Byte Sized Biographies…

King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a Beautiful Madness
Wonderful Atlantic Monthly Photo Essay on Ludwig II
Ludwig II was born on August 25, 1845.  His father, Maximillian, was then the Crown Prince of Bavaria.  His grandfather, Ludwig I, was the King of Bavaria and a member of the House of Wittlesbach, the ruling dynasty that had governed the Kingdom of Bavaria, for over six hundred years.
Upon Maximilian’s death, Ludwig became Ludwig II at the age of eighteen.  His childhood had not been particularly happy, raised by governesses and without interaction with or affection from either of his parents, he spent much of his time in emotional isolation.  He also developed a hostility toward his younger brother Otto, feeling that because he was the heir and expected to reign eventually as the king, he was held to a much higher standard.
Unfortunately, Ludwig immediately had misgivings and began to realize that moving forward with the marriage would be a disaster.  Publicly, he initially attempted to maintain an appropriate veneer of enthusiasm and affection, privately the courtship featured nothing more than an occasional furtive kiss on the brow.  Ludwig spent much of the summer arriving at Sophie’s family’s palace at Possenhoven at all hours of the night where the couple would engage in awkward small talk and interact without any real passion.  By the end of the summer and the impending August wedding date, Ludwig decided to postpone the event.  His explanation was that the wedding would be rescheduled for October 12, the anniversary date of his grandfather, Ludwig I, and father, Max II.  But when Ludwig also cancelled the wedding on this date, Sophie’s parents demanded that he either set a permanent date or call it off for good.  Ludwig chose to characterize this demand as impertinent and informed Sophie that as a result, the engagement was officially ended.
As Ludwig became more isolated from day to day reality, his preoccupation with architecture and building became more prominent.  As early as 1868 he had written to Wagner of his desire to build a castle in the style of German folklore, something that might be occupied by one of the heroic figures of a Wagnerian opera.  Having thoroughly explored the area surrounding Hohenschwangau, Ludwig selected a dramatic location on a raised plateau known as the Pollat Gorge.  Sketches were composed by architects after consultations with Ludwig II about his vision for the building.  Construction began in 1869, it would not end until after Ludwig’s death.  Initially called New Hohenschwangau Castle it would ultimately be named Neuschwanstein, or “New Swan Stone” Castle.
During Ludwig’s lifetime, the public was forbidden to enter the palace grounds.  Only servants or an occasional expressly invited visitor were permitted.  This was in line with the ever more reclusive life that Ludwig began to pursue in the 1870’s.  He spent his days sleeping and nights reading obscure literature frequently from the era of Louis XIV.  He commissioned plays and operas to be performed privately in large theaters in Munich for his benefit with no other audience.  He would take evening rides in his gilded carriage or sleigh in winter, his footmen dressed in the manner of the court of Louis XIV, the king drawn by white horses that made a spectacular impression on the rural inhabitants of backwoods Bavaria.
The death of Ludwig II was met by shock and grief throughout Bavaria.  The king’s body was conveyed to the capital where it would publically lie in state for three days in the chapel of the Residenz.  An immense funeral procession would convey the king to St. Michael’s Church and his burial place in the church crypt, a procession that would take over two and a half hours.  The funeral of Ludwig is believed to be the largest state occasion in the history of the...

Billie Holiday, Lady Day
Sometimes the most remarkable artistic genius can emerge from the humblest of beginnings.  Sarah Julia Harris was born on August 16, 1895 in Baltimore, MD.  Disowned by her father, she was raised by her mother, who ultimately married another man and had two more children.  Like her siblings, Sarah, nicknamed “Sadie”, began working at cleaning jobs at an early age, a lack of education rendered her virtually illiterate.  She was employed on the railroad trains that operated between Baltimore and Philadelphia.  When she became pregnant at age nineteen, she was kicked out of her family’s home and fired from her job.  With few options, she agreed to be admitted into the Philadelphia General Hospital, performing menial tasks in exchange for shelter and care.  Her child was born on April 7, 1915.  This child had several versions of her first name listed on official documents, various approximations of the name Eleanora.  Although she started life as Eleanora Harris, eventually the world would come to know this illegitimate daughter of an unemployed domestic by a different name: Billie Holiday.
Fortunately, addiction had not yet seriously diminished her talent.  Performing mostly in New York, her trademark gardenia in her hair, 1943 and 1944 would be the high point of her live career.
This behavior would come to public attention when Billie Holiday and Joe Guy were arrested by federal narcotics agents in New York City for possession of heroin.  Drugs and hypodermic needles were found in a search of a room that both individuals had occupied in Philadelphia.  Despite a flimsy case, Billie disdained legal advice and plead guilty and was sentenced to a year and a day in a federal reformatory in Alderson, West Virginia.
Despite her legal problems and her lack of any recently recorded hits, Billie remained immensely popular.  Her persona, which had been that of someone “unlucky in love,” was now changing towards someone unlucky in life.  It didn’t take long for her to lapse back into addiction, which became the cause of cancelled recording sessions and missed concert dates.  If she did show up she would seem disinterested, would play a short set and disappear.  Clearly, her lifestyle was beginning to affect her performance.

Edgar Allen Poe: Life Sucks and Then You Die
Poe was born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in the city of Boston.  His parents, David and Eliza were actors that travelled a circuit along the Eastern seaboard.  His mother performed a week before his birth and would return again to the Boston stage a month later, which is indicative of the economic stability of Poe’s family.  David Poe had abandoned a career in law to try and achieve his wife’s level of dramatic success.  That he was unable to do so became a source of frustration and anger that eventually ended the marriage.  He disappeared and was dead by 1811.  Eliza took her three young children to Richmond where she would contract tuberculosis and also die in 1811, on December 8.
On May 16, 1836 Poe married Virginia Clemm.  The groom was twenty-seven, the bride, fourteen.  The specifics regarding when and if Poe enjoyed a physical relationship with his young cousin is a matter of dispute.  It is widely believed that initially Poe and his wife’s relationship was platonic in nature but as she grew older their relationship became more typically romantic.  That they were emotionally close and that Virginia Clemm practically idolized her husband has never been disputed.
Poe and Maria Clemm remained in the Bronx, and 1847 started off reasonably well when he prevailed in a libel suit that provided a few hundred dollars.  But Poe would write very little in 1847, depressed, distracted and his own health now deteriorating.
As if Poe had not suffered enough in life, upon his death, his literary estate and even personal reputation came under immediate attack.  Rufus Griswold was a prominent anthologist who published the very popular “The Poets and Poetry of America.”, throughout the 1840’s.  Wanting to be included in this anthology Poe naturally attempted to cultivate Griswold and Griswold, wanting Poe’s critical approval included occasional poems and corresponded with Poe.  At best this was merely a business relationship, at times Poe lashed out at Griswold, both in criticism and lectures, that Griswold was the purveyor of the type of mediocre literature that Poe routinely would savage in his critical columns.  Poe must have felt that their occasional disputes were behind them late in life because in his final years he is alleged to have appointed Griswold the executor of his literary estate.  Unfortunately, Poe could not have been more mistaken in underestimating the deep animosity that Griswold still harbored for him.  Within two days of Poe’s death, Griswold, using the pseudonym “Ludwig” published a lengthy obituary in the prominent New York Daily Tribune which disparaged Poe’s professional criticism, mentioned his wife’s death amidst extreme poverty and included such personal descriptions as “he walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses.”  Because of his reputation as a Baptist minister and respected anthologist, Griswold’s slanderous profile gained traction with the press and public and severely damaged Poe’s reputation.
With his professional life at a dead end, Poe turned to another alternative to resuscitate his economic fortunes: marriage.  With celebrity, Poe became the object of female attention that continued throughout the decade of the 1840’s.  Poe became quite friendly with some of these women and now, he decided that one of them, Sarah Helen Whitman, six years older than Poe at forty-five, was worthy of more serious pursuit.  A widow, Helen Whitman lived in Providence, Rhode Island and travelled within literary and intellectual circles.  In 1848, Poe and Helen Whitman exchanged correspondence and Poe showed up in Providence without notice on September 21 and within days hastily proposed marriage.  Poe had literally begged her to rescue him and reinvigorate his genius but Helen said that she would have to think it over.  Ultimately, aware of the rumors of drunkenness and instability,

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Revolutionary Poster Boy
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born in Rosario, Argentina on May 14, 1928.   His upper class parents forged his birth certificate to read June 14 to conceal the fact that Ernesto was conceived out of wedlock.  Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa both came from socially well-connected families.  Despite Ernesto Sr.’s attempts at several money-making ventures, the family lived on Celia’s inheritance.
On March 4, 1960 Che Guevara was meeting with industrial management associates in downtown Havana, when a massive explosion ripped through the wharf area of the city.  A French freighter, La Coubre, had been unloading armaments directly onto the dock when a momentous explosion occurred.  Thirty minutes later, with a massive emergency aid effort underway, another explosion went off, killing even more people.  Approximately seventy-five people died and two hundred more were injured in an incident that Castro immediately charged was planned and carried out by the CIA.  He ordered a state funeral with a procession through Havana to a speaker’s platform set up in front of the city’s prominent Colon cemetery.  Castro used the occasion for a typically lengthy and aggressive speech.  Alberto Korda, a former fashion photographer who had joined Castro’s entourage and recorded such events began to photograph various government officials standing in Castro’s vicinity.  He suddenly noticed Che Guevara standing off to the side, gazing introspectively into the crowd.  Korda had only a few seconds to take two photographs before Che Guevara sat down behind Castro.  Although Korda immediately knew he had taken two excellent photos, neither would be published in any newspaper accounts of the memorial.  He cropped the palm tree and profile of another individual out of the picture, tilted Che’s head slightly and tacked the photo to the wall of his studio.
Seems like a rather tense occasion.
For Che Guevara personally, the grim reality of his marriage also reared its head early in the first days of the Cuban revolutionary government.  His wife, Hilda, and daughter arrived from Peru but Che Guevara immediately told her of the “other woman” and asked for a divorce.  Hilda later wrote an unverifiably sentimental account of their discussion but the divorce was granted and Che Guevara quickly married Aleida March.
The Bay of Pigs combined with a disastrous Kennedy-Khrushchev summit meeting at Vienna to prompt the most dangerous episode of the Cold War.  Thinking that his American counterpart was a weak intellectual who could be intimidated, Khrushchev began negotiations with Castro regarding the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba.  The Soviet Union had been forced to accept similar American missiles in Turkey and the Soviet leader saw an opportunity to humiliate the US and also guarantee Cuba’s security.  Castro, with Che Guevara’s enthusiastic urging, agreed, in principle.  As an indication of Che Guevara’s importance in the Cuban government hierarchy, it was Che who was sent to the USSR in August of 1962 to finalize the deal.
Much of the success of the Cuban revolution was due to a well organized courier underground that allowed the Cuban rebels to communicate their needs at all times.  Tamara Bunke aka “Tania” was attempting to serve this purpose and  connected with Che’s unit in early January.  She had brought with her two agents from Cuban intelligence, Ciro Bustos and Simon Debray.  Unfortunately, a Bolivian communist informer tipped off the government as to her true identity and she could no longer return to La Paz where she had been able to inform Havana by coded radio messages as to the progress of and whereabouts of Che’s mission.
The following morning local senior officials of the Bolivian military as well as Felix Rodriguez arrived in La Higuera by helicopter.  Rodriguez would eventually recount his encounter with the cap...

Friedrich Nietzsche: I am not a Man! I am Dynamite!
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Rocken, Germany on October 15, 1844.  In July of 1849, Nietzsche’s father, a thirty-five year old minister, died of an indeterminate brain condition, forcing the family to move to the nearby town of Naumburg.  Both of these locations are in the Saxony region, former German Democratic Republic, approximately thirty miles southwest of the city of Leipzig.
Ree and Salome quickly began to discuss establishing their own intellectual cadre with the participants literally living together in a bohemian utopia, this in an era where a male and female living under the same roof for any reason would be considered scandalous.  Into this intrigue, Friedrich Nietzsche finally arrived and a meeting with the   couple ensued at St. Peter’s Basilica.  His alleged greeting to Lou Salome while Ree was preoccupied with recording his impressions of the cathedral was “From what stars have we fallen here to meet?”
In her self serving memoir written many years later, Lou Salome would claim that in Lucerne, Nietzsche would make his second marriage proposal, the type of awkwardly unrealistic action that probably guaranteed Nietzsche lifelong bachelorhood.  Realistically, since Lou Salome’s only income came from her inheritance, a small amount meant only until she married, she wasn’t going to marry anybody, at least not then.  From this afternoon also emerged a famous photograph of Lou Salome with a whip of lilacs driving the two philosophers who are tethered to a make believe cart.  From there, this strange group scattered, Nietzsche to his home in Naumburg, Ree to his family home near Berlin and both Salome’s to Zurich
Elizabeth didn’t have the office space in Weimar to accommodate her brother so she quickly persuaded a very wealthy patron and former acquaintance of Nietzsche, Meta Von Salis, to buy a three-story villa as a suitable setting for her brother’s last years.  Once the house was purchased, Elizabeth decided it needed some appropriately luxurious improvements and without telling the new owner, went ahead with the new construction.  Von Salis was stuck with the bill but at least got the satisfaction of accusing Elizabeth of exploiting the archive for her own benefit.  By then, Friedrich Nietzsche was installed as the centerpiece of his sister’s shrine to his work, trotted out occasionally for especially wealthy potential patrons and responding to any visitors with a blank stare.  Mercifully, he succumbed to a heart attack on August 25, 1900.
Elizabeth Nietzsche would enthusiastically support the ascendance of Adolf Hitler, inviting him in 1934 to the Nietzsche Archive for a photo op and proclaiming that her brother would have been just as supportive.  Hitler had probably read little of Nietzsche’s work but he certainly grasped what the purported endorsement of an internationally famous intellectual would mean to the image of his inner circle, generally perceived as a motley crew of unsophisticated thugs.

