Download or read book Spectacular Rogue Gaston B Means written by Edwin Palmer Hoyt and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gaston Bullock Means (July 11, 1879 ? December 12, 1938)[1] was an American private detective, salesman, bootlegger, forger, swindler, murder suspect, blackmailer, and con artist."--Wikipedia.

Download or read book Crooked written by Nathan Masters and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting, forgotten narrative of the most corrupt attorney general in American history and the maverick senator who stopped at nothing to take him down Many tales from the Jazz Age reek of crime and corruption. But perhaps the era’s greatest political fiasco—one that resulted in a nationwide scandal, a public reckoning at the Department of Justice, the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, and an Oscar-winning film—has long been lost to the annals of history. In Crooked, Nathan Masters restores this story of murderers, con artists, secret lovers, spies, bootleggers, and corrupt politicians to its full, page-turning glory. Newly elected to the Senate on a promise to root out corruption, Burton "Boxcar Burt" Wheeler sets his sights on ousting Attorney General Harry Daugherty, puppet-master behind President Harding’s unlikely rise to power. Daugherty is famous for doing whatever it takes to keep his boss in power, and his cozy relations with bootleggers and other scofflaws have long spawned rumors of impropriety. But when his constant companion and trusted fixer, Jess Smith, is found dead of a gunshot wound in the apartment the two men share, Daugherty is suddenly thrust into the spotlight, exposing the rot consuming the Harding administration to a shocked public. Determined to uncover the truth in the ensuing investigation, Wheeler takes the prosecutorial reins and subpoenas a rogue’s gallery of witnesses—convicted felons, shady detectives, disgraced officials—to expose the attorney general’s treachery and solve the riddle of Jess Smith’s suspicious death. With the muckraking senator hot on his trail, Daugherty turns to his greatest weapon, the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose eager second-in-command, J. Edgar Hoover, sees opportunity amidst the chaos. Packed with political intrigue, salacious scandal, and no shortage of lessons for our modern era of political discord, Nathan Masters’ thrilling historical narrative shows how this intricate web of inconceivable crookedness set the stage for the next century of American political scandals.

Download or read book Loyalty and Liberty written by Alex Goodall and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-12-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Loyalty and Liberty offers the first comprehensive account of the politics of countersubversion in the United States prior to the McCarthy era. Beginning with the loyalty politics of World War I, Alex Goodall traces the course of American countersubversion as it ebbed and flowed throughout the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the rise of McCarthyism and the Cold War. This sweeping study explores how antisubversive fervor was dampened in the 1920s in response to the excesses of World War I, transformed by the politics of antifascism in the Depression era, and rekindled in opposition to Roosevelt's ambitious New Deal policies in the later 1930s and 1940s. Identifying varied interest groups such as business tycoons, Christian denominations, and Southern Democrats, Goodall demonstrates how countersubversive politics was far from unified: groups often pursued clashing aims while struggling to balance the competing pulls of loyalty to the nation and liberty of thought, speech, and action. Meanwhile, the federal government pursued its own course, which alternately converged with and diverged from the paths followed by private organizations. By the end of World War II, alliances on the left and right had largely consolidated into the form they would keep during the Cold War. Anticommunists on the right worked to rein in the supposedly dictatorial ambitions of the Roosevelt administration, while New Deal liberals divided into several camps: the Popular Front, civil liberties activists, and embryonic Cold Warriors who struggled with how to respond to communist espionage in Washington and communist influence in politics more broadly. Rigorous in its scholarship yet accessible to a wide audience, Goodall's masterful study shows how opposition to radicalism became a defining ideological question of American life.

Download or read book Charlotte True Crime Series written by Cathy Pickens and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling account of a hundred years of sensational and sinister deeds that marked and shaped one southern town. Crimes that captivated attention in the Charlotte area over the years run the gamut from missing people to the wrongly accused. This collection of headline stories features violent motorcycle gangs, crusading mothers, a fraudster who claimed a president was poisoned by his wife, a serial killer who broke all the rules and even a man who made Bigfoot. With a mystery novelist's ear for a good tale, Cathy Pickens presents more than a century of sensational sinister deeds that marked this diverse and dynamic city.

