On July 31, 1980, the Eagles played a charity show at Long Beach Arena for California Senator Alan Cranston. To the crowd, five musicians stood in pe…
The night of July 31, 1980, at the Long Beach Arena in California should have been a routine charity concert for Senator Alan Cranston. The Eagles were at the height of their fame, five musicians whose harmonies and guitar work had become the soundtrack for an entire generation. From the outside, they seemed impossible to … Read more
On April 26, 1945, with Soviet artillery pounding Berlin into rubble and the main airfield unusable, a small aircraft threaded between burning buildings to land on a narrow boulevard in the heart…
The sky over Berlin on the night of April 28, 1945 was a furnace. Soviet searchlights swept through smoke that rose from a thousand fires, and anti-aircraft guns hammered at anything that moved. Below, the city that had been the capital of the Thousand-Year Reich was being pounded into rubble from every direction at once. … Read more
On December 13, 1945, British hangman Albert Pierrepoint executed three women at Hameln prison for concentration camp crimes, an event without precedent in British legal history. Among them was…
On the morning of December 13th, 1945, three women stood before the British hangman Albert Pierrepoint at Hameln prison. The first was 22 years old. The second was 26. The third was 52. Each had been convicted of war crimes committed while serving as a female guard in the Nazi concentration camp system, and each … Read more
In 1941, Princess Irene of Greece became queen of Croatia, a country she had never visited. Her husband, an Italian prince, was named King Tomislav II by Mussolini and Hitler, though he refused to…
The SS officers came without warning, submachine guns slung across their chests. They did not greet her as Your Majesty, Queen of Croatia. They did not greet her at all. They stood in the hallway of the Villa della Petraia in Florence and gave her minutes to pack. Princess Irene of Greece and Denmark, Duchess … Read more
In 1832, Boston merchant Thomas Caldwell moved his family into an old Garden District house that had changed hands four times in thirty years, always selling for far less than comparable…
At 11 p. m. on February 10th, 1833, Elijah was awakened by the sound of breaking glass. He found the basement door standing open, a lamp burning at the top of the stairs. Descending cautiously, he discovered Thomas Caldwell and his eldest son, James, engaged in what appeared to be excavation work against the far … Read more
On April 10, 1935, Adolf Hitler stood as best man while Emmy Sonnemann, a divorced actress from Hamburg, married Hermann Göring in Berlin. Twelve thousand police and Nazi officials lined the…
She was not a general, not a politician, not a bureaucrat. She held no formal title in the Third Reich, no office in the Reich Chancellery, no seat at the conference tables where Europe’s fate was decided. And yet Emmy Göring spent more than a decade at the very center of the Nazi world, presiding … Read more
When Andy Williams’ family navigated the public storm of his wife Claudine’s 1976 shooting trial, his eldest daughter, Noel, briefly stepped into the …
The late 1960s were difficult years for the family of singer Andy Williams, who had long been the face of wholesome American entertainment. He married French dancer Claudine Longet in 1961, and the couple appeared to have it all. They had three children, Noel, Christian, and Robert, and made their home between the world of … Read more
In December 1998, days before Christmas, neighbors walked into a Wisconsin police station carrying a sealed envelope Julie Jensen had given them weeks earlier. Her instructions were explicit: open…
The neighbors walked into the Pleasant Prairie Police Station the day after Julie Jensen was found unconscious in her bed. It was December 1998, just days before Christmas, and they carried a sealed envelope she had given them weeks earlier with specific instructions. Open this only if something happens to me. Inside was a handwritten … Read more
1988: John Gotti Sent Man on Pablo Escobar, What Happens Next Becames a urban legend
The rain came down in sheets over Little Italy, hammering the windows of the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street with the kind of persistent autumn downpour that turned Manhattan almost cinematic. Neon signs bled color onto wet pavement. The street smelled of old concrete and car exhaust and the particular dampness that only New … Read more
In 1884, nine months after his first wife died of cancer, railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington married Arabella Duval Worsham, a woman whose past Manhattan society could not verify and whose…
On September 16, 1924, at her palatial apartment in the Hotel Plaza in New York City, Arabella Huntington lay dying at the age of seventy-four. For years her eyesight had been failing, until near-total blindness had set in, a cruel fate for a woman who had devoted her life to the visual splendor of European … Read more