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.
By far, it was John Dillinger, whose most successful robbery, in Greencastle, Indiana, yielded $74,000. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow stole from gas stations, lunch counters, and small banks; their top job brought only $1,500.
A black act is slang for picking a lock in the dark.
In Italian, Mafia means “beauty, excellence, bravery”. Cosa Nostra means “our thing.”
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.
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.”…
MI5 is Britain’s counterintelligence service, which operates mainly at home. MI6 is Britain’s Secret Service, which operates mainly overseas. The official titles are DI5 and DI6, but the “M” titles, for Military Intelligence, Departments 5 and 6, are what everyone uses.