Detroit lawmen coined the term in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
They realized that Saturday night holdups were committed with handguns purchased in quick one-hour trips to Toledo, Ohio.
There, guns could be bought at filling stations and flower shops for $5 or $10, without time restrictions.
While hanging may have occurred earlier in U.S. history, the practice of lynching was probably started by Colonel William Lynch of Virginia in the 1780s. Lynch organized a vigilante band aimed at ridding Pittsylvania County of its bad element. An 1836 editorial by Edgar Allan Poe discusses Lynch’s career.
The Black Hand was the name for groups of extortionists who preyed upon Italian immigrants in the United States from about 1890 to 1920. It was active in cities such as Chicago, Kansas City, New Orleans, and New York. The Mafia, an older and more complex criminal organization, originated in Sicily in the nineteenth and…
It was “Son of Sam” killer David Richard Berkowitz (b. 1953) who was known as the 44-Caliber Killer. From July 1976 to August 1977 he killed six people and wounded seven others with a .44-caliber gun.
The throat-slashings of six prostitutes in London’s East End occurred between August and early November 1888. The identity of Jack the Ripper was never verified.
It is slang for a policeman or politician who accepts or extorts graft.
FBI agent Melvin Purvis was known as the Man Who Shot Dillinger. Purvis never actually fired at John Dillinger in the 1934 shootout in Chicago that ended in the death of”public enemy number one.” But Purvis directed the trap and pointed Dillinger out to other agents and police.