An unidentified body found near the beach in Australia in 1948. An unclaimed suitcase. A coded note.

A woman posing as a non-profit worker kidnaps a formerly homeless pregnant woman and tries to claim her baby. [PART 1]

It is agreed that the 1977 political murder of a couple in Johannesburg was a political killing that covered up mysterious Swiss Bank deposits. Various reports implicate Cuban Nationalists, Italian Fascists and the CIA.

What’s Madoff like as a prisoner? According to his fellow inmates, he’s cheap (“You couldn’t get an ice-cream cone off him”), he’s unrepentant (“Fuck my victims”), and he’s eager to dole out financial advice.

[Part 2 of 2] The story behind this spring’s spate of retributive murders in Southwest D.C.

[Part 1 of 2] The story behind this spring’s spate of retributive murders in Southwest D.C.

Lenny makes $5,000 a week selling coke. It was easy to get into the business after finishing prep school. Getting out and going legit after his final score is proving much more difficult.

A teenage Florida hacker crew, millions of credit cards numbers stolen by driving by big box stores and entering their networks, $1.1 million in cash buried in a backyard, an FBI snitch,  and how it all fell apart.

How smallpox went from eradicated disease to the ideal weapon of bioterrorists.

It took a desperate screenwriter to find Max Mermelstein, Miami’s former coke overlord, after twenty-five years in hiding.

Step 1: awkward high school senior passes himself off as a flirtatious female student online. Step 2: he cons his male classmates into e-mailing him sexually explicit images of themselves. Step 3: extortion.

The Conficker ‘worm’ has replicated itself across tens of millions of computers. Only a few hundred people have the knowledge to recreate how, and no one (except its anonymous maker) fully understands why.

How two brothers, born of the same mother but adopted by different families, reunited and used a stolen $50k to fund a ride that started in New Jersey and ended with bullet-ridden cabins in the wilds of Alaska.

In 2005, the prisoner who had set the U.S. penal system record for years in solitary confinement was moved to what’s called “the Alcatraz of the Rockies”—a jail in Colorado built just for him.

In 2008, a Brooklyn cop grew gravely concerned about how the public was being served. So he began carrying a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.

The second installment of the Gaile Owens story. A former churchgoing mother of two from suburban Memphis, Owens is the first woman to be given the death penalty in Tennessee in nearly 200 years.

Las Vegas casinos operating in Macau rely on “junkets” to bring in the gambling elite, but the money and murder for hire trails lead straight to the Triads.

Gaile Owens was a churchgoing mother of two boys in suburban Memphis. Now she’s the first woman sentenced to die in Tennessee in nearly 200 years. The jury never heard her whole story; this is it.

The defining, minute-by-minute account of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

When the Feds sought the death penalty for four African-American drug dealers in Baltimore, the accused found a defense in the unlikeliest of places: the legal theories of white supremacists.

Helg Sgarbi had perfected the art of seducing, swindling, and blackmailing ultra-rich women across Europe. Fleecing a billionaire BMW heiress should have been the crowning achievement of his career.

In the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight, Marvin Harrison, the man who holds the NFL record for receptions in a season, may find himself with a permanent record of a different sort.

A rape case against a Deputy D.A. brought by a co-worker opens a window into a shockingly kinky and dysfunctional District Attorney’s office, brimming with conflict of interest.

In nine hours, Guinea-Bissau’s President and military leader were assassinated in separate incidents. Their dealings had turned the country into the runway of choice for drug smugglers and Hezbollah.

The story of how federal authorities blew the biggest anti-terror investigation of the past decade—the post-9/11 anthrax attacks—and nearly destroyed an innocent man.