The Rizzuto crime family was technically a crew, a branch office. On paper, they answered to the Bonanno family in New York, one of five mafia organizations that divided the Eastern United States among themselves and considered the rest of the continent beneath their attention. The Rizzutos were their Canadian franchise, a…
May 2nd, 1957. 10:55 at night. The Majestic Apartments, 115, Central Park West, Manhattan. Frank Castella walked through the lobby the way he always did, tailored suit, felt hat, calm eyes. He nodded at the doorman. He stepped toward the elevator. He never made it. A heavy set man in a dark…
The chandelier was still in the trunk. That detail is so strange and so specific and so human that it stops you the moment you read it. Roy Deo had placed a chandelier in the trunk of his 1983 Cadillac from his Long Island home that he once intended to have repaired. He’d…
It’s the spring of 1985 in East Harlem and a man named Fat Tony Salerno is running one of the most lucrative criminal empires in American history from a social club on Pleasant Avenue. The Genovese crime family boss oversees a heroin distribution network that has dominated New York City for decades…
It’s August 4th, 1985 in Oakland, New Jersey. About 2,000 Jamaicans have gathered for a summer picnic. Music is playing, food is out, then someone pulls a gun. What started as a warm afternoon turned into one of the most violent gang battles in the history of the American Northeast. Elements of…
On the 22nd of July 1999, the United States Navy conducted a burial at sea for John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and Lauren Bessette. There was no public funeral, no open church service, no eulogy delivered in a room where anyone who had simply watched her survive could bear witness…
In 2014, the death of the ninety-nine-year-old Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, led her heir to a London vault and a discovery that felt frozen in time. There, tucked away in massive oak chests, he found a treasure trove of jewelry, all curiously wrapped in newspapers from a single, turbulent year: 1953. Why…
There is a photograph that every documentary about the Kennedy family uses. The whole family gathered at Hyannis Port on the lawn in the bright Massachusetts summer sunlight. The children in white, the parents at the center, everyone looking at the camera, everyone smiling. It is one of the most reproduced photographs…
At 12:30 p.m. on the 22nd of November, 1963, in the backseat of a moving presidential limousine on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, Jacqueline Kennedy reached across her husband’s body and climbed onto the trunk of the car. The world has seen the photograph. Most people who have seen it assume they…
Queen Elizabeth II had access to the most extraordinary jewels on Earth. Yet, there were necklaces she never once wore. Today, we uncover the nine royal pieces she left untouched. Number nine, the Tech Crescent Necklace. The Tech Crescent Necklace is one of those royal jewels that almost feels shy. It carries…
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