English True Crime

A vain man of good looks, small means, and no family links to the mob, Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano steadily worked his way up to acting boss of the Bonanno crime family, becoming its leader when official boss Joseph Massino went to the clink in 2003. But at a time when the Mob was crawling with secret operatives and informants caving to government pressure to flip, Basciano obeyed the code of La Cosa Nostra. "I got faith in one guy," he told a group of mobsters during a secretly taped meeting.

Brooke Nolan is a battered child who makes an anonymous phone call about the escalating brutality in her home. When social services jeopardize her safety, condemning her to keep her father's secret, it's a glass of spilled milk at the dinner table that forces her to speak about the cruelty she's been hiding. In her pursuit of safety and justice, Brooke battles a broken court system that pushes to keep her father in the home.

The case began in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1922 and lasted for over a decade. The killer has never been found, and the case continues to fascinate true-crime aficianados. A bon vivant Episcopal minister, a not-so-virginal soprano in his choir. The wealthy wife. Her oddball brother. Their furtive maid. The snooping congregants. The bumbling detectives. And in the denouement, a trial, one of the more notable of America’s Jazz Age, covered by the likes of Damon Runyon, Dorothy Dix and James Thurber. All of it hanging on the dramatic testimony of a single, strange witness.

William Pepper was James Earl Ray's lawyer in the trial for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., and even after Ray's conviction and death, Pepper continues to adamantly argue Ray's innocence. This myth-shattering expose is a revised, updated, and heavily expanded volume of Pepper's original best-selling and critically-acclaimed book of the same name, with 26 years of additional research included. The result reveals dramatic new details of the night of the murder, the trial, and why Ray was chosen to take the fall for an evil conspiracy.

The incredible true story of one of America's largest ransom cases - and the massive FBI and police manhunt to bring the radical captors to justice.

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out stars' sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the best-selling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall.

Craig Glazer was an ordinary college student when he planned and successfully executed his first fake sting to get back at some drug dealers who had robbed him. The rush he got from the experience led him and a crew of 11 accomplices to mastermind a two-year, 33-sting spree that stretched coast to coast, posing as everything from local police to IRS agents and hotel managers.

After being released from jail, handsome and charming Paul John Knowles embarked on a gruesome joyride of kidnapping, rape, and murder across multiple state borders. As the manhunt gathered pace, the cold-blooded killing spree continued to defy detectives. How many more lives would be lost before the police finally caught up?

When a fancy car pulls up outside six-year-old Marie's home in 1959, her dad tells her she is going on holiday. But little does she know she will not see her home again for four long years. Her family cannot afford to keep her at home. Marie tells the story of how she was taken away from a poor but happy and loving home life to live in a convent - away from everyone and everything she holds dear. Her hair is bluntly chopped, her clothes are taken away and her name is changed. Then a horrific ritual of physical, sexual and mental abuse begins.

That's what attorney Kevin C. Bryant, 45, told his two young sons in the spring of 2003. At the time, blond, pretty, 26-year-old Tabatha Bryant was alive and well in an upscale suburb of Rochester, New York. But that was about to change - because Bryant knew his wife was cheating, and he intended to end the affair by ending her life. On June 14, 2003, he called 9-1-1 to report Tabatha slain by an unknown intruder who'd shot her in the eye with a .22 and repeatedly stabbed her in the neck and upper body.

On October 24, 1890, a woman's mutilated and lifeless body was discovered on a pile of rubbish in Hampstead, North London. Her arms were lacerated, her face crushed and bloodied, and her head almost completely severed from her body. A mile away a blood-soaked stroller was found leaning against a residential gate. The dead baby's body, hidden beneath a nettle bush, was not located until the following morning. So began the incredible story of the Hampstead Tragedy.

Marie seems to have it all: a devoted husband, two wonderful children, and a professional career. But all of that changes when she drives her car into the darkened parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. After she lowers her car window to place an order at the drive-through, a man suddenly appears and places a gun at her temple. What follows is every woman's worst nightmare.

Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others.

From the Bowery Boys and the Five Points Gang through the rise of the Jewish "Kosher Nostra" and the ascendance of the Italian Mafia, mobsters have played a major role in the city's history, lurking just around the corner or inside that nondescript building. Bill "the Butcher" Poole, Paul Kelly, Monk Eastman, "Lucky" Luciano, Carlo Gambino, Meyer Lansky, Mickey Spillane, John Gotti - each held sway over New York neighborhoods that nurtured them and gave them power.

If you’re a fan of true crime, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the big-name cases: Ted Bundy, BTK, David Berkowitz, Christopher Watts, Diane Downs, Casey Anthony. The list of well-known, notorious cases throughout history is seemingly endless. Books, websites, podcasts, streaming television series, and magazines are filled with their abhorrent tales of mayhem. They’re some of the most foul killers the world has ever known. In this volume, you’ll find 12 assorted true crime stories ranging in date from the 1950s to 2020.

As a private banker working for the largest bank in the world, UBS, Bradley Birkenfeld was an expert in Switzerland's shell-game of offshore companies and secret numbered accounts. He wined and dined ultrawealthy clients whose millions of dollars were hidden away from business partners, spouses, and tax authorities. As his client list grew, Birkenfeld lived a life of money, fast cars, and beautiful women, but when he discovered that UBS was planning to betray him, he blew the whistle to the US government.

It was heaven on earth—and, some whispered, the devil’s garden. Thousands came by trains and carriages to see this new Eden, carved from hundreds of acres of wild woodland. They marveled at orchards bursting with fruit, thick herds of Ayrshire cattle and Cotswold sheep, and whizzing mills. They gaped at the people who lived in this place—especially the women, with their queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts. The men and women of this strange outpost worked and slept together—without sin, they claimed.

The sound of snapping twigs closed in on the five teenagers enjoying an evening around a glowing campfire at Gitchie Manitou State Park. The night of music and laughter had taken a dark turn. Evil loomed just beyond the tree line, and before the night was over, one of the Midwest's most horrific mass murders had left its bloodstains spewed across the campsite. One managed to survive and would come to be known as the "Gitchie Girl".

Queen of Thieves is the gritty, fast-paced story of Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum, a poor Jewish woman who rose to the top of her profession in organized crime during the Gilded Age in New York City. During her more than twenty-five-year reign as the country’s top receiver of stolen goods, she accumulated great wealth and power inconceivable for women engaged in business, legitimate or otherwise.

I was known as the traitor's daughter. When I was five years old, my father was tortured, branded with the letter Z, then beaten and left for dead. The grueling punishment for his crime was a reminder to all others who dared threaten the Russian's reign. I was the young girl left behind. A living piece of the traitorous puzzle the Russian leader tried so diligently to ignore - until I grew up. No longer could he deny how much my existence had always been intertwined with his. And in order to survive the life I was thrown into, I was forced to learn my place inside of it.