Mildred Fish Harnack, the Only American Female Ever Executed For Espionage by Nazi Germany
Mildred Fish Harnack was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 16, 1902.  Her parents, descended from a New England, protestant background, separated when Mildred was a teenager and she was primarily raised by her mother.  After her father’s death in 1918, the family relocated to the Washington, DC area but Mildred returned in 1921 to attend the University of Wisconsin.
While a student at the University, Mildred met a German Rockefeller scholar, Arvid Harnack, in 1926.  In September they were married and Mildred continued with her studies and taught literature.  Having been immersed as a youngster in the deeply German immigrant culture of Milwaukee and subsequently exposed to the radical political atmosphere of Madison, Mildred’s attraction to a German intellectual would be completely predictable.  From the very beginning, the Harnack’s marriage was atypical.  Although Harnack’s uncle was the esteemed German theologian Adolf Von Harnack, Arvid’s father also died when he was a teenager and his immediate family was struggling with the disastrous German economy of the twenties.  When Harnack’s academic stipend ran out in 1928, he was forced to return to Germany.  Mildred Harnack obtained a teaching position at Goucher College in Baltimore and the young couple hoped to reunite quickly.
Horst Heilemann, a young member of this German cryptology unit was also a former student of Harro Schulze-Boysen and regularly socialized with the couple.  After Harro confided that he worked with Russian intelligence, Heilemann mentioned that his group had successfully intercepted some communications and identified some Russian agents.  When Heilemann returned to his office and reviewed decoded messages he determined that the Schulz-Boysens had been compromised.  He unsuccessfully attempted to telephone Harro and was forced to leave an urgent message.  Later, when Harro returned the call, instead of Heilemann he got a senior colleague on the line.  Confused by the cryptic message he had received, he unfortunately identified himself.  Heilemann’s stunned colleague figured out what had happened and immediately informed the secret police.  The Gestapo did not want to risk further warnings to other members of the group and Harro Schulze-Boysen was arrested on August 31, 1942.  Convicted by a military court, he was hanged in Plotzensee Prison, Berlin, December 22, 1942
Libertas Shulze-Boysen was in the unique position of having access to film footage that was used by the propaganda ministry.  She was able to produce photographic copies of atrocities that were being committed against Jews and others on the Eastern Front.  Unsuccessful attempts were made to get this information to the West.  She was guillotined in Plotzensee Prison, Berlin, December 22, 1942, one hour after her husband was hanged.

Captain George Smith Anthony and The Voyage of the SS Catalpa
In 1874, rebel leader John Devoy received another letter from Fenian prisoner James Wilson that he chose to read aloud at a national meeting of the Clan Na Gael.  Part of it read:
     “Think that we have been nine years in this living tomb since our
       first arrest and it is impossible for mind and body to withstand the
       continual strain that is upon them.  One or the other must give way
       …We think that if you forsake us, then we are friendless indeed.”
This missive, the “Letter From the Tomb”, compelled the Clan to understand that to rescue the military Fenians was their moral imperative.  Devoy was officially urged to devise a plan of escape and he immediately proceeded to Boston and a meeting with John O’Reilly, the only man ever to successfully escape from an Australian penal colony.  O’Reilly was still in touch with members of the New Bedford, Massachusetts whaling community, including some of the former members of the crew of the Gazelle.  This close knit group quickly sold Devoy on the idea that any rescue attempt should also try to fund itself by engaging in a legitimate whaling expedition.  They also agreed that there was only one man for the job, Captain George Smith Anthony.
Recruiting Anthony was merely a start.  Devoy, O’Reilly and Richardson began to scour New England for a suitable ship.  Although the Clan Na Gael had secretly raised some money from a national base of contributors they were still short of the purchase price of an appropriate vessel.  It took Richardson fronting thousands of dollars and another Clan Na Gael member, James Reynolds, mortgaging his home to provide the funding for the purchase of the ”Catalpa”, a ninety foot merchant ship that had recently returned from the West Indies.  In March of 1875, the ship was towed to New Bedford where Captain Anthony could personally supervise its repairs and reworking as a whaler.
By the end of April, a twenty-two man crew had been selected with only one man, Dennis Duggan, aware of the true mission of the Catalpa.  Duggan, Irish, was also a carpenter by trade so he would not arouse the suspicions of customs officials about any atypical crew aboard a whaler.  On April 30, 1875, Captain George Anthony raised anchor in New Bedford and began the first leg of the mission to rescue the six Irish rebels.
In January of 1868, after three months at sea, their prison ship reached western Australia.  On the tenth, it dropped anchor in Fremantle and the prisoners were transported to the jetty at Victoria Quay.  From there they marched through the town to the Fremantle Gaol, a forbidding stone edifice with a practically medieval appearance.  Nicknamed “The Establishment” this prison confined over three thousand human beings,  fifteen per cent of the western region’s twenty thousand inhabitants.  Escape was considered impossible.  If a convict even made it outside of the walls of Fremantle Gaol, he would have to circumvent thousands of miles of shark infested ocean or an equally lengthy trek through the desert like conditions of the Australian bush country.  He would  probably die of thirst before aboriginal trackers found him and dragged him back to be hanged in the prison yard.  The military members of the Fenian group were placed in one man cells that were three feet wide, seven feet long and nine feet high.  Here they were doomed to service on a work gang, eventual death and burial in an unmarked grave along some Australian road.
 
 

John Paul Jones, Admiral and Patriot
Considered a hero of the American Revolution, John Paul Jones was born in Scotland, carried out most of his naval exploits in the British Isles and died in Paris.  His most famous encounter, a victory over the British warship, HMS Serapis, took place off of the coast of Yorkshire, England, thousands of miles from the American colonies.
It is now a matter of historical debate as to when or even if John Paul Jones actually uttered the famous phrase “I have not yet begun to fight”.  But if there ever was a moment for him to say it, now was the time.  Some of his crew members, fully aware of the damage done below, unlocked the dozens of British prisoners on the verge of drowning in the hold, clambered on to the deck and not seeing the captain began to shout for quarter from the other side.  Paul Jones was intent on knocking down the Serapis’ main mast with his personally manned nine pound gun.  Upon hearing his own crew attempting to surrender he first tried to shoot at them with an unloaded pistol and then hurled it as the startled sailors fled below deck.  Knowing his fate to be either imprisonment or even the noose, the captain had clearly adopted a much more modern outlook.  Failure was not an option.  Hearing the commotion, Pearson asked if the American ship had struck.  Most likely Paul Jones’ response was not as theatrical as chronicled but he certainly made it clear that he would rather sink than surrender.
The American ambassador, Gouverneur Morris, found John Paul Jones to be a tiresome pest.  However, when he received a message in July of 1792 that Paul Jones was gravely ill he proceeded to the captain’s rented apartment on the Rue de Tournon.  There he had Paul Jones compose a modest will and hastily left for a dinner engagement.  When he returned later that evening he found John Paul Jones dead, face down on his bed, his legs in a kneeling position on the floor.  He curtly informed Paul Jones’ landlord that the deceased should be buried as modestly as possible, most likely because he feared that he personally would be stuck with the bill.  Luckily, officials of the French government became aware of the naval hero’s demise and incredulous at the ambassador’s response, took charge of John Paul Jones’ burial.
John Paul Jones languished in obscurity for over one hundred years.  As the city of Paris expanded, it covered over the small cemetery with full fledged urban dwellings.  It took a determined American ambassador and the patriotic fervor of President Theodore Roosevelt to congressionally underwrite an archeological dig.  This needle in a haystack proposition at least had the knowledge that Paul Jones’ undertakers, presuming that eventually America would come calling, buried him in a lead coffin, sealed in alcohol.  It took five years and the exhumation of dozens of graves but, in 1906, when his coffin was opened, John Paul Jones was so well preserved that his face was instantly recognizable.  Dimensions from the Houdon sculpture confirmed his identity and following an autopsy that attributed his death to a combination of kidney failure and pneumonia, John Paul Jones began the lengthy journey back to his adopted homeland.  His casket, now encased in polished wood and the American flag, was paraded through the streets of Paris, accompanied by hundreds of American and French military personnel.  Transported to Cherbourg, it was loaded on to the USS Brooklyn and accompanied on its transatlantic voyage by a flotilla that swelled to eleven warships by the time it reached the Chesapeake Bay.  It would take seven more years to construct a suitable repository for the mortal remains of John Paul Jones, appropriate for a man who spent much of his career impeded by the indecision of others.
 

The true story about the man who contributed mightily to the destruction of one of America’s greatest 20th century icons.
According to Colonel Tom Parker personally, he was born in early 1900, in Huntington, West Virginia and began working in touring carnivals at a very young age.  He served in the military, eventually developed and promoted his own carnival acts and graduated to first promoting and then managing country musicians until obtaining the exclusive management contract of Elvis Presley in 1954.  While he was always able to obscure his true beginnings, his singular accent was ascribed to his origins in rural Appalachia.  In fact, although slight, his accent was Dutch because Colonel Tom Parker was not born anywhere near West Virginia, he was not even born in the United States.  He was born Andreas Van Kuijk on June 26, 1909, in Breda, The Netherlands, the seventh of eleven children of Maria and Adam Van Kuijk.
Initially conceived as a Christmas special by Tom Parker, both Elvis and the shows creative team of Steve Binder and Bones Howe agreed that they wanted a more stripped down return to Elvis’ musical roots and were able to convince Parker to generally accept moving away from Elvis singing Christmas carols, most likely because that was something Presley wanted no part of.  Once they got that general agreement, Elvis made the creative decisions on his own with a great deal of input from Binder whose perspective Presley respected.  The resulting special, with a tanned, refreshed Elvis in an especially remarkable leather outfit, among other wardrobes, performing an extended medley of some of his most popular or distinctive hits was the highest rated television show of the year, the program also a critical hit.
With Elvis on the road and her husband engaging in various romantic adventures as a result of his newfound notoriety, Gladys Presley, already a heavy drinker, began to consume alcohol on a daily basis and abuse sleeping pills.  Quite domineering in her relationship with Vernon, it is believed as she deteriorated physically, her husband, in Elvis’ absence began to be much more physically abusive.  Her son’s fame was also troubling and overwhelming, her fear that an hysterical crowd might eventually harm or even kill Elvis.  Depressed because her neighbors disliked her habit of raising chickens and feeding them on the front lawn of Graceland, Gladys never really adjusted to her family’s radical transformation, once telling her friend, “I wish we had stayed poor.”
While in Germany, Presley also met Priscilla Beaulieu, a fourteen year old daughter of an Air Force officer stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany.  Because of her youth, her relationship with Presley was extremely restrained until 1962, although her ability to then visit Elvis and ultimately live at Graceland while Priscilla attended a local Catholic High school, was conditional upon an agreement that the couple eventually marry.
Because some of the Memphis Mafia especially Joe Esposito, were conduits to the Colonel, he was fully aware of Preley’s restlessness and anger over his stalled career.  He also was mindful that at some point, Elvis’ public might completely tire of the formulaic nonsense that was now the mainstay of Elvis’ income stream.  He began discussions with NBC for a television special live performance that would be billed as Presley’s comeback as an entertainer.
Another close associate of Presley, Lamar Fike, was in Portland, Maine, also to help get ready for the tour.  He was attempting to get some sleep after taking a redeye from Los Angeles when there was a loud knock on his door, a voice telling him intently that the Colonel needed to see him right away, despite Fike’s protestations.  Entering the Colonel’s hotel room, he noticed other employees avoiding his gaze as Parker hung up the phone.  In an unemotional tone of voice, the Colonel explained that Fike needed to go to Memphis and be with Vernon Pre...

