Obinwanne Okeke was supposed to be a rags-to-riches Nigerian success story, was even featured on the cover of Forbes. Then the feds followed the money.

People in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, thought Lois Reiss was a nice wife and grandmother. If she had a vice, it was playing the slots. Then she committed murder.

Mexico City has one of the most ambitious and sophisticated video surveillance systems in the world. But it hasn’t stopped crime.

Texas juries send people to death row by making predictions about future violence. Racial bias has often played a troubling role. In the 1970s, one Supreme Court case paved the way.

For years, a tactical police unit in Mount Vernon, New York, reigned with impunity—protecting drug dealers, planting evidence, brutalizing citizens. Then one of its own started covertly documenting the abuse.

After the success of her novel Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen spent years trying to prove a man’s innocence. Now she’s “absolutely broke” and “seriously ill,” and her next book is “years past deadline.”

He was a powerful executive at some of the best-known companies in the world. Then he started robbing banks. The meteoric rise and dramatic fall of Steve Carroll, the high-flying corporate executive who wanted it all.

Rédoine Faïd loved the movies, and his greatest crimes were laced with tributes: to Point Break, Heat, and Reservoir Dogs. When he landed in a maximum-security prison, cinema provided inspiration once again.

When Brayden Bushby was charged with the death of Barbara Kentner, Indigenous faith in Canada’s legal system was put to the test.

It seemed like an easy crime to stop: protected Indonesian rainforest, cut for coffee farms. But a globalized economy can undermine even the best-laid plans.

The Charleston-based evangelicals had much in common: guns, God, Trump. What went wrong, only one of them could say.

Church-loving surf instructor Matthew Taylor Coleman fell into online conspiracy theories, then allegedly admitted to killing his kids to save the world. How did no one see it coming?

In just a few years, a Michigan woman took in millions of dollars, faking adoptions and ruining families’ lives along the way.

An intrepid expert with dozens of books to his name, Stéphane Bourgoin was a bestselling author, famous in France for having interviewed more than 70 notorious murderers. Then an anonymous collective began to investigate his past.

How the world’s most notorious drug lord was captured.

Previously: Patrick Radden Keefe on the Longform Podcast.

The preacher ran a prostitution ring out of his halfway house. The teenager posed as his nephew and later claimed he feared for his own life. Only one man they drove into the woods would survive.

On the cult founder, business magnate, pseudonymous internationally shown artist and ferry owner Yoo Byung-eun, who was found dead in the brush amidst empty liquor bottles.

This is what happens when you concoct game-fixing allegations against a Major League pitcher because of a perceived slight on Facebook.

In exchange for his surrender, the top Colombian drug lord was allowed to build his own jail, complete with a disco, jacuzzi, and waterfall. Now 23 years later, it’s a home for the elderly.

Nearly 70 years after Bugsy Siegel’s unsolved murder in Beverly Hills, a family finally comes forward: they know who did it.

In Goiânia, a city of 1.3 million in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, one in twenty homeless residents have been murdered in the last two years.

On the experimental favela police force UPP (aka “The Big Skull”) and their efforts to clean Rio’s largest slum in advance of the World Cup and Olympics.

A profile of Max Wade, a Marin County teenager on trial for stealing Guy Fieri’s Lamborghini and using it in the first drive-by in the history of Mill Valley, California.

It’s tempting to think Marco McMillian was killed because of his race, his sexuality, or because he was running for mayor. The truth is more elusive.

How the case of a poisoned college student in China, cold for 18 years, has suddenly turned into “what may be the largest amateur online manhunt in history.”