On the morning of May 5, 1981, three Bonanno crime family captains put on their good suits and drove to a Brooklyn social club for a peace meeting. The code of the Mafia said that you come to a sit-down unarmed. It was a gesture of trust, the entire point of a peace meeting, so … Read more

The cableway operator had one of the best-paid jobs on the Hoover Dam project, earning $1. 25 an hour, roughly three times a common laborer’s wage. The pay reflected the precision the work demanded: guiding a 20-ton concrete bucket on a steel cable across a chasm where a mistake could kill in seconds. In the … Read more

The assassin’s bomb went off under the rear wheel of an open-topped Mercedes-Benz at a hairpin bend in a Prague suburb on the morning of May 27th, 1942. Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the man Adolf Hitler himself called the man with the iron heart, staggered into the road with his … Read more

The door of the harem closes and the sound is final, like a stone rolled across a tomb. The girl from the Ethiopian Highlands, taken from a burning village, walked through days of desert heat and weeks of salt water to stand on the auction block in Zanzibar. She was inspected like livestock, priced in … Read more

On February 22, 1943, at the bottom of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, Oberst Ferrier Kessler, a 41-year-old staff officer of the 10th Panzer Division, walked between rows of captured American vehicles, notebook in hand. For two days he had been cataloging the equipment the Americans abandoned in their worst defeat of the war. Half-tracks, … Read more

In the summer of 1852, a construction worker stood at the bottom of the Appomattox River valley below Farmville, Virginia, laying the lower courses of a stone pier that had already risen thirty feet above the valley floor. It still had more than ninety feet to climb before it reached the height where the wooden … Read more

The telephone call came on a cold November morning, and Mela Agnelli knew before the words were spoken that her life had just split in two. Her son Eduardo had driven his Fiat Croma to a viaduct near Fossano, not far from Turin, parked the car, and jumped. The fall had been around eighty meters. … Read more

Daniel Guggenheim was the first witness of the morning. It was a Thursday in January of 1915, and the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations had taken over the Board of Estimates room at New York City Hall. That winter, it was questioning rich men about their fortunes, their charities, and their workers. The chairman, Frank … Read more

The letter was written four days before the end. On June 21st, 1876, at the meeting of the Rosebud and Yellowstone rivers, a correspondent for the New York Herald named Mr. Kellogg put his observations to paper, describing the campaign as it prepared to move against Sitting Bull’s band. Within days, Kellogg would be dead, … Read more