Behind the clean publicity photographs of old Hollywood families, some parents were living with diagnosis that no studio could soften and no headline could safely explain. Red Skeleton’s 9-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia and given about a year to live. Jacqueline Suzanne’s little boy was sent to a children’s psychiatric institution…
On the evening of February 21st, 2008, a man named Baird Jones was found dead in his East Village apartment on East 8th Street at 10:30 in the evening. He was 53 years old. The NYPD confirmed there was no criminality and no suspicious circumstances. An autopsy was inconclusive and the cause of…
There is a woman buried in no grave, scattered in waters off Honolulu by a butler who would be dead himself within 3 years, whose life contained more wealth, more violence, and [music] more betrayal than any novelist would dare put between two covers. She was born in a mansion on East…
Hey, hey, I wasn’t even planning to make this one. This story gets messy cuz a lot of it ain’t sitting in clean official records. Some of it comes from police fragments, some from old street memory, and some from people passing down what they heard. So, I’m not saying every detail…
July 30th, 1975, 2:30 in the afternoon. The parking lot of the Mackis Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Jimmy Hawa stood by a pay phone in a blue golf shirt, sweating through the Detroit summer, glaring at his watch. He’d called his wife 20 minutes earlier. He said the words…
January 6th, 1979. A Saturday afternoon in Ozone Park, Queens. The temperature outside Robert’s Lounge sat at 28°. A dirty snow crusting the curb on Lefferts Boulevard. Inside, the bar smelled like stale beer and cigarette ash, the same smell it always had. Marty Krugman walked through the door wearing a top…
Most men, when they walk into a federal penitentiary for the second time in their lives, are thinking about survival, about keeping their head down, about getting through the years without becoming a story someone else tells. Most men walking through those gates at 70 years old are thinking about one thing…
MGM and Caesars were busy squeezing resort fees out of tourists and turning Las Vegas into a luxury theme park for billionaires, one man quietly engineered the single biggest locals casino deal in Vegas history. $31.5 billion not for the Bellagio, not for the Venetian, for the casinos your neighbor goes to…
with regards to the history of the American mafia. Has Charlie Luchiano’s role been overstated? 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 crime. Feel free to subscribe if you like that sort of thing. I’m…
March 16th, 1932. The roof of 124 Thompson Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, 2:15 in the afternoon. A building janitor found two bodies. The first was Gerard Vernotico, 29 years old, a baker from Little Italy. He had a wife. He had a daughter. He had a second child on the way,…
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