American True Crime

Known for deep dives into true crime, extremist ideologies and fringe subcultures, journalist Leah Sottile turns her investigative eye toward American New Age culture. Today, tarot cards, astrology and crystals are everywhere—from Instagram and TikTok, to upscale boutiques and pricey wellness retreats. Sottile investigates how the recent surge of interest in New Age ideas speaks to a culture that is woven into the very fabric of America, and how self-professed gurus like Love Has Won's Mother God and the mysterious channeler Ramtha have built devout followings because of it.

At first glance Gabriel Cardona is the poster-boy American teenager: great athlete, bright, handsome, and charismatic. But the streets of his border town of Laredo, Texas, are poor and dangerous, and it isn't long before Gabriel abandons his promising future for the allure of the Zetas, a drug cartel with roots in the Mexican military. His younger friend, Bart, as well as others from Gabriel's childhood join him in working for the Zetas, boosting cars and smuggling drugs, eventually catching the eye of the cartel's leadership.

The notorious Gotti family is the stuff of mob legend. The "Dapper Don", John Gotti Sr., and his son John A. "Junior" Gotti ran New York's powerful Gambino crime family and were well known for their flamboyant style and brutal ways, an image perpetuated in popular Mafia mythology. John Alite, a mob hit man, associate, and close friend of the Gottis, has a very different story to tell.

It is dawn on Thursday, 14 February 2019, and armed FSB agents are raiding Michael Calvey’s Moscow apartment. He is being arrested for a crime that never happened.

In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington write a true story of Southern Gothic horror - of two innocent men wrongly convicted of vicious crimes and the legally condoned failures that allowed it to happen. Balko and Carrington will shine a light on the institutional and professional failures that allowed this tragic, astonishing story to happen, identify where it may have happened elsewhere, and show how to prevent it from happening again.

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes listeners inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight gang members in prison.

In the world of high finance, multibillion-dollar Wall Street banks greedily guard their secrets. Enter Robert Kerbeck, a working actor who made his real money lying on the phone, charming people into revealing their employers’ most valuable information. In this exhilarating memoir that will appeal to fans of The Wolf of Wall Street and Catch Me If You Can, unsuspecting receptionists, assistants, and bigshot executives all fall victim to “the Ruse.”

On a stormy Thanksgiving Eve in 1971, a man known only as “Dan Cooper” boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305, claimed to have a bomb, and demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. After releasing the passengers in Seattle, he vanished mid-flight—parachuting into the freezing darkness over the Pacific Northwest. He was never seen again. Decades later, the case remains the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history. Despite an exhaustive FBI investigation, Cooper’s identity and fate remain a mystery, fuelling endless speculation and intrigue. In The Man Who Wasn't There, Mark Stokes ...

In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth? In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind.

En los años veinte, la comunidad india de los Osage en Oklahoma era la población de mayor renta per cápita del mundo. El petróleo que yacía bajo sus propiedades les convirtió en millonarios: construyeron mansiones, tenían chóferes privados y mandaban a sus hijos a estudiar a Europa. Pero un espiral de violencia asoló esta comunidad indígena cuando sus miembros empezaron a morir y a desaparecer en extrañas circunstancias. La familia de una mujer Osage, Mollie Burkhart, se convirtió en un objetivo principal.

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little-known aspects of the Civil War: The stories of four courageous women - a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow - who were spies. After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

Blending history and memoir, retired U.S. Marshal Mike Earp - a descendant of the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp - offers an exclusive and fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the most storied law enforcement agency in America, illuminating its vital role in the nation's development for more than two hundred years. Setting his own experiences within the long history of the U.S. Marshals service, Earp offers a moving and illuminating tribute to the brave marshals who have dedicated their lives to keeping the nation safe.

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand.

We all love a mystery - but what about a mystery that has no solution? Delve into the shadowy world of unsolved disappearances and people who have vanished without a trace, never to be seen again. Such strange and chilling tales run the gamut of the terrifying and the bizarre and include crime victims, lost explorers, ships vanished at sea, outdoor disappearances, and supernatural mysteries that defy all explanation.

It's no secret that federal agencies are waging a broad global war against terror. But, for the first time, in this memoir, an active Muslim American federal agent reveals his experience infiltrating and bringing down a terror cell in North America. Due to his ongoing work for the FBI, Elnoury writes under a pseudonym. An Arabic-speaking Muslim American, a patriot, a hero: To many Americans, it will be a revelation that he and his team even exist, let alone the vital and dangerous work they do keeping all Americans safe.

A blend of Manhunt, Killing Pablo, and Zero Dark Thirty, this sensational investigative high-tech thriller - soon to be a major motion picture from Sony - chronicles a riveting chapter in the 20th-century drug wars: the exclusive inside story of the American lawman and his dangerous eight-year hunt that captured El Chapo - the world's most wanted drug kingpin who evaded the law for more than a decade.

On 13th February 2017, the small town of Delphi, Indiana, was forever changed. Best friends Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, set out to explore the Monon High Bridge trail on a day off from school. They never returned. The next day, their bodies were discovered near the trail, and a haunting audio clip captured by Libby on her phone—of a man saying, "Down the hill"—became a chilling clue in a case that would grip the nation. Down the Hill delves deep into the investigation that spanned years, baffled seasoned detectives, and drew amateur sleuths from around the world. With ...

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in Northwestern British Columbia. The corridor is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis. Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate in which Indigenous women and girls are overpoliced yet underprotected.

No other event in the last fifty years is shrouded in myth like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Today, we remember this moment for the 76 people, including 20 children, who died in the fire; for its inspiration of the Oklahoma City bombing; and for the wave of anti-government militarism that followed. What we understand far less is what motivated the Davidians’ enigmatic leader, David Koresh.