The true story about the man who contributed mightily to the destruction of one of America’s greatest 20th century icons.
The Colonel, understanding that the lack of international touring was a major irritant for Elvis, then devised an ingenious plan to circumvent his personal abhorrence of such a tour.  He made a deal with various television networks all over the world for Elvis to appear in a live format for live international satellite transmission to countries including Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, the Phillippines and Australia.  Because the Super Bowl would take place on the same day, January 14, 1973 and because special attention and additional material was to be supplied for the version shown in the United States, the American edition of the show appeared on April 4.  Elvis became excited about this novel showcase, lost twenty-five pounds in the month leading up to the show and also cut way back on his pharmaceutical consumption, evident when he hit the stage in a specially designed American eagle jumpsuit, this preparation helping to produce an iconic appearance.  The show was again NBC’s highest rated program of the year and the subsequent release of a live double album sold a half million copies in two weeks, startling numbers in the age of vinyl.
Linda Thompson, the Tennessee beauty queen that became Elvis’ official girlfriend after his marriage dissolved, hoped that Presley’s ability to get himself into some semblance of normal sober shape might be a permanent transition.  But only hours after the concert ended in the early morning, Presley was again so narcotically intoxicated he could not even get off of his hotel room balcony to accompany his entourage to the USS Arizona memorial.  Thompson herself would personally witness Presley’s final harrowing descent and bizarre behavior that transformed him into a tragic monstrosity.
Despite his resurgence, Elvis Presley’s spending habits, large payroll and maintenance of both Graceland and a succession of households in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills necessitated a great deal of cash.  While his live shows were lucrative, they entailed transportation eventually aboard a Convair 880 four engine jet, named the Lisa Marie after his only daughter, which transported a large entourage of security and band members to most shows.
With financial necessity having forced Kirk Kekorian to sell the International to the Hilton Hotel Corporation, Presley spent his time at what was now the Las Vegas Hilton, isolated In his hotel suite, avoiding Colonel Parker, who he rarely spoke to, Parker spending most of his time at the gaming tables running up a debt that eventually reached thirty million dollars.  Stories of Presley spontaneously shooting out television sets and streetlights were absolutely true, the paranoid singer usually armed with several handguns, once coming within inches of accidentally shooting Linda Thompson while she was using the bathroom.
By August of 1977, Elvis Presley, 6 feet tall, weighed 350 pounds, 175 pounds more than what he weighed only four and a half years earlier during his Aloha from Hawaii concert.  His heart was three times its normal size and his nervous system routinely  contained as many as twelve separate types of mostly narcotic medication, including several types of opiates.  His remarkable tolerance of these medications was the product of massive abuse that stretched back over two decades.
Following the circuslike funeral and public outpouring of grief after Elvis Presley’s death, life went on normally for Colonel Parker and Presley’s immediate family.  A year later, a convention was held at the Las Vegas Hilton, organized by Tom Parker, that included a dedication of a statue of Elvis in the lobby, separate admission to an Elvis re-creation for a fifteen dollar additional charge, appearances by Priscilla and Vernon Presley, and the Colonel signing an autographed poem for a buck a throw.

For twenty years, Whitey Bulger terrorized Boston with the full collusion of the FBI.  On the run for sixteen years, he was eventually arrested on June 22, 2011.
Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen Bulger was arrested ten times, for crimes ranging from larceny, drunk in public and assault and battery.  Only once were charges ever pursued to the point of a criminal conviction and even then, Whitey was able to get the charge reduced on appeal.  It is no wonder that he developed an arrogant disdain for the criminal justice system and a sense of invulnerability.  Unfortunately, this mentality only increased the severity of his transgressions.  In May of 1948, Bulger and two accomplices enticed a young female into Whitey’s car and attempted to rape her at a beach in Dorchester.  The girl fought back and was kicked to the curb, but not before getting the license plate.  All three teens were quickly arrested.  Again, Bulger plead guilty to a lesser assault charge, paid a fine and avoided a serious prison term.  Within two months, he was arrested again, this time for a drunken assault in a diner that turned into a brawl with the police who showed up to arrest him.  Again, he plead guilty to the lesser charge of public drunkenness, paid a modest fine and walked away.
Despite Bill Bulger’s vehement and relentless involvement, including an eleventh hour visit to DC to the Director’s office for an unscheduled, in person request for a last minute reprieve, on November 13, 1959, Whitey was flown commercial, with federal marshals, from Baltimore to San Francisco.  From there, in leg irons, he was placed on the small ship that transported him to the center of San Francisco Bay and the Rock.  This was an especially isolating development for Whitey for in the late fifties transcontinental flight was a luxury the Bulger family certainly could not afford.  He would have to rely on letters only, the occasional visit from his brother or other family members now an impossibility.
On May 27, 1981. In broad daylight, at a country club in Tulsa, Martorano followed Roger Wheeler to his car in the parking lot and as Wheeler got in Martorano pulled the door open, put a bullet right between Wheeler’s eyes and hopped into a getaway car driven by another Winter Hill mobster.  Tulsa investigators quickly determined that criminals from Boston were probably involved, but when they and Oklahoma City FBI agents contacted Boston FBI, they got nowhere.
Gradually, even the highest level coke and pot dealers were invited to the upstairs office of the Triple O’s Bar.  There, Whitey would be waiting, usually with at least Kevin Weeks, a former bouncer that Whitey took under his wing, gradually relying on him as one of his top enforcers.
In July of 1956, there was no cushy Club Fed where Whitey could serve out his time in relative penal comfort.  Instead, he was sent to the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, a huge, forbidding edifice that had housed the likes of Al Capone, Mickey Cohen and Vito Genovese.  By comparison Whitey Bulger was a two-bit, bank robber, not exactly intimidating at 5’10”, 150 pounds and other than a few hoodlums back in Boston not particularly well connected.  After thirty days of quarantine that was mandatory for every new inmate, Bulger was assigned to one of the eight man cells that comprised most of the tiers of the prison.
Although Bulger had shot some gangster rivals to death in his early battles with the Mullens, his hands on violence began to ramp up in the late seventies, probably as a result of his newfound power as the most powerful criminal in South Boston.  This attitude was evidenced in the matter of Louie Latif, a bookmaker and drug dealer who began to behave erratically, first by murdering several business associates who caught him stealing and then by dealing cocaine.  Both behaviors were not only repeatedly unsanctioned by Bulger, Litif also refused to pay rent.

For twenty years, Whitey Bulger terrorized Boston with the full collusion of the FBI.  On the run for sixteen years, he was eventually arrested on June 22, 2011.
Litif got off with this stern warning but then made the mistake of telling Bulger that he was going to murder his bookmaker partner, a last straw.  On April, he was invited to the Triple O’s where Bulger stabbed him repeatedly with an ice pick and Steve Flemmi shot him in the head.  His body was found in the trunk of his car, in garbage bags, abandoned on a South End street.  In another example of his macabre sense of humor Whitey explained to associates afterwards that Litif, known as a flashy dresser, was wearing green underwear after they stripped his body.  Therefore, they made sure that they used green garbage bags, so that Louis would be found, color coordinated.
Only a few months later, a Southie criminal named Brian Halloran tried to extricate himself from some serious criminal charges by going to the FBI, with details tying Bulger and Flemmi to the murders of Louie Litif and Roger Wheeler, even claiming to be an eye witness in both cases.  Although Halloran was at least embellishing if not outright lying about his presence at the Wheeler slaying, he was close enough to Callahan to be able to secretly record potentially incriminating conversations. He pleaded to be allowed into the witness protection program and the agent handling his case figured he would run that by supervisor John Morris, to see what he thought. Morris immediately told Connolly who told Whitey Bulger.
With two bodies now buried in its basement, Whitey Bulger began referring to the Nee house as the Haunty.  The cellar would have another permanent guest, Deborah Hussey, Steve Flemmi’s quasi-stepdaughter.  Although he and Marion Hussey never married, he lived within the Hussey household and was perceived as the father in the family.  That is, until Deborah Hussey revealed that Flemmi had molested her sexually, beginning when she was a young teenager.  As an adult, Debbie developed a serious drug addiction and resorted to prostitution to feed her habit.  Arrested on numerous occasions, she frequently named dropped both Flemmi and Bulger to the police.  She also took to hanging around the Triple O’s and demanding drinks from the customers or hitting up Southie dope dealers for freebies, bragging that she had connections to Whitey, another big red flag.  Bulger believed her to be a dangerous loose cannon and began pushing Flemmi to do something about it.  In early January, 1985, Flemmi did.  He got her to meet him by feigning guilt over what had happened between them and the general situation with her mother.  He asked to make it up to her by taking her clothes shopping and telling her he was thinking of buying her her own place.  Why don’t we drop by and take a look and see if you like it?  The house in question was The Haunty.
Ambitious, Connolly was fully aware that for the FBI, the American Mafia to the exclusion of all other organized crime entities was the paramount target of Federal law enforcement.  Aware that Steve Flemmi already had provided information, Connolly set his sights on forming the same relationship with Whitey Bulger.  Thus far in his brief FBI career in New York, Connolly received high praise during his ongoing evaluations with the stipulation that he had not developed any confidential informants.  The agent, knowing Whitey from the old neighborhood and willing to cut ethical and professional corners, understood that developing Whitey as a Top echelon informant could be, within the bureau, a career maker.
In the cat and mouse game of criminal informant, it quickly became clear that the lines were being blurred as to who was the cat and who was the mouse.  John Connolly introduced Bulger and Flemmi to his newly installed supervisor within the FBI’s Boston Organized Crime Unit, John Morris.  Connolly also arranged for regular dinners at Morris...

For twenty years, Whitey Bulger terrorized Boston with the full collusion of the FBI.  On the run for sixteen years, he was eventually arrested on June 22, 2011.
Whitey did not limit himself geographically to South Boston.  No longer able to access Marshall Motors because a jailed, cash strapped Howie Winter’s family needed to rent it out, in early 1980, in a location owned by confederate George Kaufman, he set up another headquarters at a garage on Lancaster Street, only blocks away from Jerry Angiulo’s North End office in a restaurant on Prince Street.  Here Bulger routinely met with Ilario “Larry” Zannino, Angiulo’s number two man, among other bookies and criminals.  An initially strategic spot for such interactions, the Lancaster location set off a law enforcement reaction that was practically a keystone cop imitation.  When the Boston State Police received a tip that the garage was actually a chop shop, two investigators began surveillance from across the street.  Stunned when they observed the entrance and exit of some of Boston’s most notorious mobsters, they realized bugging the garage would probably provide a mother lode of indictments.  Jack O’Donovan, the head of the organized crime unit for the Massachusetts State Police had long suspected that the FBI was colluding with Bulger, and O’Donovan was intent on investigating and arresting Bulger himself.
When Charley Gasko emerged from the elevator into the rear area of the apartment building he would not be meeting up with Josh Bond.  Instead, he would be confronted by a half dozen FBI agents and various other law enforcement officials, guns drawn.  They ordered him to get on the ground, but despite his age and relative frailty, his response underlined that this was not your typical 81 year old senior citizen, in fact it was not Charlie Gasko at all.  It was America’s Most Wanted criminal, James J. (Whitey) Bulger.
Minutes later he called his longtime companion, the alleged Carol Gasko, who was in fact Bulger’s longtime girlfriend and fellow fugitive, Catherine Grieg, his accomplice during Whitey’s 16 year odyssey.  He told her that he had been arrested, that she should stay in the apartment and minutes later she was also brought down to the garage, both fugitives now in handcuffs.
Bond, who also managed the Princess Eugenia, needed to reach Charles or Carol Gasko, the elderly, childless couple that occupied the northeast third floor corner apartment, #304.  The property manager actually knew the Gaskos’ quite well, his own apartment was next door to theirs and he interacted with Charlie Gasko quite frequently.  Bond heard the phone ringing in his earpiece but there was no answer.  He hung up, not sure what to do.  The reason for his call was that the Gasko’s storage unit at the rear of the building was broken into and he needed to know how the couple wanted to handle the situation.  Come down and meet him, Josh, in the back of the building or just have Josh notify the police.
On the evening of October 29, Bulger arrived at the US Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia.  A high security prison where two inmates were murdered in the previous six weeks, unfortunately it also housed at least two individuals who made it completely unsuitable for Bulger.  One was Fotios (Freddy) Geas, serving a life sentence for the murder of two underworld criminals.  Although of Greek ethnicity, Geas was a hitman who operated in Springfield, Mass and was affiliated with the Mafia’s Genovese crime family.  In fact, he was arrested as part of the FBI’s investigation of organized crime in the Western Massachusetts area, an investigation that eventually involved the administration of Mayor Michael Albano.  Paul DeCologero was also a Northeastern Massachusetts organized crime figure, serving a lengthy sentence for murder.  On the morning of October 30, only minutes after Whitey Bulger’s prison cell door was unlocked at 6 AM,

