Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Criminals & Outlaws

As the Klondike gold rush peaked in spring 1898, adventurers and gamblers rubbed shoulders with town-builders and gold-panners in Skagway, Alaska. The flow of riches lured confidence men, too--among them Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith (1860-98), who with an entourage of "bunco-men" conned and robbed the stampeders. Soapy, though, a common enough criminal, would go down in legend as the Robin Hood of Alaska, the "uncrowned king of Skagway," remembered for his charm and generosity, even for calming a lynch mob. When the Fourth of July was celebrated in '98, he supposedly led the parade....

Organized Crime Queens

The Secret World of Female Gangsters

From the bizarre world of female Japanese motorcycle gangs to the historic rise and fall of London’s Forty Elephants, the history of female organized crime is both fascinating and strange. These are the stories, both true and legendary of the female crime bosses that broke the mould of feminine gentility. This is The Secret World of Female Gangsters.

Most of society thinks of women as the gentler sex, the sex with more compassion and empathy, not prone to violence....

A New York Times Notable Book
The compelling behind-the-scenes story of the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age, whose villainy bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant and stunned the world of finance told by his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward.
Ferdinand Ward, the son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor, moved to New York at twenty-one and, in less than a decade, made himself the business partner of a former president and established himself as the Young Napoleon of Finance. In truth, he was running a massive pyramid scheme. Drawing from...

I Am Troy Davis, coauthored by Jen Marlowe and Davis's sister Martina Davis-Correia, tells the intimate story of an ordinary man caught up in an inexorable tragedy. From his childhood in racially charged Savannah; to the confused events that led to the 1989 murder of a police officer; to Davis's sudden arrest,...

In the Whitechapel neighborhood of London in 1888, five women were horribly mutilated and murdered by the infamous killer, Jack the Ripper. Though there were many suspects, no one was ever caught. This recently discovered memoir from the 1920s introduces a new suspect: James Willoughby Carnac, who claims to have been the Ripper. He describes the events and geography of Whitechapel in 1888 with chilling accuracy and gives a credible motive for becoming the murderer--and for ending the killings. Ultimately the reader must decide if this is simply one of the earliest imaginings of the...

This absorbing book coincides with memories of my years as a detective. The graphic narrative in their self-exposed details, capture the complex mosaic of those stuck in an anti-social world where the web of crime, drugs and child abuse are all interwoven. -Susan Snow Detective (Ret.) Suffolk County Police Dept., Long Island, New York Sex Crimes Unit, Child Sexual Abuse Task Force, Homicide Squad

Dr. Eugene Barron's "Hungary Ghosts" offers a fresh look at the underworld of psychopaths and sociopaths, presented in their own words. Their stories are those of tragedy, destruction and...

Shortlisted, Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing

On a frigid February evening in 1805, Amos Babcock brutally murdered Mercy Hall. Believing that he was being instructed by God, Babcock stabbed and disembowelled his own sister, before dumping her lifeless body in a rural New Brunswick snowbank.

The Ballad of Jacob Peck is the tragic and fascinating story of how isolation, duplicity, and religious mania turned impoverished, hard-working people violent, leading to a murder and an execution. Babcock was hanged for the murder of his sister, but in...

To the press and the police, this secretive Don insisted he was nothing more than a simple man who enjoyed puttering about in his beloved vegetable garden on his Livingston, New Jersey, estate. In reality, the Boot was a...

The beautiful Hawaiian islands are the backdrop for this compelling true life story of a man trapped between the law and a life of drugs, crime and murder. The once hopeful heir to a family tradition of "To Serve and Protect" and how he spirals out of control. His parents' unconditional love, used as a means to an end, as they witness a son's gradual decline into the depths of hell.

This is an unflinching look at how an addict uses and abuses those around him, ultimately destroying everything. Staunton is a natural story teller and his authentic voice makes this dark tale bearable....

"Joseph Barboza is the most dangerous individual known."--FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, 1965

Joe Barboza knew that there were two requirements for getting inducted into the Mafia. You had to be Sicilian. And you had to commit a contract killing. The New Bedford-born mobster was a proud Portuguese, not Sicilian, but his dream to be part of La Cosa Nostra proved so strong that he thought he could create a loophole. If he killed enough men, if he did enough of the Mafia's dirtiest biddings, then they would have no choice...

The world was stunned when eighty-year old Cornelius Gurlitt became an international media superstar in November 2013 on the discovery of over 1,400 artworks in his 1,076 square-foot Munich apartment, valued at around $1.35 billion. Gurlitt became known as a man who never was - he didn't have a bank account, never paid tax, never received social security. He simply did not exist. He had been hard-wired into a life of shadows and secrecy by his own father long before he had inherited his art collection built on the spoliation of museums and Jews during Hitler's Third Reich. The ensuing...