What’s Left of a Cartel Cop’s Palace Playground

If you look up the definition of “police corruption” in the dictionary, there should really be a photograph of Arturo “El Negro” Durazo Moreno, the infamous Chief of Police in Mexico City, from 1976 to 1982. While his official job earned him less than $1,000 a month, Durazo made a fortune off the cocaine drug trade and…

But Did You Hear about France’s Most Infamous Madam?

With the Jeffrey Epstein scandal creeping its way into every late night dinner table conversation and the sordid secrets of his mysterious Madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, slowly unfolding in the press, it wasn’t long before we would be talking about “Madame Claude”. France’s own high society brothel queen, aka. Fernande Grudet, reigned for decades as one…

That Time When Parisians Used to Hang Out at the Morgue for Fun

Some thirty thousand people visit the Notre Dame de Paris everyday, but little-known to tourists or even to the Parisians that pass by it on their daily commute, there was once a much more popular yet sinister attraction that shared a backyard with the historic cathedral, capable of luring up to 40,000 visitors in a single day. That attraction was…

In the Shadows with NYC’s Self-Styled Guardian Angels

People forget that in 1979, New York was burning. To relive it today would almost be like entering an unrecognisable dystopian society where street gangs ruled the city after the sun went down. Times Square’s Disney stores were occupied by peep shows and drug dens, and you could go as far as saying that some…

Inside the Scarface Hotel

Today, I got acquainted with The Mutiny Hotel, the early 80s cocaine-fueled Miami hotspot where the CIA partied side by side with notorious drug traffickers, celebrities and politicians. In 1969, The Mutiny Hotel opened its doors on Coconut Grove as the neighbourhood was fast becoming a mecca for cocaine kingpins. By its peak in the late…

Four Grisly Murders, One Salvador Dali

Note: portions of this article contain graphic text. You couldn’t have concocted an eerier murder mystery if you tried. Yet, history seems to have bookmarked the case of the Missing Women of Perpignan — “Les disparues de Perpignan”, as the French say — with dwindling media attention; a shocker due not only to the case’s bizarre nature, but the fact…

London’s Female Shoplifting Mafia of Yesteryear

We think of the corsets and voluminous petticoats of the 1800’s as painfully limiting to the women who wore them, but a group of female gang members in 20th century London would be inclined to disagree. Enter the “Forty Elephants”, also the “Forty Thieves”, an all-female gang that terrorized London and the surrounding area for…

Meet the Woman Behind New York’s 1800s School For Crooks

Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, better known as the “Queen of Fences” was a homely Prussian immigrant running a dry goods store with her husband and four children. She was also one of the biggest crime bosses the city of New York had ever seen. Marm came to New York in 1827, a poor immigrant peddling bits of silk…

Inside the FBI’s Colossal Fingerprint Factory

Before the FBI went digital, it looked a little more like a giant stock warehouse for Amazon.com. In the 1920s, the bureau was only employing 25 workers to classify around 800,000 print cards, but by 1943, there were more than 20,000 employees sorting through 70 million fingerprints. At the height of wartime, the archives were so overwhelmed that the FBI eventually…

3 Ways to Spot Fake Wine: Meet the Sherlock Holmes of Wine Crime

I won’t pretend I know much of anything about buying expensive wine, but I do know that I love playing detective. Armed with blue lights and razor blades in her toolkit, Maureen Downey has become a top wine fraud investigator, helping to rid the wine industry of counterfeit and stolen wine. Yes, wine crime is actually a…