Showing results for "Jazz" in True Crime

It was a crime that shocked the nation: the brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were intellectuals - too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. When they were apprehended, state's attorney Robert Crowe was certain that no defense could save the ruthless killers from the gallows.

In January 1923, 20-year-old Fritzie Mann left home for a remote cottage by the sea to meet a man whose identity she had revealed to no one. The next morning, the barely clad body of the beautiful and bewitching dancer washed up on lonely Torrey Pines beach, her party dress and possessions strewn about on the sand.

Edgar Laplante was a small-time grifter, an erstwhile vaudeville performer, and an unabashed charmer. But after years of playing thankless gigs and traveling with medicine shows, he decided to undertake the most demanding and bravura performance of his life. In the fall of 1917, Laplante reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, Cherokee nation leader - and total fraud.

Catch Me If You Can meets The Great Gatsby meets the hit Netflix series Lupin in this captivating true-crime caper. A skilled con artist and perhaps one of the most charming, audacious burglars in history, Arthur Barry slipped in and out of the bedrooms of New York’s wealthiest residents, even as his victims slept only inches away. He befriended luminaries such as the Prince of Wales and Harry Houdini and became a folk hero, touted in the press as “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived” and an “Aristocrat of Crime.”

Many tales from the Jazz Age reek of crime and corruption. But perhaps the era’s greatest political fiasco—one that resulted in a nationwide scandal, a public reckoning at the Department of Justice, the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, and an Oscar-winning film—has long been lost to the annals of history. In Crooked, Nathan Masters restores this story of murderers, con artists, secret lovers, spies, bootleggers, and corrupt politicians to its full, page-turning glory.

Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else—a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Indiana-born Vivian Gordon fluttered to New York in 1920 looking for fame and fortune. Before long, the flame-haired chorus girl parlayed her youth, beauty, and ambition into more profitable means as a tough and glamorous symbol of Prohibition-era excess. She was a speakeasy owner, blackmailer, high-end escort, extortionist, racketeer, and con woman. But given her dangerously intimate associations, Vivian was also a woman who knew too much and who rightfully feared for her life.

On the night of August 6, 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a newly appointed judge and prominent figure in many circles of Manhattan, hailed a taxi in the heart of Broadway and vanished into thin air. Despite a decades-long international manhunt led by the New York Police Department's esteemed Missing Persons Bureau, the reason for Crater's disappearance remains a confounding mystery.

It was a Roaring Twenties fatal attraction. Nettie Herskovitz was wealthy and widowed when she met Harry Diamond. The attentive, irresistibly sexy twenty-three-year-old suitor would become Nettie's fifth husband. He was also a bootlegger, pimp, and first-class hustler who thought he'd wed a goldmine. What Harry found instead was a fiercely independent older woman who was nobody's fool for long.

Colored is a weekly podcast that puts a primary focus on the true crime cases of Black and Brown people to help spread their stories.

This is Sisterhood Sit-In: Podcast featuring Jeannine A. Cook and Minista Jazz.  Take a literary journey through time and space with The Cook Sisters as they attempt to perform the ultimate social exorcism.  A true crime mystery meets magical realism experience where literature is the source code. Reimagine your favorite stories from authors such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Octavia E. Butler in a Sisterhood SIt-In.