Curated playlist
Prisoners who died in United States federal government detention
- Vito GenoveseOn the 2nd of June 1958, Vito Genovese sat before the McClellan Hearings of the United States Senate on organized crime, called there under subpoena. He answered nothing. Instead, he cited his Fifth Amendment rights under the Constitution…
- Charles HarrelsonCharles Harrelson went to prison for the murder of federal judge John H. Wood Jr., who was shot dead on the 29th of May 1979 in the parking lot outside his townhouse in San Antonio, Texas. No federal judge in the 20th century had been…
- Carmine PersicoCarmine Persico, known as Junior and as Immortal, had a projected prison release date of the 20th of March 2050. By then he would have been 117 years old. The sentence behind that date began in 1987, and he served 32 years of it. Yet the…
- Robert HanssenRobert Philip Hanssen, a veteran FBI agent, drove to Foxstone Park on the 18th of February 2001. The park sits near his home in the Washington suburb of Vienna, Virginia. He was there to leave a package of classified material at a dead…
- Ted KaczynskiTed Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times in 1995 and attached a promise to it. If the Times or The Washington Post printed his essay in full, he would "desist from terrorism." The essay ran to roughly 35,000 words and carried the…
- Bernie MadoffBernie Madoff told his own sons in December 2008 that the fund he ran was "just one big lie." Bernard Lawrence Madoff was an American financier, born in 1938, who had once served as chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange. He admitted to…
- Wilhelm ReichIn 1956, a United States court ordered six tons of Wilhelm Reich's books and papers burned.
- Whitey BulgerOn the 22nd of June 2011, agents in Santa Monica, California, used a ruse to lure an 81-year-old man out of his apartment. They arrested him without incident. He was James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr., who had once led the Winter Hill Gang,…
- 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…
- Gregory ScarpaGregory Scarpa Sr. sometimes left the numbers 666, the biblical number of the beast, on his victims' pagers. His longtime girlfriend Linda Schiro later recalled the habit. Scarpa was called the Grim Reaper and the Mad Hatter. He was a…
- John GottiJohn Gotti ran the Gambino crime family of New York City, and one of his fellow mobsters once delivered a harsh verdict on him. Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, the former underboss of the Lucchese crime family, said: "what John Gotti did was the…
- Anthony CassoAnthony Casso signed his letters "Tony Gaspipe." In 2006, writing to his biographer Philip Carlo from a federal cell, he made a startling statement for a man in his position. "I have always hated rats and as strange as it may sound I still…
- Anthony SalernoAnthony Salerno, known to everyone as Fat Tony, was 75 years old in October 1986 when Fortune magazine named him the most powerful, wealthy and influential gangster in America. It was an odd honor for a man whose health was failing. He had…
- Joseph Edward DuncanJoseph Edward Duncan III was recognized by strangers in a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in the early morning of the 2nd of July 2005. A waitress, a manager and two customers noticed a girl sitting with a man none of them…