When cops kill civilians, their union is on hand to defend them. In many cases this has come at the expense of the truth.

Before ending up in Rikers, Jeremy Wilson — if that’s his real name — had portrayed himself as a Scottish-born DJ, a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer, a professor at MIT, an Apple executive, a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States, and an Irish mobster. Among others.

Defensive end Shawn King was the 36th pick in the 1995 draft. His career with the Carolina Panthers didn’t turn out as planned.

Asunta Fong Yang was adopted as a baby by a wealthy Spanish couple. Aged 12, she was found dead beside a country road. Not long after, her mother and father were arrested.

There is a little-known network of 11 federal prisons in America called Criminal Alien Requirement facilities. They exclusively house men who lack U.S. citizenship and have been convicted of crimes. They are all run privately. And over the last 18 years, they have allowed scores of inmates to die from diseases that could have been treated.

How forensic anthropologist Sue Black does her job.

How an art shipper took advantage of the market’s opaque rules and shadowy deal-making to rip off a Russian oligarch.

Should having an intellectual disability disqualify a mother from raising her child?

How a distillery worker in Kentucky stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bourbon, one barrel at a time.

Life and death with the young and radicalized.

Government agencies have been trying to protect children for nearly 200 years. They are still failing.

The mysterious death of a champion Irish setter.

The story of Akai Gurley before he was killed by a New York City police officer.

Arno Smit bilked millions out of Tulare County dairy workers (and at least one wealthy widow). Then he disappeared.

A war criminal’s life on the run.

After his daughter died in a terrorist attack, Stephen Flatow won an unprecedented judgment against her killers. Then he had to figure out how to actually collect.

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy working for British intelligence, was poisoned. As he lay dying, he worked with detectives to find his killer.

After Daniel Rigmaiden was arrested for a multi-million dollar fraud, he didn’t argue that he was innocent. He wasn’t. But he couldn’t understand how he had been caught. Rigmaiden had covered his tracks meticulously — the only way the cops could’ve found him, he realized, was through some secret tracking device that they had never disclosed to the public.

What seems like a slam-dunk case against a mass murderer exposes widespread prosecutorial misconduct in Orange County.

A secret meeting, and short Q&A, with the drug lord while he was still on the lam.

Last February, John Jonchuck Jr. dropped his 5-year-old daughter off a bridge to her death. This is the story of what happened, and what didn’t, in the years before the murder made headlines.

After Brooke Melton died in a car crash, her parents approached attorney Lance Cooper to investigate. What he found in her 2005 Chevy Cobalt would lead to GM’s 30 million-vehicle recall.

Inside New Haven’s Special Victims Unit.

A case of peafowl dividing a neighborhood.

Rabbi Barry Freundel said he would help dozens of women convert to Judaism. In the process, he secretly videotaped them naked.