Few personalities have achieved the worldwide fame and popularity of Harry Houdini.  Successful in several different media ranging from vaudeville to motion pictures, this performer was also an astute businessman who incorporated both groundbreaking copyright implementation and sensational publicity to establish himself as the first 20th century entertainment superstar.
To garner publicity, Houdini now started to promote himself by slipping handcuffs in police stations after a meticulous search by detectives.  In San Francisco, he stripped down to a veritable loin cloth to illustrate that he could not possibly be concealing a key or lock pick.  Then police restrained him with at least ten of their own pairs off handcuffs, even going so far as fastening ankle shackles to the wrists with an additional set of cuffs.  Houdini was then lifted up and placed in a nearby closet, emerging minutes later with each set of handcuffs removed and now attached together, the magician still practically naked.  Publicity photos of Houdini’s scantily clad muscular frame, draped with all nature of restraints became commonplace.  Because he could not perform in such a risqué costume, Houdini instead added the wardrobe obstacle of a straitjacket strapped over and under the numerous locks, cuffs and metal restraints he typically employed.  This became another of the performer’s trademark routines.
Although Houdini himself provided intense drama for his audience, he personally experienced one of the most dramatic moments of his own life when his mother, Cecelia, died on July 17, 1913.  Although all such mother-son relationships are typically close, Houdini had an especially strong maternal bond.  Having become a worldwide success, the rock that his family and especially his mother relied upon and an attentive son who lived up to his vow to his dying father, Harry Houdini’s interaction with his mother was a typically Old World relationship.  Unlike his behavior with non-family members, which was egotistical, controlling and financially ruthless, Houdini even described himself as a Mama’s Boy and it is has been speculated that his entire career and especially his death defying stunts were nothing more than an attempt to arouse approval, attention but most importantly Cecelia’s concern.
However, the nineteen year old was anything but an overnight success.  He first paired himself with an acquaintance factory co-worker and briefly with two of his brothers, most notably his younger brother, Theo, nicknamed Dash from his middle name of Dezo.  Eventually, Dash would strike out successfully on his own, performing as Hardeen, but Harry Houdini’s co-performer by then was Wilhemina Beatrice Rahner, nicknamed Bess, who also became Houdini’s wife in mid-1894.  Bess came from a German Catholic background, an unusual union within such a devoutly Jewish family.  All of the relatives eventually accepted the marriage and Bess became an integral part of Houdini’s act.
What resulted was one of his most famous tricks, the milk can escape.  Onstage, Houdini had audience members kick the four foot tall can to establish that it was in fact metallic and inflexible.  The can was then filled with water while offstage Houdini changed into a bathing suit.  When he returned, he was handcuffed and placed inside of the can after telling the audience to hold their breath for as long as they could.  Six hasps secured by locks, some even provided by spectators, were then secured and a screen was placed in front of the can, this process itself taking approximately a minute.  Houdini’s assistant, Franz Kukol, an Austrian hired while Houdini performed in Europe, stood by with an axe, the audience told that he was to break open the can if Houdini did not emerge in a set amount of time, the Austrian’s presence designed to add additional tension to the already potentially fatal undertaking. Houdini did employ a remarkable ability to hold his breath,

Few personalities have achieved the worldwide fame and popularity of Harry Houdini.  Successful in several different media ranging from vaudeville to motion pictures, this performer was also an astute businessman who incorporated both groundbreaking copyright implementation and sensational publicity to establish himself as the first 20th century entertainment superstar.
To publicize commercial appearances, the escape artist also began the practice of jumping handcuffed from bridges spanning whatever river ran through the city where he was performing.  On May 6, 1907, when Houdini jumped from a bridge in Rochester, New York, he also incorporated the new phenomenon of motion pictures, a two minute clip of this exploit is still easily found on the internet today. Underwater for no more than fifteen seconds, Houdini quickly emerged, holding the now removed restraints in the air.  Not only was this particular jump witnessed by an estimated ten thousand spectators, Houdini cleverly was able to exhibit the film footage in subsequent performances in theaters and arenas, cutting edge stuff in 1907.  A subsequent jump in New Orleans, included not only handcuffs but chains wrapped around his limbs and padlocked at his throat.  This required only about thirty seconds, before Houdini emerged, holding all of the restraints triumphantly over his head, as a transfixed audience of thousands watched from a Mississippi levee.  Weather conditions also were circumvented, Houdini once jumping twenty five feet off of Detroit’s Belle Isle Bridge at the end of November, into the freezing Detroit River.  Similar successful jumps occurred into Pittsburgh’s Allegheny and Boston’s Charles Rivers but the danger involved in these attempts was evidenced when a head first dive into the ocean from an Atlantic City pier in front of 20,000 people resulted in Houdini slamming his head into the ocean floor.
All of these escapades wound up routinely publicized on newspaper front pages all across America.
In Washington, DC, in January of 1906, he was placed in the former cell that confined Presidential assassin Charles J. Guiteau within the Murderer’s Row in the DC’s United States jail.  Stripped of his clothing and thoroughly searched, he was then placed in Guiteau’s former cell, jail personnel leaving him there and returning to an exterior office.  The cells were not only protected by sophisticated locks, they also featured a bar connected to the walls of the corridor, this bar also locked with a device that featured five tumblers and was unreachable from the inside of the cell.  He emerged in two minutes, but then added the extra twist of opening the cells of all of the confined criminals and persuading them to exchange positions within the row, extricating his clothing from another cell and presenting himself to the warden in his office in a total of twenty-one minutes.
After observing the huge contracts obtained by such performers as Charlie Chaplin, his path became clear, especially when two young producers offered him a deal to star in an adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.  Initially trumpeted as the highest amount of money to be paid for a performer in a motion picture up to that time, Houdini became the first of many artists to be disappointed by the promises of a film producer.  The film was never made and he eventually sued and recovered a modest amount of money but this foray only solidified Houdini’s desire to stop touring and get heavily involved in film production.
Houdini’s distraction from performing was underlined by the undertaking of building a massive monument to his mother at her gravesite at the Jewish Machpelah cemetery in Queens.  This granite and marble memorial underlined his practical obsession with his mother and also was eventually meant as a final resting place for himself, another reason for the ornate 1000 ton addition to this maternal shrine.  A ceremony on October 1,

In March of 1895, Oscar Wilde enjoyed fame and fortune as one of Britain’s foremost literary figures.  Only four months later he was inprisoned for the crime of “gross indecency,” convicted of violating Britain’s laws against same sex relationships.  Upon his release, he exiled himself to France, his career in ruins and never saw his family again.
At Oxford, Wilde continued his immersion in the classics.  The school was definitely a step up in class, his fellow students having matriculated at Eton, Harrow or similarly upper class English preparatory environments.  Many were also comparatively much wealthier than the modestly affluent Irish native. A later journalistic account described him as initially, naïve, embarrassed, with a convulsive laugh, a lisp and Irish accent.
Wilde sailed for America, arriving in New York on January 2, 1882.  Oscar, who received a great deal of attention in London’s society columns, and whose tour was widely publicized in both Britain and the US, was swamped by journalists, even before he was able to clear customs and disembark, the press actually hiring boats to interview Wilde offshore.
            Wishing to represent himself as an aesthete in appearance as well as philosophical perspective, Wilde greeted the press in a full length green topcoat, trimmed with fur on the cuffs and collars, a similarly colored and trimmed rounded green hat on his head, hair much longer then was typical.  A large collared shirt with light blue tie was visible underneath this outer layer.  He also wore a large seal ring with a classical Greek profile.
Oscar Wilde also remained focused on Constance Lloyd.  In Dublin, for a series of lectures, he was invited to the home of relative’s of Constance’s mother, Adelaide Atkinson Lloyd.  There, Oscar and Constance spent time together and socialized for the next few days, Constance attending both of Wilde’s Dublin lectures.  On November 25, the couple were left alone in the drawing room of the Atkinson home, the same room where Constance’s father proposed to her mother.  Here, also Oscar Wilde proposed to Constance Lloyd.  She accepted immediately and was described as, “insanely happy.”
But just as Wilde reached the heights of public popularity, his private life resulted in his complete personal ruin and professional destruction.  Although his vow of celibacy applied to his relationship with his wife, it did not preclude Wilde from consorting sexually with men, on a frequent basis that included what were termed, “rent boys,” young, working class males typically in their late teens.  Wilde was also emotionally involved with Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed Bosie, a student at Oxford when Wilde was introduced to him.  The two began a tempestuous lengthy relationship that was also quite indiscrete.
On February 28, 1895, Wilde entered a private club of which he was a member, the Albemarle Club.  He was hailed by the doorman, who handed him an envelope, stating that the enclosed card was dropped off ten days earlier.  Inside was a card embossed with the Marquess of Queensbury’s name and written in script, “For Oscar Wilde- posing Somdomite,” the last word misspelled but written with clear intent.  Only the card was delivered, it was judiciously placed in an envelope by the doorman and could have easily been seen by staff, as well as members, which included women.

In March of 1895, Oscar Wilde enjoyed fame and fortune as one of Britain’s foremost literary figures.  Only four months later he was inprisoned for the crime of “gross indecency,” convicted of violating Britain’s laws against same sex relationships.  Upon his release, he exiled himself to France, his career in ruins and never saw his family again.
Unfortunately, their reunion was so successful that both men began contemplating running off to Naples, the consequences be damned.  Robert Ross and various other associates and friends of Wilde soon heard about this development and were all uniformly dismayed.  Wilde was literally living off his wife’s allowance, funds that would be jeopardized if the news of his rekindled relationship with Bosie became known to her and especially her attorneys.  Even so, he needed to borrow money just to get to Naples by train, leaving this important fact out of any discussions he had about his reasons for heading to Italy.
Robert Ross’ belief that Wilde’s literary reputation would eventually be reconstituted occurred faster than even he anticipated.  By the beginning of the 20th century, various critical analyses and biographies and accounts of Wilde’s life appeared to great interest.  His plays never really disappeared for any length of time, their popularity in British regional theater continued and all of Wilde’s theatrical works returned to popularity internationally as the century progressed.  By 1908, Ross had successfully repurchased all of Wilde’s copyrights that were sold off during Oscar’s bankruptcy proceedings.  These rights were then returned to Wilde’s sons.
John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry.  Aggressively masculine and a sportsman, as opposed to his sons, the elder Douglas, is credited with creating what are known as boxing’s “Queensberry Rules,” the ten basic rules that govern boxing even today.  Despite great wealth, Douglas was extremely hostile, and possibly mentally ill.
Although his wife also restored a modest allowance of ten pounds a month upon hearing of his break with Douglas, Wilde received the news that she died on April 7, 1898 after a botched operation to relieve her paralysis.  She was buried in Genoa, her gravestone using her newly assumed name of Holland with no mention of Oscar Wilde.
Finding Wilde borderline delirious and hearing that he had no more than days to live, Ross then went to the nearest Catholic church and brought back an Irish priest who quickly went through the official ceremony of converting Wilde to Catholicism.  Ross also sent cables to Frank Harris and Alfred Douglas, warning them of Wilde’s current state.  By the morning of November of November 30, Wilde had lost consciousness and was completely unresponsive.  He died that afternoon.
Ross also transferred Wilde’s remains from Bagneaux to the more prestigious Parisian cemetery at Pere Lachaise, already the resting place of Chopin, Balzac, Moliere and eventually Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison. Ross also collected funds for a magnificent sculpted abstract sphinxlike creature, requesting that the artist Jacob Epstein include a compartment for the internment of Ross’ own ashes, a request that was not fulfilled until 1950, 32 years after Ross’ death at age 49 of a heart attack.  Epstein’s monument is perhaps too magnificent, it was repeatedly vandalized by lipstick kisses until cemetery authorities cleaned it and installed plexiglass to prevent such future vandalism.

