Showing results by publisher "The Atavist" in All Categories

The bomb appeared early one morning in an upstairs office of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino near Lake Tahoe, an enigmatic box covered in a bewildering array of switches. A neatly typed letter explained that the box contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite. It was the largest improvised explosive device in American history - and its creator promised to explain how to remove it safely if the casino delivered $3 million by helicopter to a remote landing site in the mountains.

In 1948, a young Australian mining engineer named Ben Carlin set out to do the impossible: circumnavigate the globe, by land and sea, in a single vehicle. The vehicle in question was an amphibious jeep developed by the U.S. Army, which Carlin christened Half-Safe, after a deodorant slogan. It was a mechanical mongrel that was supposed to move with equal ease across land and water but in practice wasn't much good for either one. Undaunted, Carlin and his wife Elinore set off across the Atlantic Ocean with dreams of fame and fortune, and of carving a small notch in history.

Nobody would've figured the kids from the sleepy beach town of Coronado, California, for criminal masterminds. They were just some hippie surfers, high school friends who'd come up with the idea of swimming bundles of marijuana across the border from Tijuana during the summer of 1969. Within a decade, however, the Coronado Company had become the largest pot-smuggling operation on the West Coast, a $100 million empire with outposts from Mexico to Morocco to Thailand.

In 1910, the United States - its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted - was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.

It was the spring of 1987, and crack cocaine had turned whole swaths of Detroit into veritable combat zones. The city thought it had seen everything - until one evening that May, when the police arrested a 17-year-old kid named Rick Wershe. They called him White Boy Rick. In a city known for its fraught racial divide, Wershe had somehow joined the ranks of the drug kingpins on the predominantly Black East Side before he was old enough to shave.

It was one of the strangest sights the Coast Guard pilots had ever seen: a tall-masted wooden ship, the kind that sailed centuries ago, capsizing in the wind and towering waves of Hurricane Sandy off the coast of North Carolina. It looked like something out of a movie - and, in a way, it was. The ship was the Bounty, a replica of a British merchant vessel of the same name whose crew famously mutinied in 1789. She had been built for a Marlon Brando film in the 1960s - and now she was sinking, her 16-person crew fleeing into the sea amid the splintered wood and torn canvas.

They called him the Gold Czar. In the lawless Colombian gold-mining town of Segovia, he was rarely spoken of in more than a whisper. But investigators were convinced he was behind the gangland killing of several local mine owners - a massacre that many believed was responsible for the nightmarish wave of violence that turned the town into one of the world's murder capitals. The question was: Could they prove it?

The world had never seen a crime wave quite like it. Starting in early 2011, thieves descended upon dozens of natural-history museums across Europe armed with crowbars, sledgehammers, and tear-gas grenades, interested in only one thing: antique rhinoceros horns. By 2013, they had stolen nearly a hundred horns in all, worth millions of dollars on the international black market. The only thing more unusual than the crimes themselves was the law enforcement's theory about who was responsible: a handful of families from rural Ireland known as the Rathkeale Rovers.

What would you do if you were given the opportunity to become another person - one whose life promised to be more glamorous and prosperous than your own? That was the question posed to Judith Patterson when, at age 33, she met the birth mother who had given her up for adoption as a child, who now revealed to her an extraordinary secret. Patterson, her mother told her, was the illegitimate daughter of a Texas oil mogul, one of the most powerful businessmen in the country in his day.

Before Ian Fleming there was Dennis Wheatley. A best-selling spy novelist at the outset of World War II, Wheatley became a master of deception for Great Britain, turning pulp fiction fantasies into real-life espionage. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg tells the amazing true story of one man who applied the plots of his own novels to the battlefield - and changed the course of history.

Vanessa Veselka grew up a child in motion. After her parents split, she'd lived in nine states by the age of seven, eventually landing with her mother in 1970s Greenwich Village. Along the way she became enthralled with a distant part of her identity: her father's ceremonial adoption into the Tlingit, an Alaskan native people of legendary martial prowess. As an adult her childhood memories of Tlingit warrior tales would transform into a quest to understand her own connection to a distant people and their history.

Early on the morning of September 1, 1996, the Israeli military began preparing for a war with Syria they were convinced was imminent. The Israelis had received top-secret intelligence from a Syrian general and informant code-named Red Falcon, recruited 23 years earlier by Mossad spy Yehuda Gil - himself known as "the man of a thousand faces." Gil had been the general's sole handler, the conduit of decades of critical intelligence. But now, on the brink of war, questions arose about who exactly was handling whom. What information was real and what was a lie?

Lifelong baseball fanatic and former college ball player Abe Streep had long since grown disillusioned with the slick spectacle of modern major-league baseball when he discovered the Santa Fe Fuego, a scrappy upstart team struggling through its first season in an independent professional league that few baseball fans had even heard of. The Fuego players were paid barely fifty dollars a week.

In the mid-1920s, young children began to vanish from neighborhoods around New York City. It took the police a decade to find their abductor, an unassuming 64-year-old handyman named Albert Fish. Fish had committed crimes of unspeakable horror: He had not only abducted and murdered the children, but also tortured and, in some cases, eaten them. During Fish's trial, some of the country's most prominent psychiatrists debated the exact nature of Fish's crimes. Was he evil or insane? Who had the power to determine where one ended and the other began?

When Frank Milliken died in his home, his wife Janet and their two children couldn't bear to live among reminders of him. They left their home in California and moved to Pennsylvania to start over in new surroundings. The house they bought, an airy colonial on a quiet street, seemed idyllic. But once they moved in, things started to go wrong. Odd sounds, strange sensations, whispers from the neighbors; the Millikens began to suspect that their ghosts had followed them across the country.

Author Cris Beam left her mother's home at age 14, driven out by a suburban household of hidden chaos and mental illness. Her mother, a descendant of William Faulkner, told neighbors and family that her daughter had died. The two never saw each other again. Nearly twenty-five years later, after building her own family and happy home life, a lawyer called to say her mother was dead. In this story about the fragility of memory and the complexity of family, Beam decides to look back at her own dark history, and for the secret to her mother's madness.

Joseph Gutheinz is on a mission to save the moon. Decades ago, astronauts brought back 850 pounds of rocks from their lunar journeys; the U.S. gave some away as "goodwill" gifts to the world's nations. Over time, many of them disappeared, stolen or lost in the aftermath of political turmoil, and offered for millions on the black market. Gutheinz, first as a NASA investigator and then the leader of an intrepid group of students, has dedicated his life to getting them back.

On her deathbed, David Dobbs's mother Evelyn Jane revealed a secret she'd kept for 60 years about the man she had truly loved, and lost. His name was Norman "Angus" Zahrt, a married World War II flight surgeon with whom she'd engaged in a secret love affair, just before he deployed to the Pacific and disappeared. Intrigued by his mother's hidden longing, Dobbs embarked on a reporter's quest to uncover Zahrt's fate, and that of his family. The story he returned with is an extraordinary tale of love, war, and how we confront the lost chances in our lives.

At a remote military base in the Pacific Northwest, Navy sonar technicians hear a confounding sound. It is the voice of a whale, but one that sings at a frequency - 52 hertz - never before heard by scientists, and inaudible to other members of its species. The whale seems to be alone in the Pacific Ocean, unable to communicate with its kind.

It was known as the Living Grave: A remote Hawaiian peninsula called Kalaupapa, housing the largest settlement for leprosy patients in the United States. Once it had been a forbidding place of exile, inhabited by thousands of the disease's victims who had been removed from their families and confined against their will, far away from a society that feared and misunderstood their condition.