December 24th, 1996. 5:47 p.m. West Side of Youngstown, Ohio. A kitchen window glowed warm against the winter dark. Inside, Mahoning County Prosecutor Paul Gaines stood at his counter, unaware that a car had just pulled up outside his house. The driver kept the engine running. The passenger stepped out into the…
You’re driving east on Interstate 15, somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and you see it. Three casinos rising out of absolutely nothing. No city, no suburb, no reason. Just desert, a state line, and a cluster of buildings that look like Vegas had a fever dream and dropped a few properties in…
in the Banano crime family in the United States. What was the difference between the hangouts of the Italian American mobsters and the Sicilian faction of that family? Let’s check it out. I’m James Gladwish and welcome to OC Shorts, bringing you detailed historical snapshots of the American Mafia and other organized…
September 20th, 1980. Flatlands, Brooklyn. A neighborhood bar on the corner of East 41st Street and Flatlands Avenue. A place with a jukebox, neon beer signs, and a back room where the lights never came on. A man named Frank Amato walked through the front door that night believing he was there…
May 11th, 1982, 5:30 in the afternoon, Northern Avenue, Boston Waterfront. Brian Howerin sat in the passenger seat of a Blue Datson outside the topside lounge, finishing a beer with a man named Michael Donaghhue. The sun was still up. Families were walking past. A blue Chevy pulled alongside. The window came…
It is the summer of 1981 in Harlem. A black man in a customtailored suit steps out of a Mercedes on 116th Street, the same block where Italian gangsters used to collect tribute just 2 years earlier. That man is Leroy Nikki Barnes, and he has just become the most powerful drug…
There is a photograph taken sometime in the early 1970s. Alexander Onassis, young, dark-haired, leaning against a boat somewhere in the Mediterranean sun. He looks like someone who has everything. And technically, he did. His father was one of the wealthiest men on Earth. His family name was printed on tankers, airlines,…
They did not share a bedroom. The most famous couple in America, the president and first lady who appeared in thousands of photographs as the composed embodiment of the ideal marriage, slept in separate rooms in the White House as a normal feature of their domestic arrangement. The household staff knew. The people close…
Are you optimistic about fulfilling this role in the same way you did before? >> Yes. I think it doesn’t matter what else you do if you don’t do that part well. If you fail your husband and your children, um that really is the role which means the most to me….
October 1968, a small Greek island called Scorpios. The wedding is private, deliberately so. No press pool, no official photographers, no estate witnesses. The woman walking toward the altar is the most recognizable widow in the world. The man waiting for her is not a senator, not a general, not a statesman….
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