The gamblers and teenage cons who haunted New York City’s 60s-era all night bowling alleys.

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.

Behind the tabloid story of the “murder orphan” in Queens.

At various points, Thomas Mitchell was a novelist, an attorney, a scientist, a Hollywood dealmaker and a CIA higher-up. He was also a con man.

“When I’m in Nigeria, I find myself looking at the passive, placid faces of the people standing at the bus stops. They are tired after a day’s work, and thinking perhaps of the long commute back home, or of what to make for dinner. I wonder to myself how these people, who surely love life, who surely love their own families, their own children, could be ready in an instant to exact a fatal violence on strangers.”

“For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back.”

How a couple made millions on uncanny forgeries.

How one woman is monitoring the jihadi network from a home office in Montana.

Ten years after D.C. area sniper shootings, an interview with Lee Boyd Malvo.

A mystery writer moves into an apartment where a grisly crime was committed.

A family’s struggle with mental illness and the criminal justice system.

Joe Arridy had an IQ of 46. In 1939, he was executed for a crime he neither understood nor committed.

The rise of the “wildly lucrative” herbal incense business, and the downfall of one company.

Is a Marine responsible for a series of violent attacks against women?

It started as a bluebird New Year’s Day in Mount Rainier National Park. But when a gunman murdered a ranger and then fled back into the park’s frozen backcountry, every climber, skier, and camper became a suspect—and a potential victim.

Did a handsome young Green Beret doctor kill his pregnant wife and two daughters? Or, as he claims, did a group of candle-carrying hippies carry out a vicious home invasion while chanting “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs”? A mystery that spanned three decades.

A profile of Griselda Blanco, aka the “Black Widow,” who pioneered the cocaine trade in New York and Miami.

The rise and fall of Lisette Lee, the self-proclaimed “Korean Paris Hilton,” who was busted for drug trafficking.

Two brothers dreamed of baseball stardom. One would end up killing the other.

Ervil LeBaron, the Mormon Manson, terrorized Mexico’s Mormon compounds, ordering the killing of enemies and relatives alike. Even after he was captured, followers continued treat the “Hit List” he left behind as the word of God.

How Bernardo Provenzano, “boss of all bosses of the Sicilian Mafia” and fugitive for more than 40 years, got caught.

On the O.J. Simpson verdict and the Million Man March.

The rise and fall of Mickey the Pope, the founder of a New York City marijuana delivery business.

Life inside a provincial Russian drug den. Originally appeared in Russky Reporter.

“What could possibly be funnier than depositing a perfectly ridiculous, obviously false, fake cheque?”