Download or read book The Strange Deaths of President Harding written by Robert H. Ferrell and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1998-09-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available for the first time in paperback, The Strange Deaths of President Harding challenges readers to reexamine Warren G. Harding's rightful place in American history. For nearly half a century, the twenty-ninth president of the United States has consistently finished last in polls ranking the presidents. After Harding's untimely death in 1923, a variety of attacks and unsubstantiated claims left the public with a tainted impression of him. In this meticulously researched scrutiny of the mystery surrounding Harding's death, Robert H. Ferrell, distinguished presidential historian, examines the claims against this unpopular president and uses new material to counter those accusations. At the time of Harding's death there was talk of his similarity, personally if not politically, to Abraham Lincoln. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes described Harding as one of nature's noblemen, truehearted and generous. But soon after Harding's death, his reputation began to spiral downward. Rumors circulated of the president's death by poison, either by his own hand or by that of his wife; allegations of an illegitimate daughter were made; and question were raised concerning the extent of Harding's knowledge of the Teapot Dome scandal and of irregularities in the Veterans' Bureau, as well as his tolerance of a corrupt attorney general who was an Ohio political fixer. Journalists and historians of the time added to his tarnished reputation by using sources that were easily available but not factually accurate. In The Strange Deaths of President Harding, Ferrell lays out the facts behind these allegations for the reader to ponder. Making the most of the recently opened papers of assistant White House physician Dr. Joel T. Boone, Ferrell shows that for years Harding suffered from high blood pressure, was under a great deal of stress, and overexerted himself; it was a heart attack that caused his death, not poison. There was no proof of an illegitimate child. And Harding did not know much about the scandals intensifying in the White House at the time of his death. In fact, these events were not as scandalous as they have since been made to seem. In this meticulously researched and eminently readable scrutiny of the mystery surrounding Harding's death, as well as the deathblows dealt his reputation by journalists, Ferrell asks for a reexamination of Harding's place in American history.

Download or read book A Time of Scandal written by Rosemary Stevens and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2016-12-11 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at what really happened in the U.S. Veterans’ Bureau Scandal in the 1920s. In the early 1920s, as the nation recovered from World War I, President Warren G. Harding founded the U.S. Veterans Bureau, now known as the Department of Veterans Affairs, to treat disabled veterans. He appointed his friend, decorated veteran Colonel Charles R. Forbes, as founding director. Forbes lasted only eighteen months in the position before stepping down under a cloud of suspicion. In 1926—after being convicted of conspiracy to defraud the federal government by rigging government contracts—he was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary. Although he was known in his day as a drunken womanizer, and as a corrupt toady of a weak president, the question persists: was Forbes a criminal or a scapegoat? Historian Rosemary Stevens tells Forbes’s story anew, drawing on previously untapped records to reveal his role in America’s commitment to veterans. She explores how Forbes’s rise and fall in Washington illuminates Harding’s efforts to bring business efficiency to government. She also examines the scandal in the context of class, professionalism, ethics, and etiquette in a rapidly changing world. Most significantly, Stevens proposes a revisionist view of both Forbes and Harding: They did not defraud the government of billions and do not deserve the reputation they have carried for a hundred years. Packed with conniving friends, FBI agents, and rival politicians as well as gamblers, revelers, and wronged wives, A Time of Scandal will appeal to anyone interested in political gossip, presidential politics, the “Ohio Gang,” and the 1920s.

Download or read book The League written by Bill Mills and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two weeks before the U.S. entered World War I, a Chicago advertising executive visited the Department of Justice with a proposal - organize the country’s businessmen into a secret force of volunteer agents to ferret out and investigate enemy activities within the United States. The country, overcome by a wave of patriotic fervor, had also become gripped with fear and uncertainty of the influx of immigrants from the very countries with which the country was now at war. The idea received quick approval and caught on like wildfire. Soon thousands of volunteers in every major industry, trade and profession were on the alert nationwide, maintaining surveillance and investigating cases for the Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation. They would grow to become 250,000 strong. Written as a real-life adventure story, The League reveals how the organization began, the manner in which it operated, and the varied missions that it performed on behalf of the U.S. government. It is an extraordinary chapter in American history, when almost any citizen could receive official credentials as a volunteer investigator. From a running gun battle on the streets of Philadelphia, to the seizure of a disguised German commerce raider on the high seas, to the hunt for the radical bomber that attacked the Federal Building in Chicago, The League is a fascinating true story that will not soon be forgotten.

Download or read book Dead Last written by Phillip G. Payne and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2009 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are the saints in America’s civil religion, then the twenty-ninth president, Warren G. Harding, is our sinner. Prior to the Nixon administration, the Harding scandals were the most infamous of the twentieth century. Harding is consistently judged a failure, ranking dead last among his peers. By examining the public memory of Harding, Phillip G. Payne offers the first significant reinterpretation of his presidency in a generation. Rather than repeating the old stories, Payne examines the contexts and continued meaning of the Harding scandals for various constituencies. Payne explores such topics as Harding’s importance as a midwestern small-town booster, his rumored black ancestry, the role of various biographers in shaping his early image, the tension between public memory and academic history, and, finally, his status as an icon of presidential failure in contemporary political debates. Harding was a popular president and was widely mourned when he died in office in 1923; but with his death began the construction of his public memory and his fall from political grace. In Dead Last, Payne explores how Harding’s name became synonymous with corruption, cronyism, and incompetence and how it is used to this day as an example of what a president should not be.

