May 22nd, 1992. 8:47 a.m. St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital, Chicago. Anthony Josephardo closed his eyes for the last time. He was 86 years old. He died in a hospital bed surrounded by family, congestive heart failure, acute respiratory failure, natural causes. He was buried 4 days later at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside,…
Somewhere in the lowest quarter of Manhattan in the early 1840s, a woman sat in a room and did something to herself that no one in New York had ever done before. She took a metal file, the kind used to sharpen knives or shape iron, and she pressed it against her own front teeth,…
The pistols had silencers. That detail matters. It tells you everything about what kind of killing this was and everything about what kind of world Angelo Sepe had been living inside for the last 20 years. Because in this world, the loudest men always died in the quietest rooms. And this room, a basement apartment…
Stone Mountain, Georgia. 16 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta. You’ve probably seen it on a map and never thought twice about it. It’s the kind of place where people mow their lawns on Saturday mornings and complain about HOA fees. Not exactly the backdrop you’d expect for one of the most sophisticated drug pipelines the…
One day, federal agents came to arrest Carlo Gambino, one of the most feared men in America. He invited them in for coffee. Not a joke, not a movie scene. Coffee. Dessert, too. According to later accounts, as if this were not an arrest at all, just an inconvenient social call. And that is the…
A cramped apartment in Queens. A woman stands in a doorway while Henry Hill screams at her. Paranoid, wired, coming apart at the seams. That’s how Good Fellas introduces you to Sandy. Strung out, compliant, a mob groupy who existed to show how far Henry Hill had fallen. Hollywood gave her maybe three scenes and…
In November 1941, a surgeon asked a young woman to sing. She sang God Bless America. She recited the Lord’s Prayer. She counted backward from 100. While she was singing, while the words were still forming in her mouth, a doctor named James Watts was cutting into her brain with an instrument that looked like…
From sending candy into outer space to sneaking forbidden foods behind the first lady’s back, Ronald Reagan’s eating habits were anything but presidential. The 40th president replaced his pipe smoking addiction with a monthly delivery of 720 bags of jelly beans, judged people’s character by how they ate candy, and brought frozen hamburger soup…
She walked into the White House for the first time as first lady and described it as looking like it had been furnished by a discount store. She blew through a $50,000 budget in two weeks. She secretly hired a French designer and then had to hide his involvement from the entire…
The camera showed a composed, elegant couple running the most powerful country in the world. What they never showed was JFK asking his press secretary to collect 1,200 Cuban cigars the night before he made them illegal. They never showed Jackie telling her husband she wanted to die beside him on the White House…
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