Hinds County deputy sheriff Bill Russell confiscating champagne during the liquor raid at Jackson Country Club in February 1966. Courtesy of Fred Blackwell. (From Mississippi Moonshine Politics )
Extortion. Gambling rings....
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...
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...
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...