Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Criminals & Outlaws

Just who was the man whose name has become synonymous with the classic "rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul" scam in which money from new investors is used to reward earlier ones? In December 1919, he was an unknown thirty-eight-year-old, self-educated Italian immigrant with a borrowed two-hundred dollars in his pocket. Six months later, he was Boston's famed "wizard of finance," lionized by the public and politicians alike. Based on exclusive interviews with people who knew Charles Ponzi, lent him their money, and exposed him, Donald Dunn's "Ponzi" recreates both one of America's most notorious and...

"It was Rebecca's son, Thomas, who first realized the victim's identity. His eyes were drawn to the victim's head, and aided by the flickering light of a candle, he 'clapt his hands and cryed out, Oh Lord, it is my mother.' James Moills, a servant of Cornell . . . described Rebecca 'lying on the floore, with fire about Her, from her Lower parts neare to the Armepits.' He recognized her only 'by her shoes.'" from Killed Strangely

On a winter's evening in 1673, tragedy descended on the respectable Rhode Island household of Thomas Cornell. His 73-year-old mother, Rebecca, was found close...

Thus spoke one lawman about John Wesley Hardin, easily the most feared and fearless of all the gunfighters in the West. Nobody knows the exact number of his victims-perhaps as few as twenty or as many as fifty. In his way of thinking, Hardin never shot a man who did not deserve it. Seeking to gain insight into Hardin's homicidal mind, Leon Metz describes how Hardin's bloody career began in post-Civil War Central Texas, when lawlessness and killings were commonplace, and traces his life of violence until his capture and imprisonment in 1878. After numerous unsuccessful escape attempts,...

Bonnie and Clyde were responsible for multiple murders and countless robberies. But they did not act alone. In 1933, during their infamous run from the law, Bonnie and Clyde were joined by Clyde's brother Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche. Of these four accomplices, only one--Blanche Caldwell Barrow--lived beyond early adulthood and only Blanche left behind a written account of their escapades. Edited by outlaw expert John Neal Phillips, Blanche's previously unknown memoir is here available for the first time.

Blanche wrote her memoir between 1933 and 1939, while serving time at the...

Wayne Padgett was a colorful, charming, and generous man. He was also one of Oklahoma's most elusive bootleggers and career criminals. From the 1960s into the 1980s, he operated out of Tulsa as a high-ranking member of the outfit known as the Dixie Mafia. In Oklahoma Tough, poet Ron Padgett tells the inside story of his notorious father and of how he earned his reputation as a Robin Hood "King of the Bootleggers."

Oklahoma Tough is also a history of the distinctive mid-twentieth-century Oklahoma milieu that made Wayne Padgett's life story possible. Ron Padgett...

Think gunfighter, and Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid may come to mind, but what of Jim Moon? Joel Fowler? Zack Light? A host of other figures helped forge the gunfighter persona, but their stories have been lost to time. In a sequel to his "Deadly Dozen," celebrated western historian Robert K. DeArment now offers more biographical portraits of lesser-known gunfighters men who perhaps weren t glorified in legend or song, but who were rightfully notorious in their day.

DeArment has tracked down stories of gunmen from throughout the West characters you won t find in any of today s western...

How is it possible for an innocent man to come within nine days of execution? An Expendable Man answers that question through detailed analysis of the case of Earl Washington Jr., a mentally retarded, black farm hand who was convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of a 19-year-old mother of three in Culpeper, Virginia. He spent almost 18 years in Virginia prisons--9 1/2 of them on death row--for a murder he did not commit.

This book reveals the relative ease with which individuals who live at society's margins can be wrongfully convicted, and the extraordinary...