On August 7, 1974, a twenty-five year old man named Philippe Petit walked across a 200 foot wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, 1,350 feet above the ground, something that even the policeman who arrested him described as a once in a lifetime event.
On the night of June 25th and the early morning of June 26th ,1971 Philippe Petit and his associates ascended the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral.  Blondeau tossed a fishing line attached to a tennis ball to Petit in the other tower.  A thicker rope was attached to this initial line and then pulled across the gap between the two towers, this process repeated with thicker ropes until the heavy metal cable was attached to a rope and pulled across the open space.  Petit and Blondeau worked all night, securing the wire until the early morning hours of Saturday.  Then, to the amazement of the ever increasing group of tourists that gathered in the plaza in front of the cathedral, Petit, dressed in his typical all black clothing walked on to the cable and for three hours, juggled balls and pins, walked rapidly back and forth and even lay on his back as the crowd applauded below.
Assisted by some local Australians he met in Nimbin, he persuaded a local wire distributor to give him the requisite cable in exchange for a performance of magic and juggling for the company’s employees.  With huge padlocked doors impossible to pick or penetrate, Petit hacksawed his way in through barred gaps high above the ground and, with his newfound friends, reconnoitered both pylons at night.  Eventually they were able to rig the bridge in preparation for the crossing scheduled to occur on June 3, 1973.  At rush hour on the morning of June 3, Petit ascended the wire and crossed several times, pausing again to perform his trademark move of lying on his back for several minutes, supported only by the thin cable, almost three hundred feet above the ground.
It was three weeks before Petit took the subway downtown and, for the first time, got a look at the Twin Towers in person.  Even he was humbled by the magnitude of both buildings, recalling later that the same word kept unconsciously repeating in his mind: Impossible! But, even on this first attempt at reconnaissance, Petit would access forbidden stairwells, avoid police and, when encountering construction workers, act as if he belonged.  Although it took an hour, he finally emerged, alone on the top of one of the Twin Towers.  Far from complete, the building did not even have a guardrail.  It was 1,350 feet high and eventually contained 110 stories.  Petit was still so intimidated that when he got to the edge of the structure he could barely look down and focused instead on the distance between the two towers.
It is approximately 7 AM, soon the entire area will be crawling with workers and security.  Petit knows it is now or never.  He is utterly exhausted and has gotten virtually no sleep for two consecutive days.  Later, Blondeau would call the wire the worst they had ever rigged together.  Both he and Jean Francois Heckel were also terrified, believing that it was very possible that Petit could fall.  But Petit had already made up his mind.
            “I had to make a decision of shifting my weight from one foot anchored to the building to the one foot anchored on the wire.  This is possibly the end of my life, to step on that wire, but on the other hand something that I could not resist, I did not make any effort to resist, something called me on to the cable. And death is very close.”

On August 7, 1974, a twenty-five year old man named Philippe Petit walked across a 200 foot wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, 1,350 feet above the ground, something that even the policeman who arrested him described as a once in a lifetime event.
After Philip and Jean Francois are booked and fingerprinted, they were handcuffed to chairs while paperwork is composed that specifically defines the charges of Criminal Trespass and Disorderly Conduct.  In the details of the complaint, the headline reads “Man on Wire.”  It only takes Petit a few minutes to charm most of his captors by balancing a policeman’s hat on his nose and flipping it on to his head repeatedly.
.  It is ultimately decided that both men are to be conveyed to a downtown hospital where Philippe is to be given psychiatric examination.  The doctor in charge quickly pronounces him sane.  He is taken back to a precinct house, where he is told that his sister is on the phone, a ruse to allow Annie to attempt to speak with him.  An hour later, in front of a judge, the deal is made official.  Ultimately, this little show will turn into a October 29 high wire walk across Central Park’s Turtle Pond, in front of 5,000 spectators.  Both Jean Francois and Philippe are released and their cuffs removed.  They are free to go, however Jean Francois was eventually officially deported.
Merely walking through the lobby, he heard his name being called and turning to the source of the voice he saw a very well dressed man with a striking handlebar moustache.  The man ebulliently explained that he saw Philippe performing in Paris while the stranger was on vacation.  He introduced himself, also responding to Philippe’s already probing questions telling the aerialist that he works on the 82nd floor of the South tower.  His name is Barry Greenhouse, employed by the New York State Insurance Department and most importantly his office is on an upper floor.  When Barry asked Philippe again what he is doing in the World Trade Center, Philippe invited him to dinner, realizing that Greenhouse may be the most valuable accomplice in his entire crew.  At dinner, with Annie participating, Petit wheeled out his photo album scrapbook of his antics in Paris and Sydney and, thinking, based on Greenhouse amused reaction that the streetwise New Yorker probably has figured out what he is up to, Petit spells out his plan exactly, asking for the older man’s help.  After asking some general questions, probably to see how serious Petit was, Greenhouse offered to assist in any way that he can.
On the street below, Annie Allix was much more effusive.  “I saw Philippe up there, it was extraordinary, it was so, so beautiful…It was like he was walking on a cloud.”
Jean Louis and Jean Francois have already flown home, Heckel’s excited anticipation over potential future coups dampened by Jean Louis’ admonition that he will never work with Petit again and he believes that their friendship is irrevocably broken.
 

On November 14, 1959, two petty criminals, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, crossed Kansas, murdered the Clutter family in the tiny hamlet of Holcomb, Kansas and unwittingly enabled a New York City writer named Truman Capote to achieve immortality for all three of them.
When Truman Capote arrived in Kansas, Smith and Hickock were not yet on law enforcement’s radar.  Capote’s initial intent was to write about the reaction of the town and its inhabitants but he had at least enough self awareness to understand that it would be next to impossible for someone with both his New York and blatantly homosexual persona to ingratiate himself to the appropriate degree.
Capote enlisted Harper Lee as his partner in journalism and set about trying to induce the locals, both law enforcement and private citizens, into sharing any valuable insight.  His initial wardrobe of a pillbox style hat, long sheepskin coat and scarf that hung all the way to his feet did him no favors but Harper Lee seems to have helped him win over his most productive source and access to important information.  Alvin Dewey, as a member of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation or KBI, the state agency with jurisdiction over the investigation and a resident of Garden City, was logically designated to coordinate the investigation with other assigned members of the KBI.  Initially repelled by Capote, Dewey eventually was charmed especially by Harper Lee, who also became friendly with Dewey’s wife Marie, and it wasn’t long before Capote and Lee were getting regular invitations to dinner.
Arriving shortly after midnight on the morning of November 15, a full moon completely illuminated both the Clutter home, and the expansive series of barns, which Smith said excited Hickock, Dick thinking the proprietor of such a spread had to possess a great deal of money.  With no need for headlights, Hickock shut them and the car engine off and parked behind a tree, allowing the two men to appraise the situation.
Richard Eugene “Dick” Hickock was born on June 6, 1931 in Kansas City, Missouri.  His parents, Walter and Eunice, were typically devout, hard working lower middle class Kansas Midwesterners who raised their family on a 44 acre farm in the small town of Edgerton.  Walter Hickock worked as a mechanic by day and farmed his acreage during off hours.  Industrious, he built the farm’s main family residence by himself.  His oldest of two sons, Dick was popular in high school and lettered in several sports but Dick’s parents were unable to provide the financial means to send Dick to college after his graduation in 1949.  Instead, he went to work for the Santa Fe Railroad and pursued another interest, women.  Many surmise that the critical event in Hickock’s life was a serious car accident in 1950, in which he was almost killed, spent days in the hospital and emerged with disfigured facial features and possibly permanent brain damage. Married at age 19 to his 16 year old girlfriend who produced two children, Hickock seems to have undergone a personality change in which he suddenly began gambling, kiting checks and living beyond his means.  He also managed to conceive a child with another woman, prompting a divorce from his first wife.  Saying that he wanted to “do the right thing,” he married the mother of his third child but continued to subsidize menial jobs, mostly as an auto mechanic, with petty crime.  Whether it was for writing bad checks or stealing a rifle from a private residence, Hickock finally caught his first five-year jail sentence in 1956 for “cheating and defrauding.”  He was paroled from Kansas State Penitentiary on August 13, 1959.
Perry Edward Smith was born in Huntington, Nevada on October 27, 1928, perhaps appropriately, his birthplace is now a ghost town.  His father John “Tex” Smith and mother Florence “Flo” Buckskin were rodeo riders who performed in small towns across the northern great plains.

On November 14, 1959, two petty criminals, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, crossed Kansas, murdered the Clutter family in the tiny hamlet of Holcomb, Kansas and unwittingly enabled a New York City writer named Truman Capote to achieve immortality for all three of them.
This arrest was most likely the result of the efforts of KBI investigator Harold Nye, who, in the interim after the Wells revelation, had traveled to Las Vegas to question individuals who might have encountered Perry Smith while Smith stayed in the city prior to returning to Kansas.  Nye also met extensively with members of the Las Vegas Police department and impressed upon them that Smith especially was known to frequent the city and that Smith and Hickock’s apprehension was extremely important.  While the attentive Las Vegas patrolmen who spotted the stolen plate and vehicle deserve credit, most likely they were focused as a result of information transmitted throughout the department, the result of Harold Nye’s diligence.
Hickock and Smith, not wanting to drag a lot of miscellaneous items with them when they returned from Mexico and had to resort to hitchhiking, mailed a box to Post Office General Delivery in Las Vegas containing, among other things, the boots they wore the night they killed the Clutters.  Their arrest occurred only a few minutes later and had the police nabbed them sooner these critical items that physically linked them to the murder scene might never have been recovered.
Hickock went first although no one was really sure how that was decided, perhaps alphabetically.  He made a brief statement; “I don’t have any hard feelings.  You’re sending me to a better place.” He then thanked the KBI agents for being there and was helped by guards up the thirteen steps of the gallows.  There, while the 23rd Psalm was intoned by the prison chaplain, a hood was placed over his head, a noose tightened around his neck and the long hood. At 12:19 AM he was positioned exactly on the wooden platform and then the hangman, paid six hundred dollars for his effort, pulled a lever opening a small trap door, Hickock falling straight down until the rope snapped taut breaking his neck.  A doctor present for this official purpose took 22 minutes to pronounce Hickock dead, after his heart stopped beating.
Smith was next, driven to the gallows and arriving a little after 1 AM.  In Capote’s book, he is supposed to have issued an apology but his last official words actually were: “I think it is a hell of a thing that a life has to be taken in this manner.  I say this especially because there’s a great deal I could have offered society.  I think capital punishment is legally and morally wrong.  Any apology for what I have done would be meaningless at this time.  I don’t have any animosities toward anyone involved in this matter.  I think that is all.  Then Smith ascended the steps to the gallows, underwent the same process as Hickock, dropped through the trap door at 1:07 AM and was pronounced dead 12 minutes later.
Capote’s fall from grace was so complete that he exiled himself to California and published only fragments and short pieces, Answered Prayers remaining unfinished.  In August of 1984, having not published anything of substance for almost twenty years and while apparently living at the home of his newest best friend Joanne Carson, talk show host Johnny’s second wife, Capote died of liver cancer.  Gore Vidal, who successfully sued Capote over accusations of drunkenness at the White House and also famously claimed that Capote’s voice was audible only to dogs called it a good career move.

In 1942, the Czech government in exile decided to parachute two commandos into the former Czechoslovakia to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, considered the most brutal and sinister Nazi in Occupied Europe.  Code named Operation Anthropoid, this suicide mission remains one of the most heroic and remarkable stories of World War II.
Nazi lore has it that Heinrich Himmler, appointed in 1929 as the head of the newly formed SS, was intent on developing a unit consigned with obtaining and organizing intelligence on both internal party members and external individuals of political and social interest, essentially an elite domestic spying apparatus.  Heydrich’s dossier was given to Himmler by a Von Osten connection and the Reichsfuhrer was impressed enough to summon the former officer to headquarters in Munich.  However, at the last minute the interview was cancelled, a development that Heydrich and Lina perceived as a sign that he had been eliminated from consideration.  Heydrich, encouraged by Lina, decided to keep the appointment anyway and when he got to Munich, managed to wangle a 20 minute interview.  As it turned out, the appointment was cancelled merely because of Himmler not feeling well and he was doubly irritated by having to deal with an official matter during his illness.  Initially resolved to quickly dispense with this annoyance, the Reichsfuhrer brusquely informed the candidate that he had twenty minutes to describe how Heydrich would organize a potential internal party intelligence agency.  It probably did not hurt that the six foot, blonde haired, blue eyed candidate exactly fit the Aryan physical prototype of the perfect SS man.  Himmler was so surprised and impressed by Heydrich’s thoughtful and detailed response that he hired him on the spot.  Reinhard Heydrich, 27 years old, was now the head of what eventually became known as the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, literally, in English, the Security Service.
Reporting to the German naval port city of Kiel, Heydrich quickly was perceived as an outsider, especially when he showed up for training with a violin.  This possession differentiated him from his lower class compatriots as pompous and even effeminate.  His high-pitched voice, tall, gawky demeanor and lack of self confidence did little to endear him to his fellow cadets, another native of his hometown did him no favors by repeating the rumor that he was actually Jewish.  A lesser individual might have crumbled under this type of adversity but instead Heydrich thrived on his loner status, becoming technically proficient in wireless operations and passing language exams in French, Russian and English.  He completed his initial training, received promotions and excelled in athletic competitions that included fencing, horse riding and even membership in the naval pentathlon team.  Heydrich’s naval career progressed positively during the twenties and resulted in a promotion to sub-lieutenant, an officer’s rank.
To maintain his personal profile and also the national relevance and autonomy of his organization, Eduard Benes resolved that some bold and decisive action must be undertaken, even if it was symbolic, to reassert, even conceptually, the existence of the Czech resistance.  He also hoped that the operation was so bold as to serve as a catalyst for a massive uprising of the Czech population. This concept precipitated the specific plot to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, code named Anthropoid.
Secret commando agents had parachuted into the former Czechoslovakia already, with very limited success.  Most were rounded up and executed after only a few weeks of operation.  But these agents came from an ongoing initiative, assisted by the British Special Operations Executive, to continue to infiltrate Czech operatives into the Protectorate.  From this operation two commandos were selected, Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, for the specific purpose of killing both Heydrich and Karl Herman Frank.

