Crime

<p><span class="deck"> A corrupt lawyer and his complaisant ally ran San Francisco as their private preserve until a crusading editor toppled their plots and schemes, and sent one of them to jail</span> </p>

<p>The law was against the poor printer. The governor wanted his scalp. His attorneys were disbarred. Could anything save him—and free speech?</p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> One morning Cadet Johnson Whittaker was found battered and bleeding, trussed to his barracks bed. Who had done it, and why?</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">Thus Boss Richard Croker breezily dismissed charges of corruption. But the fortune he made from “honest graft” was not enough to buy him what he most wanted</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The city panicked with fear of the Mafia when the police chief was murdered</span> </span></p>

<p>Was there really a conspiracy to burn the town?</p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Today’s city, for all its ills, is “cleaner, less crowded, safer, and more livable than its turn-of-the-century counterpart,” argues this eminent urban historian. Yet two new problems are potentially fatal.</span> … </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">On a warm Florida evening in 1933 a madman with a pistol and a personality profile now all too familiar—“unskilled, unfriendly, unmoneyed, and unwell”—came within inches of altering the course of American history in one of its most critical moments</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">One of Ruth Snyder’s Crimes Was Murder</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> An Unfortunate Affair at Fullerton Which at the End is Amicably Adjusted.</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">In the shadow of Bunker Hill, bigots perpetrated an atrocity that showed a shocked nation that the fires of the Reformation still burned in the New World</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">—More than a century ago, the city of St. Louis enacted a well-thought-out plan to legalize vice. What went wrong? Everything</span> . </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> With the Depression pushing the studio toward bankruptcy, Warner Brothers had to resort to crime—and crime paid so well that the company was able to recruit the toughest guys that ever shot up a sound stage.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> In 1913 the Ouija board dictated a novel. Twenty years later it commanded a murder. It is most popular in times of national catastrophe, and it’s selling pretty briskly just now.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> Did the fifty-five statesmen meeting in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention know that a witch-hunt was taking place while they deliberated? Did they care?</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Eight generations back, the author discovered a forebear hanging on the family tree</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The Secret Service considered Emanuel Ninger a common counterfeiter. He saw himself as an American master of the impressionist school.</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The Lone Star state as it once was, proud, isolated, independent, the undiluted essence of America forever inventing itself out of the hardscrabble reality of the frontier</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Up until the last century in some parts of the country, a murderer’s guilt could legally be determined by what happened when he or she touched the victim’s corpse.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> Hard Looks at Hidden History</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> The penitentiary was invented in the United States as a more rational and humane way of punishing. It quickly ran into problems that still overwhelm us.</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck">Back in Prohibition days, the citizens of a West Virginia town decided to crack down on bootlegging and prostitution. The author remembers it well.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The legend of the most notorious of all outlaws belongs to the whole world now. But, to find the grinning teenager who gave rise to it, you must visit the New Mexico landscape where he lived his short life.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Sociologists continue to be vexed by the pathology of urban violence: Why is it so random, so fierce, so easily triggered? One answer may be found in this nation's Southern past.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">On the 20th anniversary of Watergate, a recently discovered diary reveals a similar conspiracy four decades earlier.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">On the hundredth anniversary of the unsolved double-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden, is it time to ask: What was going on in Lizzie Borden's family?</span> </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Why litigiousness Is a national character trait</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">During a single decade, Chicago invented modern organized crime and saw John Dillinger, the most famous of the hit-and-run freelancers, die in front of one of its movie houses. For those who know where to look, quiet streets and sad buildings still tell the story of an incandescent era.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Is trial by jury the essential underpinning of our system of justice or, as more and more critics charge, a relic so flawed that it should perhaps even be abolished? An experienced trial judge examines the historical evidence in the case.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><lead_in> IT BEGAN AS</lead_in> America’s most modern penal institution, and, for generations, the Vermont State Prison reflected the changing ways by which we thought we should punish our wrongdoers. Then, a tormented era and a ghastly crime combined to end its old career, and give it a surprising new one. </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">He was a Northerner. He was an industrialist. He was a Jew. And a young girl was murdered in his factory.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Can it be fair? Humane? Does it deter crime? These very current questions troubled Americans just as much in the day of the Salem witch trials as in the day of Timothy McVeigh.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">From law officer to murderer to Hollywood consultant: the strange career of a man who became myth</span></p>