Curated playlist

Prisoners and detainees of the United States federal government

Ghislaine MaxwellOn the 29th of December 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Ghislaine Maxwell of sex trafficking of a minor. Maxwell, a British former socialite, had moved for decades through the social circles of London and Manhattan. Her friends…
Ezra PoundEzra Pound cut T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land by about half. Eliot called the edits proof of Pound's critical genius.
Carlo GambinoCarlo Gambino spent more than fifty years in organized crime and was locked in a prison cell for less than two of them. In New York, his name now belongs to an entire Mafia family. The men around him were shot, jailed, forced into…
Elijah MuhammadElijah Muhammad, born Elijah Robert Poole, once said, "I seen enough of the white man's brutality to last me 26,000 years." He explained that before the age of 20 he had witnessed white people carry out the lynchings of three black men.…
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…
Larry NassarLarry Nassar, whose full name is Lawrence Gerard Nassar, was born on the 16th of August 1963 and trained as an osteopathic physician. For decades, parents and athletes trusted him with the care of young bodies. In 2016, after an…
Steve BannonSteve Bannon still earns money every time Seinfeld airs. His bank took a stake in five shows instead of a fee.
Joseph BonannoJoseph Bonanno, nicknamed Joe Bananas, headed a New York crime family from 1931 until 1968. He took command at just 26, which made him one of the youngest bosses any crime family has ever had. On the 21st of October 1964, the day before he…
Manuel NoriegaManuel Noriega received his first payment from the United States in 1955, and it came to just $10.70. He belonged to a socialist youth group then, and the money is reported to have been a reward for informing on his comrades. By the 1980s…
Frank LucasFrank Lucas liked to ask one question when he explained how he moved heroin. "Who the hell is gonna look in a dead soldier's coffin?" He put it that way in an interview for a New York magazine article published in 2000. Lucas operated in…
Marcus GarveyMarcus Garvey was declared Provisional President of Africa in August 1920, even though he had never set foot on the continent. The title came during a conference organized by his Harlem-based movement, while an estimated 25,000 people…
Joey MerlinoJoseph Salvatore Merlino, known as Skinny Joey, was born on the 13th of March 1962 and rose to become the reputed boss of the Philadelphia crime family. His reign ran from the 1990s until 2024. Once, a television reporter asked him about a…
George JungIn the 2001 biopic Blow, Johnny Depp played George Jacob Jung, the American smuggler nicknamed Boston George and El Americano. Jung is often described as a major figure in the United States cocaine trade of the 1970s and early 1980s. He is…
Sam GiancanaSam Giancana, who once ran the Chicago Outfit, died on the night of the 19th of June 1975 in the basement kitchen of his house in Oak Park, Illinois. At around 11 p.m., his caretaker, Joseph DiPersio, found the body on the floor. A gunman…
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…
Matthew MullerMatthew Muller was once nominated as one of the American Bar Association's Techiest Lawyers. He held a Harvard law degree, an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps and a reputation for fighting deportations. Then, in 2015, he was…
DMXDMX was the first artist to open five straight studio albums at number one on the Billboard 200.
David CarpenterDavid Joseph Carpenter is the American serial killer whom the press came to call the Trailside Killer. In 1980, detectives in Marin County, California, were searching for a man in his twenties or thirties. Carpenter was 50. Pathologists…
Charles PonziCharles Ponzi, born Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi, once described his arrival in America to a reporter for The New York Times. "I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left…
T.I.T.I. became a worldwide star under a name that, by his own account, almost nobody had ever used for him in real life. The Atlanta rapper, born Clifford Joseph Harris Jr., said as much to MTV News in October 2015. "It's kinda awkward to be…
Sonny FranzeseSonny Franzese walked out of the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, on the 23rd of June 2017, at the age of 100. On that day he was the oldest federal inmate in the United States, and the only centenarian in federal custody.…