In 1942, the Czech government in exile decided to parachute two commandos into the former Czechoslovakia to assassinate  Reinhard Heydrich, considered the most brutal and sinister Nazi in Occupied Europe.  Code named Operation Anthropoid, this suicide mission remains one of the most heroic and remarkable stories of World War II
But Kubas had also approached the car, undetected and he hurled the grenade towards the open interior of the vehicle.  He missed badly, the device skittering against the rear right tire and exploding against the side and undercarriage of the Mercedes.  Although inaccurate, the blast was intense enough to shatter the tram’s windows and send shrapnel into a group of passengers exiting the streetcar.
It is not known where exactly Kubis and Gabcik hid in the first days after the assassination.  But, understanding that it was only a matter of time before they would be located, Jan Zelensky arranged for seven of the fugitive commandos to be hidden in the expansive crypt of the Saint Cyril and Methodius Cathedral, Prague’s most prominent Czech Orthodox church.
Heinz Pannwitz, the local Gestapo official in charge of the investigation and manhunt decided that a change of strategy was in order.  He got Frank to agree to announce that an amnesty would be provided to any citizen who provided valuable information about the assassins, as long as this occurred before June 18.  If an arrest was not forthcoming by then, 30,000 Czechs would be detained and executed.
The only other access was through a narrow opening leading to the exterior of the church, essentially for ventilation.  Not wanting to instigate another mass suicide, Pannwitz attempted to reason with the remaining commandos inside.  Announcements via loudspeaker blared that the defenders would be treated as POW’s if they surrendered.  Petrek, and even Karol Curda, was sent up to the narrow opening, hoping to induce a peaceful conclusion.  Upon hearing Curda’s voice, one of the defenders let loose with gunshots and yelled that they would never surrender.  Pannwitz then tried having the city fire department flood the crypt, jamming large fire houses down the vent and releasing hundreds of gallons of water a minute as well as tear gas into the crypt, to no avail.  The hoses were pushed out by the defenders, who also hurled Molotov cocktails at the firemen.
The ranking officer on the scene in charge of the Lidice massacre, Horst Bohme, disappeared at the end of the war and was declared legally dead in 1954, most likely a suicide.
Even before Heydrich’s state funeral in Berlin concluded, on the evening of June 9, upon hearing the details of Lidice’s defiance, Hitler ordered the village to be completely destroyed.  At 9:30 at night, the village was sealed off, men over the age of fifteen were separated from the town’s women and children, and in groups of ten were placed against a wall and shot.  At midday on the tenth, all 173 men were dead.  They were buried in a mass grave dug by concentration camp inhabitants from Theriesiensdtadt.  203 women were placed on an armed transport to the women’s concentration camp facility at Ravensbruck.  Although brutal, this was not an extermination camp, 143 of these deportees survived their imprisonment.  As many as 105 children were detained, the exact number unclear based on their ultimate fates.  Only a handful of these victims were determined to be suitable for “Germanization,” several eventually murdered in German orphanages.  The rest were consigned to the Chelmno extermination camp.  Only seventeen made it home after the war.

In 1961, an unemployed cab driver, Kempton Bunton, pulled off one of the most remarkable art thefts of the 20th century.  Or did he?
Bunton’s mother named him Kempton Cannon Bunton after a British jockey, Kempton Cannon, who won the Epsom Derby only days before her son’s birth, June 14, 1904, a victory she financially backed.  When asked about his unusual name, Bunton also always replied, “It’s Kempton as in Kempton Park racecourse,” as if to underscore his interest in such an edgy activity.
Arthur Wellesley, the First Duke of Wellington, became one of the most prominent military and political leaders of the British Empire during the first half of the nineteenth century.  Despite spending approximately fifteen years in military posts that included the Netherlands and especially India, Wellesley remained an obscure commanding officer until his 1808 assignment to the Peninsula War, an extended conflict on the Iberian Peninsula combating Napoleonic occupation.  This grueling struggle, combined with Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia, depleted French military strength, and lead to France’s eventual capitulation.  One of the key moments of the Peninsula War occurred when Wellesley, then the Earl of Wellington, achieved a decisive victory at Salamanca, which lead to the liberation of the capital, Madrid and the flight to Valencia of Joseph Bonaparte, titular king of Spain, and brother of Napoleon Bonaparte.  The Earl entered the capital on August 12, 1812, at the head of his troops, the British hailed as liberators by Madrid’s grateful inhabitants. The Peninsula War dragged on laboriously until 1814 and the final collapse and abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after Salamanca, Madrid was never reoccupied by French forces.
            As a celebrity, Wellington, in the capital, crossed paths with Francisco de Goya, the Spanish Court Painter and a prominent member of official society in his own right.  Goya was able to get the British commander to sit for a sketch and two other eventual paintings, an equestrian study and a remarkable portrait of Wellington, in scarlet uniform, festooned with numerous colorful decorations and a remarkably lifelike expression.  Over time, as the historical prominence of both men grew, this portrait achieved a special stature denoting the interaction of one of Europe’s greatest artists with one of the continent’s most accomplished statesman and military leaders, a truly rare collaboration.
The initial controversy and subsequent national retention of such a uniquely British artifact generated massive publicity and anticipation when it was announced that the painting would be placed on display at London’s National Gallery, beginning August 2, 1961.  For two and a half weeks, crowds averaging well over five thousand patrons daily, an unusual increase over the normal number of the museum’s visitors, flocked to see the newly acquired painting.  To accentuate the stature of and to insure maximum accessibility for the throng of visitors eager to see the portrait, Goya’s Duke of Wellington was displayed on a portable easel, not in one of the museum’s rooms with other paintings but by itself, in a common area, in the North Vestibule of the Gallery.  It also was loosely secured on the easel to allow for immediate removal in the event of fire or some other calamity.  Then, on August 21, the painting vanished.

In 1961, an unemployed cab driver, Kempton Bunton, pulled off one of the most remarkable art thefts of the 20th century.  Or did he?
Although Bunton was initially only charged with one count of larceny, the prosecution submitted an indictment that was much more severe.  He was now charged with two counts of larceny, one for the painting, one for the frame, that was never recovered, and one charge of menacing for submitting letters to Lord Robbins demanding money.  In addition, he was charged with creating a public nuisance by depriving citizens of their right to see the painting and with additional menacing, implying the potential threat to permanently keep or even destroy the artwork in his letter to the Mirrror.  Breaking out the frame and the portrait theft charges separately and prosecuting Bunton for inconveniencing the public, certainly seemed like a case of overcharging, however the prosecution might have been concerned about a jury’s reaction to an oddball like Bunton, especially where charity was supposedly involved and they may have wished to underline the gravity of the offence.
On November 4, 1965, in the Central Criminal Court, Kempton Bunton’s trial began before Judge Carl Aarvold, a distinguished jurist eventually knighted for his public service.  The court was known by its nickname, Old Bailey, the site of numerous famous and sensational court cases involving many famous defendants.  Its marble floors, ornate décor and fine wooden walls evoked the image of a British courtroom popularized throughout the world in film and television.
Although Bunton was initially only charged with one count of larceny, the prosecution submitted an indictment that was much more severe.  He was now charged with two counts of larceny, one for the painting, one for the frame, that was never recovered, and one charge of menacing for submitting letters to Lord Robbins demanding money.  In addition, he was charged with creating a public nuisance by depriving citizens of their right to see the painting and with additional menacing, implying the potential threat to permanently keep or even destroy the artwork in his letter to the Mirrror.  Breaking out the frame and the portrait theft charges separately and prosecuting Bunton for inconveniencing the public, certainly seemed like a case of overcharging, however the prosecution might have been concerned about a jury’s reaction to an oddball like Bunton, especially where charity was supposedly involved and they may have wished to underline the gravity of the offence.
Kempton Bunton had a spontaneous manner of testifying that incorporated unintentionally hilarious comments that convulsed the entire courtroom, including the judge, with raucous laughter.  When asked if he had ever told his wife about the theft, Bunton replied emphatically and without hesitation,
“No, then the whole world would know, if I told her.”
When Cussen attempted to challenge Bunton’s assertion that he always intended to return the Goya, Bunton was practically exasperated,
“Absolutely, it was no good to me otherwise. I wouldn’t hang it in my own kitchen if it was my own picture,” the comment again bringing down the house, an unemployed cab driver deriding one of the art world’s most esteemed paintings.  Again and again, Bunton’s oddball demeanor and ability to stonewall the prosecution not allowing Cussen to portray him in a diabolical light.
 


 

In 1929, Al Capone was worth an inflation adjusted 1.5 billion dollars.
On January 17, 1899, Alphonse Gabriel Capone became the fourth child born into this family, and the second native American.  Including the two born in Italy, the Capone family later consisted of nine children, eight surviving into adulthood.  Al’s father was a barber by trade, eventually moving the family to a better home that also contained his shop.  His father, unlike his mother, was literate and spoke English.  Although relatively poor, the Capones seemed like just another ordinary, hard working couple putting their children through school and looking to make their way in the new world.  There was nothing to indicate mental instability or dysfunction that eventually produced a remarkably anti-social progeny.
From a young age, Donato “Johnny” Torrio was focused on organizing criminal activities involving gambling and loan sharking that he operated from behind a legitimate business, a neighborhood pool hall.  Although not flamboyant, Torrio, born in Montepeloso, Italy, was a sharp operator who allied himself with Manhattan’s Five Points Gang and quickly began to branch out into more malevolent criminal activity involving prostitution, extortion and even narcotics.  Torrio also kept a close eye on the neighborhood, always eager to find teenagers that he could depend on to run errands and generally handle tasks without asking too many questions.
This change was prompted by Johnny Torrio, by now himself relocated to Chicago and the brains behind the racketeering organization operated by James (Big Jim) Colosimo, a rags to riches gangster and restaurateur, who covertly ran a huge vice operation that dealt especially in brothels and prostitution.  His Colosimo’s Café was one of the most popular and opulent restaurants in the city and Colosimo, sporting diamonds, wearing a white suit, tall and certainly carrying more than a few extra pounds was a literally larger than life figure.  Torrio was the perfectly reserved and concealed manager who paid attention to day to day operations while Colosimo spent most of his time partying and taking advantage of his proximity to a large stable of obliging females.
Warned by his gang buddies to stop provoking Torrio, O’Banion famously responded, “To hell with the Sicilians,” evincing a bravado that was recklessly foolhardy.  Because, O’Banion was a heavyweight gangland figure with strong connections, the Outfit tread carefully but methodically forward.  O’Banion also had a lucrative florist business that focused especially on the elaborate floral designs necessitated by any number of gangland deaths in Chicago.  The shop was directly across from the Holy Name Cathedral, an immense downtown Chicago Catholic church and location that generated even more business.  O’Banion actually supervised the business personally and was usually on the premises.  On November 10, 1924, three men entered the store, ostensibly to pick up a sizable order.  Exactly who these men were has always been the subject of rumor, but the best guess revolves around Frankie Yale, who O’Banion would not have suspected and two other men, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, two individuals who eventually became the most feared hitmen in the Outfit but at that time were unknown, recent emigres from Sicily.  While Frankie Yale firmly shook hands with O’Banion, both Scalise and Anselmi shot him in the chest, throat and a final coup de grace to the head.  Other employees in the rear of the store fled out of the back door.  O’Banion’s funeral was as lavish as any Chicago had ever seen, the funeral procession to the cemetery a mile long.  Capone and Torrio and many other enemies were in attendance, for them the occasion as much of a celebration as anything else.  They presumed that O’Banion’s north side territory would now be there’s to keep.
Although Bugs Moran escaped injury, his gang was essentially neutralized and in the early thir...

