In 1913 Charlie Birger began his career as a bootlegger, supplying southern Illinois with whiskey and beer. He was charismatic, with an easygoing manner and a cavalier generosity that made him popular. The stuff of legend, he was part monster, part Robin Hood. In the early days, he would emerge from his restaurant/saloon in tiny Ledford in Saline County with a cigar box full of coins and throw handfuls in the air for the children. Echoing the consensus on Birger, an anonymous gang member c...

The lives and loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton follows the poignant life story of twin sisters who were literally joined at the hip, set against the tumultuous backdrop of America during the first half of the 20th century. Daisy and Violet and an unforgettable cast of show-business characters come alive on the pages of this carefully researched and sensitively written biography.Reviews"Jensen's book is a testament to the fickleness of the entertainment worl...

A collection of strange-but-true crime tales featuring cops, lawyers, and some very unusual suspects . . .The fact-finding folks at Bathroom Readers' Institute have rounded up the best cops-and-robber articles we've ever done, plus a rogues' gallery of new offenders. You'll read about dumb crooks and criminal masterminds, mafia henchmen and low-level goons, ancient warriors and Old West gunslingers, crazed cops and jovial judges, and even a few loony lawyers and cr...

The man who revolutionized the way we think about baseball now examines our cultural obsession with murder—delivering a unique, engrossing, brilliant history of tabloid crime in America.Celebrated writer and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime throughout his life and has been interested in writing a book on the topic for decades. Now, with Popular Crime, James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh b...

The New York Times BestsellerWinner of the Texas Institute of Letters's Carr P. Collins AwardOne of Book Riot's Best Books of the YearIn nineteenth-century Austin, Texas, a ruthless murderer terrorized the city in what would soon become a story more shocking than any fiction.In the late 1800s, just as Austin was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a ...

The spellbinding story of one of the most celebrated kidnapping cases in American history—the kidnapping of Bobby Dunbar—and a haunting family mystery that took almost a century to solve.THE MOST NOTORIOUS KIDNAPPING CASE IN AMERICAN HISTORYIn 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar went missing in the Louisiana swamps. After an eight-month search that electrified the country and destroyed Bobby’s parents, the boy was found, filthy and hardly reco...

History remembers Arnold Rothstein as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, an underworld genius. The real-life model for The Great Gatsby's Meyer Wolfsheim and Nathan Detroit from Guys and Dolls, Rothstein was much more -- and less -- than a fixer of baseball games. He was everything that made 1920s Manhattan roar. Featuring Jazz Age Broadway with its thugs, speakeasies, showgirls, political movers and shakers, and stars of the Golden Age of Sports, this is a biography of the man who d...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women chronicles the powerful and spellbinding true story of a brutal race-based killing in 1981 and subsequent trials that undid one of the most pernicious organizations in American history—the Ku Klux Klan.On a Friday night in March 1981 Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. They were seeking to ...

An Edgar Award finalist for Best Fact Crime, The Man from the Train is an “impressive…open-eyed investigative inquiry wrapped within a cultural history of rural America” (The Wall Street Journal). In this groundbreaking work of historical true crime, legendary statistician and baseball writer Bill James applies his analytical genius to crack an unsolved century-old mystery surrounding one of the deadliest serial killers in American history.Between...

In this vivid biography Geoffrey C. Ward brings back to life the most celebrated — and the most reviled — African American of his age.Jack Johnson battled his way out of obscurity and poverty in the Jim Crow South to win the title of heavyweight champion of the world. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from no one and resolved to live as if color did not exist. While most blacks struggled simply to exist, he reveled in his riches and his fame, sleeping ...

Devils Walking stands as an important milestone in the ongoing struggle to create justice from truth, and perhaps even reconciliation in a nation that must collectively move in this direction or face an uncertain future.”—David Ridgen, Canadian filmmaker and director of award-winning documentary Mississippi Cold CaseAfter midnight on December 10, 1964, in Ferriday, Louisiana, African American Frank Morris awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Outside his home and ...

This true crime history chronicles more than a century in the life of a small Midwestern city with an outsized reputation for violence and vice.Gambling, prostitution and bootlegging have been going on in Steubenville for well over century. In its heyday, the city's Water Street red-light district drew men from hundreds of miles away, as well as underage runaways. The white slave trade was rampant, and along with all the vice crimes, murders became a weekly occurre...