Building Criminal Empires in Galveston, Texas
In the Lone Star State, Texans have always prided themselves
on their resourcefulness and resilience, topped off with a dash of down-home
humor. It’s just a part of the...
Where to Hide the Booze?
It’s a fair question: where should you hide the booze, during the era of America’s “Great Mistake?" To evade federal officers and pesky raids—in the event your local...
Before America saw headlines about the Capone Mob, the Purple Gang and Murder Inc., the specter of the Black Hand terrorized nearly every major city. Fears that the Mafia had reached our shores and infiltrated every Italian...
Timmy Overton of Austin and Jerry Ray James of Odessa were football stars who traded athletics for lives of crime. The original rebels without causes, nihilists with Cadillacs and Elvis hair, the Overton gang and their...
You gotta hand it to him. Like a Danny Ocean of his day,
Alvin Karpis—public enemy number one in the mid-1930s—didn’t rob the train
because he had to. He robbed the train because he wanted to.
Every
great gangster has an origin story. In the age of classic mobsters, tales of the
rascally kid from the Bronx or the self-made thief from the Boardwalk give us a
hero we can all root for, someone whose rags-to-riches...
Snoopy
would have approved: it was indeed a dark and stormy night when Officer Dan
Herion first received the call to the scene of a crime. Deep winter, 1959, on
the frozen streets of Chicago, dispatch sent Herion and his...
They’re all but ancient history now, but for a time, the Black Hand used to be a household name. As we’ve explored in our profile of the great detective Joe Petrosino, the Black Hand were the precursor...
Who doesn’t love the 1920s? Jazz, flappers, great dancing, new hairstyles, all of the fun stuff without any of the doom and gloom of the 1930s. The Jazz Age, as F. Scott Fitzgerald termed it, was one...
Here
on Crime Capsule we’ve looked at bootlegging from a number of angles – from the
ingenious stills of North Carolina to the
secret speakeasies of Wisconsin. But one subject we haven’t covered is the
process of fermentation, and how the...