In 1929, Al Capone was worth an inflation adjusted 1.5 Billion Dollars.
Most speakeasies and night clubs serving illicit alcohol provided entertainment in some form, mostly jazz or a vocalist with a band.  One of these entertainers named Joe E. Lewis was a regular performer at the Green Mill, a club that was owned by the Outfit.  As compensation, Al Capone gave Jack McGurn a piece of the club’s profits and when McGurn found out that Lewis was not going to renew his contract and was going to earn more money at the Rendezvous, a North Side Gang operation, he confronted the singer-comedian and told him he couldn’t leave.
Lewis brushed him off, said his contract was up and that was that.  He actually performed at the Rendezvous for a week, protected by a bodyguard who accompanied him to and from his hotel residence.  Lewis then decided he didn’t need protection, that McGurn had only been trying to scare him.  On November 9, 1927, seven days after he opened at his new club, three men showed up at Lewis’ Commonwealth Hotel room, burst in on the sleepy Lewis when he opened the door and pistol whipped him into unconsciousness.  Then one assailant took a large knife to Lewis’ throat and mouth and even cut off part of the singer’s tongue.  Although they could have merely shot the defiant entertainer, the thugs instead sent a terrible message to Lewis and any other performer who attempted to assert such independence.  Joe E. Lewis managed to crawl into the hallway and was quickly taken to a hospital where he underwent extensive but successful surgery.  He recovered but eventually became a stand-up comedian, his voice now a bullfrog like croak, no longer able to belt out night club standards.  Ironically, most likely to counter the public outcry over the incident, Al Capone actually went out of his way to patch things up, claiming to Lewis personally that he knew nothing about the attack and that Joe should have come to him personally if he had a problem.  Capone also got him back to the Green Mill, equaling his deal at the Rendezvous, and gave Lewis winning tips at dog and horse races controlled by the Outfit.  Lewis’ career continued successfully well into the sixties, and a biographical film starring Frank Sinatra called the Joker Is Wild was produced in 1957, reiterating Lewis’ terrible ordeal and recovery.
While this investigation proceeded laboriously, in mid-1929, a curious incident occurred which only added to the mysterious lore surrounding Al Capone.  In mid-May of 1929, Capone traveled to Atlantic City to participate in what became known as the Atlantic City Conference.  Organized by Meyer Lansky, this gathering included almost all of American organized crime including Capone, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello and many other gangsters from all over the US.  The meeting was the first attempt by the American underworld to set up a national organization to oversee and make decisions to divide territory and adjudicate disputes without violence.  Another underlying issue was a resolve to minimize the attention that Al Capone was generating, involving both the type of violence that occurred with the St. Valentines Day Massacre and Capone himself, who routinely sought out positive media coverage and made himself publicly prominent to the point of celebrity, behavior that created hostility from other prominent underworld figures who abhorred attention of any kind.  Following the conference, which concluded on May 16, Capone intended to return to Chicago by train via Philadelphia.  With some time on his hands, he and a bodyguard went to a movie and when the film ended, upon leaving the theater, both men were arrested, searched and found in possession of a firearm, in Capone’s case a .38 caliber revolver.
.  But his respite was brief, In late April, the Chicago Crime Commission, a watch-dog collection of businessmen with no legal standing issued a list of the 14 most prominent Public enemies in the city.

On February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly was in the middle of the tour from hell and would do anything to avoid another three hundred mile, overnight bus ride that already had inflicted frostbite on another band member.  That determination changed American popular music forever.
Charles Hardin Holley was born in Lubbock, Texas on September 7, 1936.  The “e” in his surname would be dropped when Decca Records misspelled Holley on one of his first recording contracts.  Nicknamed Buddy by his mother, as she considered “Charles,” too formal, he was the youngest of four siblings.  The family was Baptist and deeply religious, attending church routinely but singing hymns from an early age probably developed Buddy’s interest in music.  Despite Lubbock’s location in the heart of the bible belt, Holly was also intrigued by country and rhythm and blues popular tunes that were available via radio stations from larger midwestern radio stations.  By the seventh grade, he was playing with another junior high school student, Bob Montgomery, in a duet called Buddy and Bob, mostly country music covers of artists like Hank Williams.
1957 began with Buddy getting a predictable release from his Decca contract.  If you were out of Lubbock, Texas in 1957 and had just been dropped from a major label there wasn’t much of a Plan B.  The best Buddy could come up with was heading to Clovis, New Mexico and the Norman Petty Studio to pay for his own demo and hope to interest a regional industry professional, in this case Norman Petty, in getting interested in representing Holly.  Norman Petty was one of the many small time independents that operated on the fringes of 1950’s rock and roll.  Less successful than the legendary Sam Phillips of Memphis’ Sun records who discovered Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, Petty still had a reputation for recognizing performers that he plugged either to record companies or radio stations.  But in early 1957, he also was still looking to get involved with talent that would translate into national success.  That’s why, when Buddy Holly returned to Petty’s studio in January of 1957 and cut a demo, Norman recognized that Holly had greatly evolved.  He told Buddy to get some more material together, polish it up and come back in February and they would seriously concentrate on developing a single, exactly the result Holly was looking for.
 When he returned to Clovis on February 24, Buddy not only had three other backing musicians, Larry Welborn, Jerry Allison and Niki Sullivan, he also had Gary and Ramona Tollett as backup singers.  Because Petty’s studio was close to a busy street with daytime noisy truck traffic, recording didn’t begin until after office hours. Petty wanted, “I’m Looking For someone To Love,” to be the “A” side of a single and when that was arduously completed over many hours, at 3 AM, it then took only four takes to record, “That’ll Be The Day.”  Subsequently, Norman Petty claimed to have greatly influenced this session, Gary Tollett maintained that Buddy already had the arrangements down and all Petty did was arrange the microphones.  Nevertheless, Petty then executed two of the more audacious moves in the history of Rock and Roll skullduggery.  The first revolved around songwriting and publishing credits.  Petty maintained that because he had provided the free use of his studio, had music connections in NY and was a known quantity in the business, his name should appear on the record as one of the songwriters.  A known quantity, he explained, is better than some unknown kids from West Texas.  He also offered to publish the music through his own Nor Va Jak publishing company, spinning this as a kind of business benefit, explaining that they wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.  He didn’t emphasize that this would entitle him to fifty per cent of the publishing revenues, only that this was how the business worked.  Buddy Holly was so thrilled that anyone would try to help hi...

On February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly was in the middle of the tour from hell and would do anything to avoid another three hundred mile, overnight bus ride that already had inflicted frostbite on another band member.  That determination changed American popular music forever.
In mid-January, when the three band members got to NY, Allsup and Bunch checked into a hotel, but Waylon Jennings stayed with Buddy and Maria.  Time was of the essence and Buddy figured he needed as much time as possible to get Waylon up to speed.  It was also during this time period that Maria informed Buddy that she was pregnant, news they kept even from Buddy’s parents.
After the equipment was offloaded, Buddy collared the Surf Ballroom’s manager Carroll Anderson and asked him about chartering a plane.  Anderson knew of an associate named Jerry Dwyer, who operated a flying service out of a small regional airport in nearby Mason City.  Dwyer was out at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, but Anderson was able to get a hold of a pilot who worked for Dwyer, 21 year old Roger Peterson, who immediately agreed to fly the charter.  During an intermission before Dion and the Belmonts and Buddy Holly finished the show, word began to spread among the musicians that Buddy was going to fly.  Initially, there were two seats on board and Holly figured that he would offer them to his two band members, Jennings and Allsup.  But once the Big Bopper found out about the charter, he approached Jennings and asked if he could take his spot, as long as Buddy said it was okay.  Waylon Jennings knew that JP Richardson was quite sick and he was also a headliner so he agreed to give up his seat.  When Holly heard that Jennings had bailed on the flight, he figured Jennings was just too scared to fly.  Laughing at his bass guitarist, he said, “I hope your bus freezes up!,” Jennings responded without thinking.  “I hope your plane crashes,” a comment he would both keep private and feel guilty about for many subsequent years.
None of the nearby farmers noticed anything unusual until Cerro Gordo county sheriff deputies pulled up to the farm of Albert Juhl, who opened the gate to his property and watched as the two policeman rapidly headed west, quickly able to see the wreckage of the plane in the distance, lodged where it came to a stop against a barbed wire fence separating the Juhl farm from some adjoining properties.  As they pulled up to the scene, the body of the pilot was visible in the wreckage, and what was eventually identified as the bodies of Valens and Buddy Holly were within twenty feet of the plane’s remains.  JP Richardson was hurled from the crash over the barbed wire fence, lying forty feet away as small amounts of snow were swirled around the bodies and the wreckage,
Back in Mason City, Buddy Holly’s brother arrived to pick up his brother’s body and take it back for burial in Lubbock, visiting the crash site before the plane wreckage was hauled off to a hangar at the airport.
Valens was put on a train to Southern California.  By the weekend, funerals were conducted for all four of the deceased, family members and fans still in a state of shock.
The site of the crash is now a makeshift shrine and pilgrimage site despite the fact that it is situated on private property.  Alfred Juhl sold his land in the early sixties to another local family, the Nicholas’. Over time they have erected a simple memorial to the musicians, as well as Roger Peterson on the exact spot along the fence line where the plane came to a halt.  To guide those interested in finding the spot they have erected a sculpture on the highway resembling Buddy’s horn rimmed glasses, marking the path that leads to the site.  Every year they purposely do not plant corn or soybeans on the path or in the vicinity of the markers, encouraging visitors to access this remarkable spot at no charge.  And from the very first days after the crash,

Possessing a 167 IQ, admitted to Harvard University at age 16, a uniquely talented mathematician, this former Berkeley college professor became the subject of the longest and most expensive investigation in FBI history.
As a youngster, Ted did develop a precocious interest in reading, math and science, his mother reading to him articles from Scientific American that he could comprehend by the time he was six.  He excelled in grade school but even at this young age was determined to avoid contact with others, usually spending time by himself in his room with the door shut, especially when visitors came to his home.
Kaczynski moved on to Evergreen Park Community High School.  On paper, he might have seemed to be the model student.  He joined the school band playing the trombone, and became a member of the math, coin, biology and German clubs.  Classmates described him as the smartest kid in his class.  But his inability to fit in socially and his self imposed isolation from any normal high school activities like sock hops and athletic events underlined his almost stereotypical profile as the quintessential nerd, complete with glasses, pencil pocket protector, slight physical stature, and painfully shy personality.
Ted Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois.  His father, Theodore, Ted, Sr. spent much of his adult working life as a sausage maker in a factory owned by a relative.
The most distinct aspect of this particular attack was that, for the first time, an eyewitness observed the Unabomber in the act.  An FBI sketch artist immediately put together a composite that was deemed unsatisfactory.  Then a freelance artist was hired to try again.  Both of these sketches were only used on a local Sacramento and very limited national basis, the FBI still insisting on not publicizing a potential serial bomber.  The secretary also continually maintained that the two original sketches did not really resemble the man she saw.  It would not be until 1994, when public awareness was already rampant and the FBI, still no closer to solving the case and knowing that the sketches they had were inaccurate, that a third sketch was developed and released, this time the much more familiar composite, which became a popular culture icon.  This rendition, by veteran criminal sketch artist Jeanne Boylan featured a hooded, grim looking man, with curly hair, a strong chin and very large, aviator sunglasses.  Her Unabomber would quickly become ubiquitous and greatly add to the criminal’s mystique.

Possessing a 167 IQ, admitted to Harvard University at age 16, a uniquely talented mathematician, this former Berkeley college professor became the subject of the longest and most expensive investigation in FBI history.
But Kaczynski had another motive for heading to Chicago.  Before he left Montana on a Greyhound bus, he constructed the first of his explosive devices.  He meant to send it to a professor at RPI, but when he got to Chicago in late May of 1978, the box wouldn’t fit in a mailbox so he merely left it at the University of Illinois-at Chicago in between two parked cars, the device eventually returned to the professor believed to have mailed via the professor’s presumed return address at Northwestern University.  But Kaczynski was disappointed when there was not any media mention of what happened with this device.  After leaving the device he showed up at his parents’ house without any specific notice.
Because a fatality finally occurred, the FBI would not have sole jurisdiction in the ensuing investigation.  The homicide division of the Sacramento police department also became involved but immediately found the situation frustrating.  Despite their belief that the more publicity about the bomber that was released to the public the better, the Sacramento police were told that, no, the FBI did not want to alert the Unabomber to the fact that they knew of his existence.  The local police felt that the FBI was more concerned with the fact that after ten years of bombings, the FBI had no idea who the perpetrator was.  The Bureau’s explanation was illogical in that by stamping FC on each bomb the killer was trying to let them know that he was responsible for numerous attacks.  This would not be the first FBI investigation that was driven as much by public relations as it was by criminal investigation.  Within weeks Sacramento homicide found themselves being excluded from meetings and ignored. Both they and the FBI got nowhere in trying to even begin to figure out who killed Hugh Scrutton.
In Schenectady, in mid-1995, David Kaczynski was now the assistant director of the Equinox Youth Shelter, an institution that catered to teenagers.  In the summer of 1995, With the high profile of the Unabomber pervading popular media, his wife began suggesting that Ted might have something to do with the bombings.  She read that the FBI maintained that the Unabomber grew up in Chicago, spent time in Berkeley and had at least recently travelled to Salt Lake City.  Linda Patrik had never met Ted, but was aware of his extreme animosity towards her, had read his correspondence with David and had lengthy conversations with her husband, attempting to convince him that Ted was mentally ill.  At first he dismissed the notion, but, as much out of curiosity, he eventually got a hold of the manifesto to see if it resonated in any way.  At the same time, Linda got a copy of the initial portion of the manifesto online as the Union College library’s printed copies had been stolen.  After the pair read even a small part of the screed, they were both alarmed. Subsequently, unable to dismiss Ted as the perpetrator of these acts, David then went back and documented when he had sent Ted money for loans.  It turned out that the devices that killed Thomas Mosser and Gilbert Murray were sent within one month and three months respectively from when checks were sent to Ted.
Kaczynski had a habit of not letting strangers inside his cabin, usually stepping outside if necessary and shutting the door behind him.  This time, he did not even fully emerge but hesitated with the door open while Burns distracted him with conversation.  The Forest Service agent was close enough to grab him by the wrist and after a brief struggle all three men were able to get Kaczynski into handcuffs.  He was immediately conveyed to a nearby rented cabin and although talkative, refused to answer any questions about the Unabomber case.

