It gave me an appreciation for humor. It made me think and feel what’s funny. Um, I appreciated humor in others. I wasn’t a class clown or anything. I didn’t try to be funny. But when Hollywood adored Mary Tyler Moore as America’s sweetheart, her smile made millions believe she had no…
And it was similar to my own show. It’s a bunch of guests at the same time. So I did the first show. I thought it went well and uh but then I got a call from a guy the head haunt show at the radio station wanted to take me out…
March 2nd, 1999. Federal Courthouse, Philadelphia. The morning is gray. Fluorescent light floods the hallway outside courtroom 17B. Joey Merlino walks between two FBI agents, hands cuffed in front of him. He is 40 years old. He wears a gray suit that fits perfectly. His lawyer trails behind. Nobody speaks. Inside the…
November 10th, 1999, South Memphis, corner of Porter and Crump. Sometime after midnight, a man steps out of a building he named the headquarters. Not ironically, not as a joke, but because that is exactly what it was, the center of something. The last physical address of a power that had already…
There is a place on the far south side of Chicago that people call the hole. The name fits. The city built up around it, filled it with people, then surrounded it with everything the rest of Chicago preferred not to look at. To the east, a highway, to the north, a…
The threat landed on the wrong side of the table. That’s the whole story really. Everything that followed, the 24 hours, the vanishing, the silence that settled over a stretch of queens. Like a weather system that simply replaced the previous one without announcement. All of it traces back to one moment….
Before John Gotti became the Dapper Dawn, before the aqu quiddle and the tabloid covers and the Christmas fireworks in Howard Beach, there was a period of about 18 months when the Gambino family was the most dangerous organization in New York to work for. Not because of external threats, because of…
The night was October 27th, 1978. Bell Seven nightclub, Kyoto, just past nine in the evening. Kazuo Taoka, 65 years old, was sitting at his usual booth, a glass of whiskey in front of him, surrounded by his lieutenants. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and expensive cologne. A young man in…
Indianapolis, Indiana, 1992. You ever been to a city that’s just mid, not the worst place, not the best place? The kind of city people fly over on the way to Chicago. That’s Indianapolis. Naptown they called it. And I mean that literally. The nickname came from how slow and quiet the…
They called him the greatest, and for six championships, three-peats, and a tongue-wagging dunk that defied gravity, nobody argued. Michael Jordan wasn’t just the best basketball player alive. He was the most famous athlete on the planet, the most marketed, the most protected, the most carefully constructed myth in the history of…
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