Download or read book The Federal Bureau of Investigation 2 volumes written by Douglas M. Charles and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 862 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative set provides a one-stop resource for understanding specific FBI controversies as well as for those looking to understand the full history, law enforcement authority, and inner workings of the nation's most famous and important federal law enforcement agency. This authoritative two-volume reference resource uses a combination of encyclopedia entries and primary sources to provide a comprehensive overview of the FBI, detailing its history, most famous leaders and agents, institutional structure and authority, law enforcement responsibilities, reporting relationships to other parts of government, and major events and controversies. Today the FBI sits squarely at the intersection of major controversies surrounding the presidential campaign and administration of Donald Trump, foreign interference in U.S. elections, and politicization of law enforcement. But the FBI has always been in the political spotlight—its history is dotted with episodes that have come under heavy scrutiny, from its surveillance of civil rights leaders during the 1960s to the methods it employs to combat domestic terrorism in the post-9/11 era. And all the while, FBI agents and offices across the country continue to investigate a wide range of lawbreaking, from organized crime (in all its facets) to white-collar crime and corruption by public officials.

Download or read book The Lindbergh Case written by Jim Fisher and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was Bruno Hauptmann an innocent carpenter, or a cold-blooded killer?

Download or read book New York Undercover written by Jennifer Fronc and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-12-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To combat behavior they viewed as sexually promiscuous, politically undesirable, or downright criminal, social activists in Progressive-era New York employed private investigators to uncover the roots of society’s problems. New York Undercover follows these investigators—often journalists or social workers with no training in surveillance—on their information-gathering visits to gambling parlors, brothels, and meetings of criminal gangs and radical political organizations. Drawing on the hundreds of detailed reports that resulted from these missions, Jennifer Fronc reconstructs the process by which organizations like the National Civic Federation and the Committee of Fourteen generated the knowledge they needed to change urban conditions. This information, Fronc demonstrates, eventually empowered government regulators in the Progressive era and beyond, strengthening a federal state that grew increasingly repressive in the interest of pursuing a national security agenda. Revealing the central role of undercover investigation in both social change and the constitution of political authority, New York Undercover narrates previously untold chapters in the history of vice and the emergence of the modern surveillance state.

Download or read book The Ghosts of Hopewell written by Jim Fisher and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2006-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illustrated examination of the Lindbergh kidnapping case, Jim Fisher seeks to set the record straight regarding Bruno Hauptmann's guilt in "the crime of the century." In February 1935, following a sensational, six-week trial, a jury in Flemington, New Jersey, found German carpenter Hauptmann guilty of kidnapping and murdering the twenty-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Although circumstantial, the evidence against Hauptmann—the handwriting on the ransom notes, the homemade kidnapping ladder, Colonel Lindbergh's money found in his garage, his matching the description of the man who accepted the ransom payoff in the Bronx cemetery, his inability to prove an alibi, and his incredible explanation of his possession of the ransom money—was overwhelming, leaving few to doubt his guilt. After a series of appeals and stays, Hauptmann died fourteen months later in the electric chair. A confession would have spared him the death sentence, but Hauptmann chose to die maintaining his innocence. It was not until the mid-1970s that revisionists began to challenge the conventional wisdom in the case: that Hauptmann was the lone killer. Revisionist books and articles appeared, as did plays, TV shows, and a movie, all portraying Hauptmann as the victim of a massive police and prosecution frame-up. At this point, the focus shifted from the evidence to the conduct of the police. By the 1980s, most people familiar with the case were convinced of Hauptmann's complete innocence. Many denied the murder, believing that the Lindbergh baby remained alive. Several men claimed to be the firstborn son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, one of whom sued to claim his share of the Lindbergh estate after Charles Lindbergh's death in 1974. Another group held that the kidnapping was an elaborate hoax to cover up the murder of the baby by his parents. Anna Hauptmann¹s series of federal lawsuits against New Jersey and others in the mid-1980s fueled further interest in the case. Although Hauptmann's widow lost all of her lawsuits, she had won the hearts and minds of the American people before her death at the age of ninety-four. Former FBI agent Fisher discusses the hard evidence, such as the ransom notes and the wood of the kidnapping ladder. He analyzes and debunks the various revisionist theories and presents new evidence that, coupled with the undisputed facts, prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hauptmann was guilty as charged: he kidnapped and murdered the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

