In 1844, Jonathan Walker had the initials SS branded into the palm of his right hand.
He had been convicted of slave stealing, helping slaves escape to the Bahamas.
Branding had been used officially as punishment for crimes in America since the seventeenth century.
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre lasted eight minutes. Several members of the George (“Bugs”) Moran gang were killed that day, February 14, 1929, along with a man in the garage who looked like Moran. Moran himself escaped the massacre to die a natural death of lung cancer on February 25, 1957.
The five Mafia families of New York City in the 1980s were the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families.
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.
Al (“Scarface”) Capone claimed he received the scar while fighting with the Lost Battalion in France during World War I. Actually, he was knifed in Brooklyn while working as a bouncer in a saloon, in a fight over a woman. Capone never served in World War I.
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.”…
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. They were found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage and were labeled communists. Julius Rosenberg, thirty-five, was executed at 8:04 P.m. His wife, Ethel, thirty-seven, was executed at 8:11 P.M. It was the first execution of civilians…