l2910

My name is Lester Coddle and I am fifty-three years old. Six days after I paid off my son’s student loans, twenty-nine thousand dollars so he and his fiancée could qualify for their mortgage, she texted me that the rehearsal dinner was going to be intimate. Just close family who had truly invested in this … Read more

Joseph Colombo Sr. was shot three times at an Italian-American Civil Rights League rally in New York City on June 28, 1971, with one bullet striking him in the head. The shooting left him paralyzed until his death in 1978. Colombo was born on June 16, 1923, into an Italian-American family in Brooklyn. His father, … Read more

The torture scene in Martin Scorsese’s *Casino* is one of the most disturbing sequences in American cinema. Joe Pesci’s Tony Spilotro, renamed Nicky Santoro in the film, calmly extracts names from a screaming victim in a Las Vegas basement. The film dramatizes the events, but the reality is far more complex. The torture actually happened, … Read more

For nearly three decades, the city of Youngstown, Ohio, was the site of a brutal and methodical mob war that left more than 50 people dead and saw more than 80 bombings rock the Mahoning Valley. The violence was so pervasive that federal investigators gave the city a grim nickname: Bomb City, USA. The conflict … Read more

On March 12, 1963, a Harlem gangster held a single photograph that could destroy the most powerful man in American law enforcement. The image was so devastating that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reportedly mobilized 40 agents against the man who possessed it. But Bumpy Johnson was not easily buried, and his response forced the … Read more

A drill bit pierced the back wall of Bertha’s Gifts and Home Furnishings in Las Vegas on July 4th, 1981. Frank Colada and his crew worked in silence, their routine familiar after dozens of similar jobs. But the instincts that had kept Colada alive for 30 years were screaming that something was wrong. He was … Read more

On the morning of December 26, 1947, a heavy snowstorm began burying Harlem under drifts that quickly climbed past ankles and then knees. By late afternoon, buses had stalled at intersections, taxis sat abandoned at odd angles, and the elevated train had ground to a halt north of 135th Street. Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, a man … Read more