Download or read book A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans written by Michael Farquhar and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively, compulsively browsable collection of neglected notables-from the bestselling author of A Treasury of Royal Scandals "History," wrote Thomas Carlyle, "is the essence of innumerable biographies." Yet countless fascinating characters are relegated to a historical limbo. In A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans, Michael Farquhar has scoured the annals and rescued thirty of the most intriguing, unusual, and yes, memorable Americans from obscurity. From the mother of Mother's Day to Paul Revere's rival rider, the Mayflower murderer to "America's Sherlock Holmes," these figures are more than historical runners-up-they're the spies, explorers, patriots, and martyrs without whom history as we know it would be very different indeed.

Download or read book Hopeless Cases written by Charles H. McCormick and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2005 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hopeless Cases describes the futile search for those responsible for a series of apparently related terrorist attacks and plots in the World War I-Red Scare era during the final surge of early twentieth-century anarchist violence in the United States. The most brazen attacks occurred in 1919 when bombs mailed to thirty-six public figures nationwide in May were followed in June by coordinated nearly simultaneous bombings aimed at public figures and institutions in eight cities. The end of the campaign was the Wall Street explosion (September 16, 1920) that killed forty and injured hundreds. Scores were arrested (thirty for the Wall Street explosion alone), but lawmen never caught the culprits. Fears aroused by bomb blasts gave the Justice Department carte blanche to roundup and deport alien radicals, particularly Bolsheviks, in 1919-1920. The bombings raised issues, including the fear of an unknown enemy and the government's need for accurate intelligence, that mirror today's post 9/11 era. The book profiles the suspects but focuses on the investigators, especially the Bureau of Investigation and its spies and informants. Based largely upon FBI files, it explores the Bureau's relationship with British Intelligence in New York City, and to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, as well as a privately funded search for the bombers. Throughout, the manhunt was handicapped by disputes with other law enforcement agencies and by intra-Bureau jealousies and rivalries, agent job insecurity and high turnover, inadequate training and resources, and morale problems, particularly in the New York and Boston field offices.

Download or read book New World Coming written by Nathan Miller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To an astonishing extent, the 1920s resemble our own era, at the turn of the twenty-first century; in many ways that decade was a precursor of modern excesses....Much of what we consider contemporary actually began in the Twenties." -- from the Introduction The images of the 1920s have been indelibly imprinted on the American imagination: jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, the Model T Ford, Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic. But it was also the era of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, widespread social conflict, and the birth of organized crime. Bookended by the easy living of the Jazz Age, when the booze and money flowed seemingly without end, and the crash of '29 that led to breadlines and a level of human suffering not seen since World War I, New World Coming is a lively, entertaining, and all-encompassing chronological account of an age that defined America. Chronicling what he views as the most consequential decade of the past century, Nathan Miller -- an award-winning journalist and five-time Pulitzer nominee -- paints a vivid portrait of the 1920s, focusing on the men and women who shaped that extraordinary time, including, ironically, three of America's most conservative presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. In the Twenties, the American people soared higher and fell lower than they ever had before. As unprecedented economic prosperity and sweeping social change dazzled the public, the sensibilities and restrictions of the nineteenth century vanished, and many of the institutions, ideas, and preoccupations of our own age emerged. With scandal, sex, and crime the lifeblood of the tabloids, the contemporary culture of celebrity and sensationalism took root and journalism became popular entertainment. By discarding Victorian idealism and embracing twentieth-century skepticism, America became, for the first time, thoroughly modernized. There is hardly a dimension of our present world, from government to popular culture, that doesn't trace its roots to the 1920s, and few decades are more intriguing or significant today. The first comprehensive view of the era since Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's 1931 classic, New World Coming reveals this remarkable age from the vantage point of nearly a century later. It's all here -- the images and the icons, the celebrities and the legends -- in a book that will resonate with history readers, 1920s aficionados, and Americans everywhere.

Download or read book Dictionary of North Carolina Biography written by William S. Powell and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive state project of its kind, the Dictionary provides information on some 4,000 notable North Carolinians whose accomplishments and occasional misdeeds span four centuries. Much of the bibliographic information found in the six volumes has been compiled for the first time. All of the persons included are deceased. They are native North Carolinians, no matter where they made the contributions for which they are noted, or non-natives whose contributions were made in North Carolina.

Download or read book Spinning the Law written by Kendall Coffey and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A behind-the-scenes analysis of media strategies not taught in law school or journalism classes, this collection of entertaining examples and explanations make for ideal reading for everyone fascinated by celebrity legal problems.