In the late 90s, an American man adopted a 5-year-old from the Ukraine. A decade later, one of the two would be accused of molesting young boys. The other would be charged with murder.

Darren Lumar lived in mansions he didn’t own, ran companies that didn’t make a dime, went to colleges that didn’t exist and slept with “any number of women” despite being married to James Brown’s daughter. When he was murdered, the cops had a problem: too many possible suspects.

Adam Wheeler lied on his college application. Lawrence Summers facilitated the destruction of the global economy.

Only one of these Harvard men was given jail time.

When U.S. customs law met abstract art in the form of a bird, “shimmering and soaring toward the ceiling while the lawyers debated whether it was an ‘original sculpture’ or a metal ‘article or ware not specially provided for’ under the 1922 Tariff Act.”

When the Rolling Stones played Altamont.

How and why did 200 pages of the Aleppo Codex, “the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible,” go missing?

Two men named Nathan committed murders. Only one received a death sentence.

Police and scientists investigate an outbreak.

The story of the Norway massacre, as told by the survivors.

Greg Ousley killed his parents and has been locked up for nineteen years.

Is that enough?

On the evening of November 7th 1974, the 7th Earl of Lucan, an inveterate gambler and Backgammon champion with a taste for power boats, snuck into his estranged wife’s basement. He then bludgeoned their nanny with a lead pipe and placed her in a canvas sack, before attempting to murder his wife. Recognizing his voice, she convinced him that she could him escape, then slipped out a bathroom window. Lord Lucan was never seen again.

The triple life of G-Rock: upscale house painter, lifelong Crip, FBI informant.

What happens when a complete stranger becomes convinced you’re the Zodiac killer.

The murderous tale of Washington D.C. fabulist Albrecht Muth and his late wife Viola Drath.

The story of a Ponzi schemer who became the mark.

How the author became tangled up with an international con man who may or may not have murdered several people.

John MacNeil was convicted by the state of Massachusetts of second-degree murder. He was given a life sentence. He escaped. He was caught. Through an incredible feat of jailhouse lawyering, he somehow got himself paroled and exiled to Canada. Then he came home.

The curious case of SpongeBob SquarePants illustrator Todd White, three ninjas, and an art caper.

Perpetually reinvented through experimental chemistry, manufactured in Asian mills, packaged in foil with names like White Slut Concentrated and Charley Sheene for use as “hookah cleaner,” distributed in college town head shops, snorted and injected by hardened addicts and high school thrill seekers alike, bath salts may be the strangest and most volatile American drug craze since crack. And they’re (quasi) legal.

How a Mexican drug cartel makes its billions.

In the remote wilderness along northern British Columbia’s Highway 16, at least 18 women have gone missing over the past four decades. Is it the work of a serial killer or multiple offenders?

On the Mexican drug cartel accused of laundering money with race horses.

A 21-year-old’s audacious real estate scam and subsequent escape.