front of the car through the windshield, then the back seat through the open side window. His jacket caught fire, and his right arm ignited. He kicked out the cracked windshield, … Read more
On August 23, 1961, police in Queens discovered six men buried upright in concrete graves at a construction site on 101st Avenue. There were no signs of struggle, no shell casings, and no witnesses. All six men were identified as soldiers in the Genovese crime family, and all six had been alive when the concrete … Read more
In 1989, Goldman Sachs was making $1. 2 million a day in profit and stood at the top of Wall Street. Yet a single block in Washington, D. C. , surrounded by boarded-up houses and broken street lights, was pulling in roughly $2 million a day selling crack cocaine—more than twice Goldman’s daily profit. That … Read more
The Bundeswehr was meant to be a clean break, a democratic army forged in the ashes of total defeat, yet its first generation of leaders was drawn directly from the ranks of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, and within a decade, the sons of the Third Reich’s most infamous commanders were stepping into their fathers’ boots. In 1967, … Read more
The silence that enveloped the Braun family in the decades following the Second World War was not the quiet of peace, but the heavy, suffocating blanket of a self-imposed exile. While the world dissected the corpse of the Third Reich, seeking justice and understanding, the family of Eva Braun engaged in a desperate, decades-long project … Read more
The quiet street in Maspeth, Queens, was the kind of place where neighbors left their doors unlocked and children played until the streetlights flickered on. On the morning of July 12th, 1964, the Ryan household at 52-17 72nd Street was undergoing a modest renovation, with paint rollers and drop cloths spread across the living room … Read more
The clatter of a typewriter in the pre-dawn darkness of the Reich Chancellery was the first sound of power in the Third Reich, a sound that preceded the Führer’s waking breath by six hours. While Adolf Hitler slept, Martin Bormann was already at his desk, a specter in the gloom, sifting through the detritus of … Read more