Adolf Hitler intended the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a coming out party for his Aryan Master Race.  African-American Jesse Owens crashed the venue by winning four gold medals.
At the Penn Relays, he won the long jump and the 100 meter dash.  Unfortunately for Eulace Peacock, the sprinter completely tore his hamstring during a preliminary heat, an injury so severe that Peacock was unable to make the 1936 Olympic Games.
Owens qualified easily, winning the 100 and 200 meter sprint and the long jump competition at the Olympic trials at Randall’s Island.  His chief American competition came from Ralph Metcalfe in the 100 and Mack Robinson in the 200, Robinson the older brother of future Brooklyn Dodger, Jackie Robinson.  Eighteen black Americans qualified for the US Olympic team, two of them women, almost four times the number of African-American competitors at the 1932 Olympic games in Los Angeles.
For a gold medal in the 100 meters, Jesse Owens would have to win four consecutive races, but the competition in Monday’s first two heats was minimal, several sprinters in the Big Ten much tougher competition.  Jesse cruised easily to victory, in the first heat by seven yards and the quarter finals by four yards, breaking his own world record in a time of 10.2 seconds.  While Owens victories were not a surprise, what was astonishing was the response of the crowd when his name was announced and after he crossed the tape in first place.  Anticipating that a German crowd politically attuned to the current Nazi master race theories would ignore or even vent hostility toward a Black American, instead the massive crowd roared their approval.
Elsewhere in the stadium, Two German athletes were generating their own excitement.  Hans Woelke and Ottilie “Tilly” Fleischer won gold in the men’s shot put and women’s discus, respectively, the first track and field Olympic gold medals ever won by Germany.  Afterwards, they were summoned to Hitler’s personal box, where both were personally congratulated by Hitler and Hermann Goering.  Later in the afternoon, when three Finns swept the medals in the 10,000 meters distance race, they were also invited to Hitler’s box and congratulated.
But by the time the event concluded, and with the weather getting progressively colder with rain starting to fall, Adolf Hitler left the arena before the high jump medals ceremony and without a personal invitation to the black American Johnson.  This did not go unnoticed especially by the American press who focused the first day’s coverage on the perceived snub.  It also was noticed by Henri de Baillet-Latour, the President of the International Olympic Committee, who was hoping to lower the volume on politics and did not want Hitler to become the focal point of the current games.  He is said to have either forbidden Hitler to personally congratulate winners or to have told Hitler that he needed to congratulate every winner, regardless of race or country of origin.  The most popular interpretation is that Hitler, figuring that at least one black man, Jesse Owens was a shoe in to win at least one medal, then decided to stop publicly congratulating any of the winners.
Later that afternoon, at 4:30 he participated in the long jump semi-final that served to eliminate ten of the remaining sixteen competitors.  Both Owens and Luz Long broke the existing Olympic record, jumping well over 25 feet to the delight of the crowd and setting up a climactic final.  Owens faulted on his first jump of the finals and his German competitor regressed to 25 feet, four inches but on his second jump Long pressed Owens to the limit with a leap of 25 feet, 10 inches.  Owens responded like a true champion establishing a new Olympic record with a jump of 26 feet.  When Long faulted on his third and last try, Owens had won his second gold.  Not to leave anything on the table, his final attempt measured 26 feet, 5.5 inches another Olympic record.

Adolf Hitler wanted the 1936 Berlin Olympics to be a coming out party for his Aryan Master Race.  Jesse Owens crashed the venue by winning four gold medals.
Owens then had to hustle to the long jump competition which also began at 10:30 AM.  Here he faced an athlete from Germany who was his first formidable foreign competition, a 22 year old German; Carl Ludwig “Luz” Long.  Long was the current German and European record holder, not quite Owens equal but certainly dangerous if Jesse should falter.  And, proving that he was human, Jesse did initially stumble during what should have been an easy qualification.  He was charged with his first of three jumps when he typically jogged on the runway and through the landing area just to get a feel for the surface.  This American warmup practice was unknown in Europe and despite even the head coach of the American track and field contingent getting into the face of the officials, the practice jump counted.  The incident seemed to rattle Owens, his second jump was only 23 feet, 3 inches, short of what he needed to qualify for the next round and more than three feet shorter than his own world record.
Conversely, and fortunately from Nazi Germany’s perspective, the head of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, was adamantly opposed to any interference in American Olympic participation due to politics.  Brundage, a wealthy and dictatorial administrator, once famously stated that the Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians.  He officially travelled to Germany to assess the situation and after a series of carefully choreographed interactions with German officials, he was able to convince the IOC to agree to US participation.
Although he was due to run in the finals of the 200 meters on Wednesday, August 5, Jesse Owens tried to throttle back some of the intensity of the previous 48 hours.  He was already the biggest celebrity of the Olympic games and despite his attempt to sleep late on Wednesday morning, his brick guest house swarmed with fans and even athletes crowding around the windows trying to get a glimpse of the American track star.
Jesse would have to hustle for the next few years to make a living with more barnstorming tours and various promotional gigs associated with black clothing stores and dry cleaning establishments.
1972 also brought another Olympics, this the ill-fated games at Munich which involved the terrorist murder of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes.  Despite this tragic event and in spite of some controversy over whether the games should continue they did and Jesse Owens got caught up in mediating another racially charged situation.
Jesse Owens travelled to the 1968 Olympics as a guest of the Mexican government, a consultant to the US Olympic Committee and a radio commentator for the Mutual broadcasting network.  Although Owens must have been astonished when long jumper Bob Beamon broke the existing world record by almost two feet, much more impactful was a coordinated protest by two black track athletes, Tommy Smith and John Carlos.  Winning gold and bronze respectively, in the 200 meters, while on the victory podium the two athletes raised their black gloved fists during the playing of the American national anthem.  While the protest caused a media sensation that reverberated around the world, it prompted great anger from the US Olympic committee and especially Avery Brundage, still the President of the IOC.  Owens was sent to meet with a group of athletes to attempt to mitigate the situation and possibly extract a face-saving apology before the IOC punished anyone.  He failed miserably to even get any white participants to leave the meeting, the consensus that they supported Smith and Carlos more than he did.  Sadly, the lengthy session deteriorated into anger and recriminations.  The next day the IOC kicked Carlos and Smith out of the Olympic Village and suspended them from Olympic competition.

Of the many political figures involved in Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, Pancho Villa remains the most famous and charismatic.
Like the history of Mexico itself, Villa’s early life and biography is obscured or disputed.  Much of the information about Pancho Villa came from his own self-serving autobiography or biased journalism and glorifying newsreels from the time period.  What is generally accepted is that Villa was born Doroteo Arango to a sharecropper father and domestic mother on June 5, 1878, in San Juan Del Rio, in the Mexican state of Durango.
In 1910, Mexican President Porfirio Diaz was re-elected to his seventh term as the political leader of the Mexican government.  Diaz had served as President for 30 of the previous 34 years, so politically powerful that this entire time period is referred to historically as the Porfiriato.  Although Mexico’s economy experienced expansion and prosperity during Diaz’s reign, much of the increased international trade, railroad construction and economic infrastructure was financed with European and American capital and benefited foreign entities and individuals and a small group of Mexican elites to the detriment of most of the Mexican population, who barely survived in squalor and deprivation.
Madero had no choice but to employ the reactionary general Victoriano Huerta as the head of the column that headed north to Chihuahua to challenge Orozco.  He also personally requested that Villa join the general to oppose Orozco, an overture that Villa accepted.  In command of 4800 federales, General Huerta accepted Villa’s men into his fighting force strictly out of necessity, considering Villa a glorified bandit.
Pancho Villa chose this window of opportunity to march his army within a few miles of Mexico City, pausing only to meet personally with Zapata.  On December 4, 1914, at Xochimilco, one of the more remarkable meetings in Mexican history occurred when the two men met and came to an agreement as to carving up territory and future military strategy.  Two days later, both men’s armies entered the capital, Villa providing Zapata’s forces with weapons and artillery.  Obregon had already declared his opposition to Villa and after assassinating some of his longtime political enemies, Pancho decided to leave attacking Veracruz to Zapata and headed North, to consolidate his power in the region.
Because Carranza had support throughout the country, Villa was forced to defend territory that he previously controlled.  Both Villa and Zapata abandoned Mexico City, which was then immediately occupied by Obregon.  The Carrancistas took everything of value and added more recruits from the poorest sectors of the city, the only alternative within the looted capital was starvation.  Villa focused on a long term offensive with an objective of pushing all of the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Francisco Madero was elected President of Mexico in October of 1911, Diaz having left the country for exile in France.  But the united hostility that combined many elements of a rebellion against the Porfiriato now focused their antagonism on Madero.  For his part, Pancho Villa was relatively inactive during this time period.  He was now amnestied from any possible political or criminal prosecution, had a substantial group of armed supporters to insure his security and looked forward to enjoying a period of relative solitude.  Unfortunately, Mexico’s political atmosphere remained chaotic.  In the South, rebels under the command of Zapata continued to seize territory and property, especially when it was clear that land reform was not imminent.  Madero was forced to use the national army to stabilize the situation and achieve at least a stalemate.

Of the many political and military figures  involved in Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, Pancho Villa remains the most famous and charismatic.
Villa formally requested that Felipe Angeles be permitted to officially join Villa’s military staff. Angeles was a traditional army officer with an expertise in artillery.  He served during the Diaz government but was in France when the revolution broke out.  Ultimately, he decided that the populist concepts of the revolution were more to his liking and felt Villa best embodied these ideas.
Public outrage over Villa’s Columbus, New Mexico attack prompted Woodrow Wilson to launch a rapidly deployed military expedition under the leadership of the commandant of Fort Bliss, Texas and experienced Apache antagonist, John “Black Jack” Pershing.  Commanding six thousand men, split into two separate columns, Pershing crossed the border, without the permission or even cooperation of the Carranza government, which was sensitive to any American incursion.  Fleeing south, Villa, attacked any appropriate smaller targets along the way but suffered a serious leg wound at Guerrero on March 28.  Pershing’s force quickly located the Villistas and successfully attacked Guerrero but Villa escaped into the mountains where he hid for six weeks, recovering from his gunshot injury.  Although Villa was no longer popular in Mexico, the American expedition was considered an invasion and an incident at Hidalgo Parral in which several American soldiers and numerous Mexicans were killed prompted an agreement between the two governments that the Pershing expedition would gradually withdraw
Although at the height of his military effectiveness and power, Pancho Villa was now confronted with fundamental logistical issues.  Although the path to the capital was wide open, Carranza ordered the cut off of any resupply, especially of coal which limited the rebel general’s railway mobility.  Foreign hostility caught up to Villa personally when the Wilson administration tailored an arms embargo designed specifically for the Villistas.  Any attempt to patch up an agreement between Carranza and Villa failed and it became clear that Pancho would never make it to Mexico City before another general, loyal to Carranza, Alvaro Obregon.  Obregon, approaching initially from the western state of Jalisco, marched unopposed into Mexico City on August 18, 1914.  Carranza joined him two days later.  Villa had no choice but to retreat northward back to the state of Chihuahua to regroup, resupply and recruit more soldiers.
On January 19, 1916 a group of Villistas stopped a train heading to Chihuahua City, from the United States.  They executed 17 American employees, an act that outraged US citizens living in the towns on the Mexican border.  Although Villa denied involvement, officially the Carranza government apologized to the Wilson administration and vowed to bring the murderers and Villa to justice.  One of the formerly most powerful political forces in Mexico was now a mere criminal.  Villa’s response was even more audacious.  He proceeded to cross the border near the tiny and isolated town of Columbus, New Mexico.  At one in the morning, a firefight broke out between the Villistas and the US soldiers stationed in the town.  The Mexican rebels looted the local general store and destroyed a hotel but after some initial confusion, US cavalry and even local townspeople organized a response that drove the invaders out of the town.  As dawn broke, the cavalry chased Villa fifteen miles into Mexico before breaking off the counterattack. The Columbus attack killed eight soldiers and ten civilians and wounded several others.  Although he was able to seize some nominal amounts of weapons and livestock, Villa never even explained much less justified this wanton and foolhardy provocation. 
One wife, Luz Corral, who he married legally in 1911, was recognized by Mexican courts as his heir,