What is an air dance?

In Italian, Mafia means “beauty, excellence, bravery”. Cosa Nostra means “our thing.”

Kim Philby was recruited by the Russians in the early 1930s. He entered the British Secret Service in 1939 and remained a double agent until 1962, when he escaped to the Soviet Union. His orders, he said, were to penetrate British Intelligence and “it did not matter how long I took to do the job.”…

Cassidy, the leader of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, was born Robert Leroy Parker in Circleville, Utah, on April 1, 1866. He was one of 10 children. The Sundance Kid was born Harry Longbaugh in 1870 in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.

An agency called the Bureau of Investigation was instituted in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt. He believed that the federal government should have an arm to enforce federal law. It was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. Twenty-nine-year-old J. Edgar Hoover became its first acting director in 1924.

John T. Scopes was a young biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who broke a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution. His 11-day trial in 1925 ended with his conviction and a fine of $100. Authorities later reversed the decision on a legal technicality. Prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan died five days after the trial…

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…