American True Crime

On July 15, 1997, Gianni Versace was shot and killed on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by serial killer Andrew Cunanan. But months before Versace’s murder, award-winning journalist Maureen Orth was already investigating a major story on Cunanan for Vanity Fair. Culled from interviews with more than four hundred people and insights gleaned from thousands of pages of police reports, Vulgar Favors tells the complete story of Andrew Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed world in which they lived . . . and died.

Meet Marcel and Sabrina, a hitman and a bookkeeper for the Mob. The couple should have never met, let alone fallen in love. When they decide to go against the grain, all hell breaks loose. Somebody wants them dead; they just don't know who. It could be Leo, Marcel's jealous older brother; Othello, Sabrina's crooked father; or it could be The Family, a roundtable of the top contenders in the underworld. There is no honor amongst thieves. Marcel and Sabrina will find the old adage to be true the hard way.

Hawaii, 1941. War clouds with Japan are gathering and the islands of Hawaii have become battlegrounds of spies, intelligence agents, and military officials - with the island's residents caught between them. Toiling in the shadows are Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy sent to Pearl Harbor to gather information on the U.S. fleet.

He didn’t want fame. He didn’t leave clues. He didn’t fit the mold. He was the FBI’s worst nightmare: a killer without a pattern. In Invisible Predator, author E.V. Black delivers a gripping true-crime account of Israel Keyes — one of the most cold-blooded and enigmatic serial killers in modern American history. Keyes crisscrossed the United States, murdering victims at random and burying "kill kits" years in advance to fuel a chilling campaign of violence that went undetected for over a decade. From the abduction of 18-year-old Samantha Koenig in Alaska to the unsolved murders he...

During the civil rights movement, the state of Mississippi created an elaborate spy network. Its mission was to preserve segregation by any means necessary—including voter interference, sponsorship of white supremacy groups, and even murder.

In this first volume, Ferrante traces the mafia's phenomenal "rise of empire" through larger-than-life characters and legendary mobsters as they provide alcohol to the American public during Prohibition, penetrate industrial labor unions, practically take over the island of Cuba and, with extraordinary vision, create the gambling mecca of Las Vegas.

This is a story about the dirty secrets of the most powerful people in the world—including Donald Trump. It is based on exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources—intelligence officers in the CIA, FBI, and the KGB, thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations, and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. American Kompromat shows that from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat was used in operations far more sinister than the public could ever imagine.

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.

Outsiders call Manuel a villain. After spending his youth entangled in inner-city gang warfare, he’s lied, robbed, and murdered his way to the top. His path was set long ago, when two killers massacred his family in front of him. While Manuel was able to take down one of the murderers, his bloodlust has grown for the killer who got away. When he gets the chance to complete his vengeance, the city cowers beneath his thirst for retribution....

The haunting account of the Delphi Murders, a double-murder case that has held an unrelenting grip on the American heartland for over six years. On February 13, 2017, two teenage friends went for a walk in the woods just outside the small city of Delphi, Indiana. They should have been safe — but Liberty German and Abigail Williams never made it home. The next day, searchers found their bodies in a clearing. The two girls had been brutally murdered.

One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert—after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life—went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the twenty-four-year-old: she was a Craigslist escort who had been fleeing a scene—of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County police, too, seemed to have paid little attention—until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan’s.

In 1949, things like this just didn’t happen: A quiet New Jersey resident took a morning walk with a 9 mm Luger pistol. In twelve minutes he murdered thirteen neighbors...and then went back to bed. Howard Unruh went from obscurity to infamy overnight. Even after his obsessive diaries were discovered - a catalogue of simmering rage, petty grievances, and sexual repression - the anomalous crime seemed incomprehensible. Succeeding decades would confirm that Unruh’s “Walk of Death” was just the beginning. The prototype for the modern mass murderer, he would usher in a new age of violence in America.

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club: a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.

In 2008 veteran journalist Evan Wright, acclaimed for his New York Times best-selling book Generation Kill and co-writer of the Emmy-winning HBO series it spawned, began a series of conversations with super-criminal Jon Roberts, star of the fabulously successful documentary Cocaine Cowboys. Those conversations would last three years, during which time Wright came to realize that Roberts was much more than the de-facto “transportation chief” of the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, much more than a facilitator of a national drug epidemic.

In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quits practicing law and starts trafficking whiskey. Within two years he's a multi-millionaire. The press calls him "King of the Bootleggers", writing breathless stories about the Gatsby-esque events he and his glamorous second wife, Imogene, host at their Cincinnati mansion, with party favors ranging from diamond jewelry for the men to brand-new cars for the women. By the summer of 1921, Remus owns 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States.

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.

Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes", Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places.

Northern Ireland, 1975. Violence has erupted on the streets of Belfast. After years as a guerilla army, the IRA is clashing with Loyalist gangs and heavily armed British soldiers. But the Troubles have spilled beyond the island: An ocean away, in the heart of Philadelphia’s Irish enclave, a teenage girl finds a letter in her mailbox. Inside is a bullet, and the message is clear: The next one is for you or your family. As reporter Ali Watkins reveals, the conflict in Northern Ireland might have gone very differently had it not been for a small ragtag band of gunrunners in the United States.

Randall Lee Smith is an American murderer who was active along the Appalachian Trail in Southwestern Virginia. On May 19, 1981, Smith murdered two 27-year-old social workers from Maine, Robert Mountford Jr. and Laura Susan Ramsay. Their murders were the first double homicide to occur in the Appalachian Trail.

A gang of train-robbing brothers. A vigilante army with hemp ropes. And a second act of violence that shocked the nation. In Civil War–era Indiana, the infamous Reno brothers turned rebellion into an art form. From petty cons to the nation’s first moving train robbery, they built a criminal empire fueled by bounty-jumping scams, counterfeit money, and fear. But when the justice system failed, a group of masked vigilantes took matters into their own hands, executing ten members of the gang in three midnight lynchings that blurred the line between justice and murder, and creating an ...