Philadelphia-born John T. Noland (1896-1931) earned it early in his career.
As a teenager, he joined a gang called the Hudson Dusters, which stole packages from the backs of trucks.
For his ability to dodge police in his efforts, he was nicknamed Legs.
Diamond was one of his chosen surnames.
For this crime of shoplifting, women outnumber men by four or five to one.
Borrowing from eighteenth-century English penal procedures, southern states began using chain gangs before the Civil War and continued the practice for nearly a hundred years. Georgia became the last state to outlaw this method of punishment in the late 1940s. The decline of chain gangs was due as much to automation as to public protest:…
It is slang for a policeman or politician who accepts or extorts graft.
Yes, and it still is a crime to kiss in public in some places. In 1656 in Boston, a Captain Kimble was placed in the stocks for kissing his wife in public on the Sabbath. To this day, it is illegal in Indiana for a mustached man to “habitually kiss human beings.” In Cedar Rapids,…
The phrase, coined by 1920s gang leader Dion O’Banion, referred to the convenient forgetfulness of eyewitnesses testifying about gang lawbreakers. The phrase implied that gang members had persuaded the witnesses to forget whatever they had seen.
On April 22, 1981, in Tucson, Arizona, four gunmen robbed the First National Bank of Arizona of $3.3 million. This was the largest bank robbery on record. Wearing Halloween masks and stocking hoods, the gunmen cleaned out a vault containing cash receipts from 27 other First National branches in Tucson.