On the culture of misogyny and abuse at one of the nation’s largest megachurches.

How a small-town comptroller became the biggest municipal embezzler in U.S. history.

How a family man dentist got involved in an underage prostitution ring.

Inside the shadowy meetings between Chicago’s violent gang members and its elected officials.

Life inside the original Playboy Mansion.

How one man terrorized a small Illinois town.

On the unlikely friendship between Nelson Algren and the young writer during the final years of Algren’s life.

It was June of 1980 when Nelson called me breathlessly from the highway.

In June, 1942, a German submarine dropped four young Nazi agents off on a Florida beach. Their mission was to blow up bridges, factories, and Jewish-owned department stores. Among them was Herbert Haupt, the 22-year-old son of a German-American family in Chicago.

The life of Robert Earl Hughes, who at more than 1,000 lbs. was named largest man on earth by the Guinness Book of World Records.

When Chicago’s Stevens Hotel opened in 1927, it was the biggest hotel in the world. By the time it was closed, it had bankrupted and caused the suicide of a member of the Stevens’ family (which included a seven-year-old future Justice John Paul Stevens), and changed the city forever.

A veteran reporter investigates his own beating.