War True Crime

A rousing tale of espionage and unsung valor, this is the captivating true story of Vera Atkins, Great Britain's spymistress from the age of 25. With her fierce intelligence, blunt manner, personal courage, and exceptional informants, Vera ran countless missions throughout the 1930s. After rising to the leadership echelon in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a covert intelligence agency formed by Winston Churchill, she became head of a clandestine army in World War II.

This book explores thirteen bizarre “murder” stories that have taken place in Tennessee over the past two centuries. The first story related here takes place around 1798 and the last takes place in 1998. These stories span the breadth of Tennessee from the Smoky Mountains, to the Mississippi River and most points between. Some of these stories are about famous persons and others are about powerful persons. Some are about persons that are unknown to all but a few. One story is about an abused animal.

From the award-winning author of Mafia Confession: "King of Bootleggers" Murder and City of Betrayal: The Genovese Family's Springfield Crew comes his most explosive true crime chronicle yet, Outlaw Bikers and the Mob. Montreal was always a city of shadows. The cobblestones told stories, but the real power pulsed beneath, in smoky backrooms, strip-club VIP lounges, and the hush of late-night meetings where names were never said out loud. This wasn’t fiction. It wasn’t a movie. This was the underworld’s frontline. And for a time, it was ruled by an unholy alliance: the Sicilian Mafia ...

On one of those magically white winter nights, my mother took me in her arms and shut the doors behind her. We left my drunken father in the name of a better life. And the name of that better life was Tom, a local gangster with the face of the devil himself. I remember looking at my mother's bloody face bashed into the ground, teeth scattered around her limp body. I understood then that one of us was going to die. Fortunately, I was right!

When Aline Griffith was born in Pearl River, New York, in 1923, one might have guessed from her exceptional beauty that a career as an actress or model might be in her future. Few would have imagined that twenty-one years later, she would find herself in Spain as a deep-cover OSS agent, infiltrating the highest levels of Spanish society, or that five years later still, she would marry a Spanish grandee and become one of the most watched, most admired, most fascinating women of international society. This is the story of Aline, Countess of Romanones, a story of courage, beauty and success that is far more exciting than any fictionalized thriller.

Weird but True Stories from the 1950's: Bizarre, Shocking, and Unbelievable Tales from America’s Atomic Age Think you know the 1950's? Think again. Beneath the surface of poodle skirts, chrome diners, and black-and-white TV was a decade overflowing with mystery, irony, and stranger-than-fiction true stories. This captivating collection reveals ten astonishing real-life events from the 1950's that defy expectation and logic—each one verified and rooted in historical fact. From radar panic over Washington D.C. to the eerie Phantom Whistler of New Jersey, from mid-air collisions with ...

June 20, 1991. A five-man hit team waited in a car outside the Long Island home of Victor Orena, the acting crime boss of the Colombo crime family. Orena recognized the vehicle—and managed to escape with his life. Over the next year, more shots would be fired in what would become the last major mob war in New York's crime-soaked history—and one of the bloodiest. The war ended with Orena's 1992 arrest and conviction for racketeering.

On an August night in 1994, French counterespionage officers seized the world's most wanted terrorist from a villa in the Sudan. After more than two decades on the run, Carlos "the Jackal" had finally been caged. For years he had murdered and bombed his way to notoriety, evading capture thanks to powerful backers and the blunders of Western secret services. Jackal is the definitive biography of this self-proclaimed "professional revolutionary", ladies man, and cold-blooded killer.

Before the internet became widely known as a global tool for terrorists, one perceptive US citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security. But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll's dramatic firsthand account is "a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping" - Smithsonian.

The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, which sets the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. Doctors from Hell is a significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.

A power-hungry baroness with two lovers disrupts life on an Eden-like island in the Galápagos, and an isolated community descends into madness and murder—a true story of utopia gone wrong from New York Times bestselling author Abbott Kahler. “Abbott Kahler’s wickedly gothic tale confronts...

Freddie Scappaticci was born in 1946 and raised in a deeply nationalist area of Belfast. When the Troubles broke out in 1969, he joined the Provisional IRA, where he quickly rose through the ranks, becoming commander of Belfast in 1984. From the outside, Scappaticci appeared to be a dedicated volunteer, but inwardly, he had become disenchanted with the IRA and, in 1977, he started working for British intelligence.

Tragedy unfolded on April 19, 1995, when a massive bomb exploded in America's Heartland, killing 168 people, including fifteen children. History says the Oklahoma City bombing was lone wolf terrorism. But haunting fresh evidence points instead to a neo-Nazi plot in which the FBI played a hidden role. The FBI launched the biggest manhunt in its history for two suspected bombers. Yet they never captured the other suspect, known only as John Doe 2, who rode next to McVeigh in the bomb truck. Soon, the FBI canceled the search, saying eyewitnesses who saw John Doe 2 were mistaken.

Author Jason Ryan takes us back to the heady days before drug smuggling was synonymous with deadly gunplay. During this golden age of marijuana trafficking, the country's most prominent kingpins were a group of wayward and fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Les Riley, Barry Foy, and their comrades eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure, and it was greed, lust, and disaster at sea that ultimately caught up with them, along with the law.

In Mossad, authors MichaelBar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal take us behind the closed curtain with riveting, eye-opening, boots-on-the-ground accounts of the most dangerous, most crucial missions in the agency's 60-year history.

Within FBI field operative circles, groups of people known as “Special” by their titles alone, Michael R. McGowan is an outlier. Over the course of his career, McGowan has worked more than 50 undercover cases. In this extraordinary and unprecedented book, McGowan will take listeners through some of his biggest cases, from international drug busts to the Russian and Italian mobs to biker gangs and contract killers to corrupt unions and SWAT work. Ghost is an unparalleled view into how the FBI, through the courage of its undercover Special Agents, nails the bad guys.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Inspired by the history of the Danes and their Jewish neighbors who worked together to defy the Reich, Miracle Across the Sound is a story of bravery, love, and true freedom. It is September 1943, and Jews are still free in German-occupied Denmark. But that is about to change. Jewish college student Fleming Lund and his Lutheran former fiancée, Liesel Prestur, have not spoken since they ended their engagement. When Leisel witnesses the Gestapo hauling her Jewish neighbors from their home in the middle of the night, she sneaks off to warn the Lunds. ...

In this disturbing exposé, journalist Paul L. Williams describes a secret alliance forged at the close of World War II by the CIA, the Sicilian and US mafias, and the Vatican to thwart the possibility of a Communist invasion of Europe. Williams presents evidence suggesting the existence, in many European countries, of "stay-behind" units consisting of 5,000 to 15,000 military operatives.

Blood feuds, billion-dollar cocaine empires, and the mafia you’ve never heard of.... For decades, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra stole the spotlight. But in the shadows of Calabria, another brotherhood was rising — one more disciplined, more secretive, and far deadlier. Today, the Ndrangheta is the richest and most powerful crime syndicate in the world, controlling up to 80% of Europe’s cocaine trade and laundering billions through banks, construction firms, and global finance. From kidnapped heirs chained in mountain caves to multi-ton shipments of cocaine ...

For eight years, two outlaw biker clubs fought to control street-level drug sales in Quebec, Canada. The notorious Hell's Angels went up against local drug dealers, the mafia, and a rival biker club, the Rock Machine. Many unfortunate bystanders got caught in the crossfire. When the smoke cleared and dozens of outlaws were arrested, over 150 people were dead. This true-crime book depicts the history of both clubs and the events known as the Quebec Bikers War.