In January 1978, Tony Accardo and his wife returned to River Forest, Illinois, to find his home burglarized. Accardo, a Chicago Outfit figure who had risen through the Al Capone era, did not call…
Helicopters beat the air over River Forest, Illinois, as federal agents surrounded a house that was never supposed to attract this kind of attention. Inside, they moved from room to room, photographing everything, searching for any trace of a man who had vanished into thin air. The man they were looking for was Michael Volpe, … Read more
In 1968, a Polish art historian stepped off a plane in New Jersey with about $100 and almost no English. She took a job as a cook and chambermaid in the home of Seward Johnson, heir to the Johnson…
In 1986, a woman who had crossed the Atlantic with about $100 in her pocket sat in a Manhattan courtroom and watched lawyers she had never met tell a watching nation that she had struck a dying man across the face. For months, the testimony would pour out: that she had screamed at household staff, … Read more
On July 1, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a Naval Appropriations Act that granted American sailors something no navy had ever guaranteed them: a legal meal in the middle of the night….
At 2:00 in the morning, aboard an American warship somewhere in the dark of the ocean, a cook sets a tray on the mess counter and walks away. The food is not fancy. It is whatever was left from dinner, kept warm, or a stack of bread and a block of cheese, or a pot … Read more
On December 19, 1961, Joseph Kennedy played nine holes of golf with his granddaughter in Palm Beach, returned home complaining of fatigue, and collapsed. A stroke had destroyed the left side of…
On December 19, 1961, Joseph Kennedy was playing golf at the Palm Beach Country Club with his granddaughter Caroline. He played nine holes, returned to the house on North Ocean Boulevard, and complained that he felt tired. Then, in the time it took to cross a room, the machine stopped working. The stroke hit the … Read more
In June 1922, a London upholsterer wrote to Winston Churchill demanding £872 that Lady Randolph Churchill had never paid. She had been dead for a year. She was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, the…
The upholsterer’s letter arrived in June of 1922, addressed to Winston Churchill, about a bill his mother had never paid. The sum was £872, and the writer had already had trouble collecting it from her executors. Lady Randolph Churchill had been dead for almost a year, but she was only one of many still writing. … Read more
In May 1933, removal vans arrived at Blenheim Palace to carry away the possessions of its mistress, Gladys Deacon, the second Duchess of Marlborough. She had waited twenty-six years to marry the…
The butler found her in the upper rooms of the London house and delivered the message in the quiet voice such men used for catastrophes. Your grace, he said, there are three strange men in the basement. The Duchess of Malborough made no reply. By the time anyone understood what the strangers were, the mischief … Read more
In 1910, Pierre Cartier arrived at the Hotel Bristol in Paris carrying a wax-sealed package and a story. Inside was the Hope Diamond, 45 carats of blue that Cartier claimed had ruined every owner…
The nurse leaned close to the bed, and the woman in it, the one the whole country knew by a single jewel, asked for the stone one last time. Evelyn Walsh McLean was sixty years old, dying of pneumonia in a Washington bedroom while an oxygen tent labored above her. By one account, she insisted … Read more
In 1906, inside his Tennessee distillery office, Jack Daniel—a five-foot-two whiskey baron in a frock coat—spun the dial of a heavy iron safe and pull…
Deep in the limestone hills of Tennessee, where white oaks shade the hollows and the air carries the sweet, sour scent of fermenting corn and charcoal, sits Cave Spring Hollow. It is a picturesque place of bubbling springs and rustic industry, but beneath that charm lies a graveyard of ambition. This is the birthplace of … Read more
In June 1968, a London court heard a custody case that would tear a family apart. Frances Shand Kydd, born at Park House on the Sandringham estate, had left her husband, Viscount Althorp, for…
On a summer evening in 1997, a woman on a small Scottish island sealed another envelope and sent it south. She had been writing letters to her daughter all summer, and all summer they had come back unopened. The daughter was Diana, Princess of Wales, and they never spoke again. On the thirty-first of August, … Read more
In January 2024, two women knocked on an old man’s door in Everett, Washington, claiming to work for a chewing gum company and asking if he’d taste a few new flavors. He invited them in, chewed…
On an ordinary January morning in 2024, an old man in his late sixties answered the door of his small yellow house in Everett, Washington, wearing nothing but a pair of pajama pants. Two women stood outside, smiling, dressed in matching t-shirts and holding flyers. They told him they worked for a chewing gum company, … Read more