Curated playlist
American people convicted of fraud
- Joey ButtafuocoIn January 1993, Madonna finished performing her song "Bad Girl" on Saturday Night Live and tore up an 8-by-10 photograph of Joey Buttafuoco. She yelled "Fight the real enemy!" at the audience. The stunt spoofed Sinéad O'Connor, who had…
- L. Ron HubbardL. Ron Hubbard, the American writer who founded Scientology, once told his wife exactly what he wanted from life. In a letter, he declared: "I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form…
- Jeffrey SkillingJeffrey Skilling sat for a PBS Frontline interview in March 2001 and described the company he helped run in the plainest moral terms. He said, "We are the good guys. We are on the side of angels." Before that year ended, Enron had filed…
- John A. GottiJohn Angelo Gotti, called Junior, sat through four racketeering trials between 2004 and 2009, and not one of them ended in a conviction. Yet he had already been to prison. In 1999 he was jailed for racketeering, after running the Gambino…
- Danny PorushDanny Porush once told securities regulators that he was merely "a figurehead" at his own brokerage. Born in February 1957, he became one of the best-known names in a stock fraud case that unfolded across the 1990s. Whether the figurehead…
- Jordan BelfortJordan Ross Belfort is an American former stockbroker who spent 22 months in prison for fraud. He is also the author of a memoir that became a major film. For years he ran a brokerage that defrauded its own customers. Then he helped the…
- Elizabeth HolmesElizabeth Holmes was twenty-nine years past her first day at Stanford when Forbes named her the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States. That was in 2015. The magazine based its judgment on a valuation of…
- Billy McFarlandBilly McFarland sold a luxury island weekend, and the guests who flew to Great Exuma in the Bahamas found tents and pre-packaged sandwiches. They had been promised lavish villas and fine meals. The festival, planned for April 2017, was…
- Tim DonaghyThe FBI found NBA referee Tim Donaghy by accident while chasing something else.
- Lou PearlmanIn June 2007, a tourist couple from Germany noticed a man staying at a hotel in Nusa Dua, on the Indonesian island of Bali. Their sighting ended a search that had stretched across several continents. On the 14th of June 2007, the man was…
- Abby Lee MillerAbby Lee Miller, the Pittsburgh dance teacher who became a fixture of reality television, once described what she had parted with in a very particular way. In December 2022, a newspaper reported that she had sold her original Pittsburgh…
- Larry Ray (criminal)In September 2010, a 50-year-old man moved into a student apartment at Sarah Lawrence College, a liberal arts school in Yonkers, just north of New York City. His name was Larry Ray, born Lawrence Grecco, and he had a simple reason to be…
- DMXDMX was the first artist to open five straight studio albums at number one on the Billboard 200.
- Kevin MitnickKevin Mitnick was twelve years old when he asked a Los Angeles bus driver where he could buy a ticket punch. His stated reason was "a school project." The driver told him. Then a dumpster beside the bus company garage supplied the rest, a…