It was a single sentence that ended a career. In June 1971, the most decorated colonel in the United States Army sat down in front of an ABC television camera somewhere in the jungles of South Vietnam, looked directly into the lens, and said seven words that the Pentagon would never forgive. This is a…
On the night of March 13th, 2019, a little after 900 p.m., the quiet on Hilltop Terrace in Staten Island broke with the sound of metal striking metal. Then gunfire, a black SUV sat in the street with fresh damage. A man lay bleeding on the pavement outside his brick home while dinner was still…
December 4th, 1989. Howard Beach, Queens. Inside a house already famous with federal agents, a dying mob captain is running out of time. He is 49. He is free on $1 million bail. He has four major criminal cases still hanging over him. The FBI has spent years listening to his voice bounce off kitchen…
The year was 1958. It was a Sunday evening in America, which meant that 70 million people were doing the same thing at the same time. They were sitting in front of their television sets. Television in 1958 was not what it would become. It was newer, stranger, more dangerous in the specific way that…
Officer Brian Foster had been having a terrible night. It was August 14th, 1976, Saturday. Hot, humid, Chicago, and summer. Everyone was irritable. Foster had been on duty since 400 p.m. Traffic Patrol. Lakeshore Drive. 7 hours of pulling over speeders, drunk drivers, people with broken tail lights. Most nights, traffic patrol was routine. Write…
May 16th, 1957. Copa Cabana nightclub. 1:30 in the morning. The Delicatessenb bowling team sits at their table. Yankees players at another table. Sammy Davis Jr. on stage performing. Someone from the bowling team yells. Racist comments. Insults directed at Sammy Davis Jr. Billy Martin stands up. Shut your mouth. You cannot make me. Suddenly,…
Off the coast of Alabama, in about 60 ft of water, there is a forest. Not the ruins of a forest. Not scattered logs or the occasional fossilized stump, a forest. Upright cypress trees, root systems intact, bark still present on some of the trunks standing exactly where they grew. The trees are between 50,000…
In 1613, a 16-year-old boy named Mikuel Romanov was dragged from a monastery in Costa and told he would be the next Zsar of all Russia. The official history tells you the Romanovs were a noble Russian family who emerged from relative obscurity to found one of the most powerful royal dynasties in human history….
There is a mountain range in the eastern United States that built the American industrial economy. Its people dug the coal that powered every factory, every locomotive, every steel mill that made the country rich. And when those people tried to organize, tried to demand wages that would let their children eat, the corporations that…
There is a skull in the Penn Museum that should not exist. It is five thousand years old, from a site called Hasanlu in Iran. A paleoanthropologist named Janet Monge examined its teeth closely. She found them straight, white, and perfectly symmetrical across the arch. The jaw was wide with every tooth…
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