PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: crime
king of England
Richard III was the last Plantagenet and Yorkist king of England. He usurped the throne of his nephew Edward V in 1483 and perished in defeat to Henry Tudor (thereafter Henry VII) at the Battle of Bosworth...
Indian revolutionary
Udham Singh was an Indian political activist who fought against the British raj in India and sought revenge for the 1919 massacre of civilians by the British army at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in the...
English criminal
Moll Cutpurse was the most notorious female member of 17th-century England’s underworld. She was a thief, an entertainer, a receiver (fence) and broker of stolen goods, and a celebrated cross-dresser....
dictator of Guatemala
Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan army general and politician who ruled Guatemala as the leader of a military junta and as dictator (1982–83). In 2013 he was tried by a Guatemalan court on charges of...
American laborer
Steven Avery is an American labourer who served 18 years in prison (1985–2003) for rape and attempted murder before his conviction was overturned because of DNA evidence. In 2005 he was charged with murder...
American boxer
Mike Tyson is an American boxer who, at age 20, became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. His achievements in the ring, however, were often overshadowed by his turbulent personal life. (Read...
American confidence man
Gaston Means was an American confidence man notable for attaining close proximity to the highest echelons of government and leveraging the information afforded him by his position. Means was born into...
Venezuelan terrorist
Carlos the Jackal is a Venezuelan militant who orchestrated some of the highest-profile terrorist attacks of the 1970s and ’80s. Ramírez was born into an upper-class Venezuelan family; his father operated...
American football player
O.J. Simpson was an American collegiate and professional football player who was a premier running back, known for his speed and elusiveness. His success on the field led to a career in film and television....
American real-estate heir
Robert Durst was an American real-estate heir who was a suspect in the 1982 disappearance of his first wife and who was convicted in 2021 of the 2000 murder of a friend; he was acquitted of killing a neighbor...
American gangster
Al Capone was an American Prohibition-era gangster who dominated organized crime in Chicago from 1925 to 1931 and became perhaps the most famous gangster in the United States. Capone’s parents immigrated...
American factory superintendent
Leo Frank was an American factory superintendent whose conviction in 1913 for the murder of Mary Phagan resulted in his lynching. His trial and death shaped the nascent Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and...
American murderer
Gary Gilmore was an American murderer whose execution by the state of Utah in 1977 ended a de facto nationwide moratorium on capital punishment that had lasted nearly 10 years. His case also attracted...
Mexican criminal
Joaquín Guzmán was the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Mexico from the late 20th century. Guzmán was born and raised in Badiraguato municipality, an...
American assassin
Jack Ruby was an American nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin of Pres. John F. Kennedy, on November 24, 1963, as Oswald was being transferred to a county jail. Despite...
British serial killer
Mary Ann Cotton was a British nurse and housekeeper who was believed to be Britain’s most prolific female serial killer. She allegedly poisoned up to 21 people. Mary Ann grew up in Durham county, northeastern...
American hedge-fund investor
Bernie Madoff was an American hedge-fund investment manager and former chairman of the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) stock market. He was best known for operating...
Colombian cocaine trafficker
Griselda Blanco was a Colombian cocaine trafficker who amassed a vast empire and was a central figure in the violent drug wars in Miami in the 1970s and ’80s. Although there is some confusion about her...
American serial killer
Dennis Rader is an American serial killer who murdered 10 people over a span of three decades before his arrest and confession in 2005. He called himself BTK because he bound, tortured, and killed his...
American assassin
Charles Whitman was an American mass murderer responsible for the deadly Texas Tower shooting of 1966. On August 1 of that year, having earlier in the day killed his wife and mother, Whitman fired down...
Colombian criminal
Pablo Escobar was a Colombian drug lord who rose to infamy as the leader of the Medellín cartel, overseeing a period marked by extreme violence, corruption, and wealth. Escobar was arguably the world’s...
American actor and assassin
John Wilkes Booth was a member of one of the United States’ most distinguished acting families of the 19th century and the assassin who killed U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln. Booth was the 9th of 10 children...
American accused assassin
Lee Harvey Oswald was the accused assassin of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He himself was fatally shot two days later by Jack Ruby (1911–67) in the Dallas County Jail. A special...
American record producer
Phil Spector was an American record producer of the 1960s, described by the writer Tom Wolfe as the “First Tycoon of Teen.” There had been producers since the beginning of the record industry, but none...
Colombian drug dealer
Carlos Lehder is a Colombian-German drug smuggler, a leader in the powerful Medellín drug cartel, who was credited with revolutionizing the transportation network for delivering cocaine to the United States...
American organized-crime boss
Paul Castellano was an American organized crime figure, the reputed successor to Carlo Gambino as the “boss of bosses” of the Five Families of La Cosa Nostra, sometimes referred to as the Mafia, in New...
president of Argentina
Jorge Rafael Videla was a career military officer who was president of Argentina from 1976 to 1981. His government was responsible for human rights abuses during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” which began as...
American vigilante
Bernhard Goetz is an American vigilante who rose to national fame when he shot four African American males on a New York City subway train on December 22, 1984. The event was notable for triggering widespread...
American criminal
Ted Kaczynski was an American criminal who conducted a 17-year bombing campaign that killed 3 and wounded 23 in an attempt to bring about “a revolution against the industrial system.” Kaczynski was a bright...
American philanthropist
John du Pont was an American philanthropist who supported amateur freestyle wrestling. On January 26, 1996, he shot and killed freestyle wrestler Dave Schultz, an Olympic gold medalist who lived and trained...
American criminal
Richard Kuklinski was an American serial killer who was convicted of four murders in 1988 and of a fifth in 2003, though in a series of media interviews he later confessed to having killed at least 100...
Turkish businessman and politician
Cem Uzan is a Turkish businessman and politician known for launching the first private television channel in Turkey and for his subsequent foray into politics. Uzan’s father had made his fortune in the...
American serial killer
Gary Ridgway is an American criminal who was the country’s deadliest convicted serial killer. He claimed to have killed as many as 80 women—many of whom were prostitutes—in Washington during the 1980s...
American investor
Raj Rajaratnam is an American investor who was convicted in 2011 of securities fraud and conspiracy in one of the largest prosecutions of insider trading (trading on information not available to the public)...
Bosnian Serb military leader
Ratko Mladić is a Bosnian Serb military leader who commanded the Bosnian Serb army during the Bosnian conflict (1992–95) and who was widely believed to have masterminded the Srebrenica massacre, the worst...
Soviet serial killer
Andrei Chikatilo was a Soviet serial killer who murdered at least 50 people between 1978 and 1990. His case is noteworthy not only because of the large number of his victims but because efforts by Soviet...
American crime boss
Lucky Luciano was the most powerful chief of American organized crime in the early 1930s and a major influence even from prison in 1936–45 and after deportation to Italy in 1946. Luciano emigrated with...
United States general
LaFayette Curry Baker was the chief of the U.S. Federal Detective Police during the American Civil War and director of Union intelligence and counterintelligence operations. In 1848 Baker left his home...
Roman politician
Marcus Junius Brutus was a Roman politician, one of the leaders in the conspiracy that assassinated Julius Caesar in 44 bce. Brutus was the son of Marcus Junius Brutus (who was treacherously killed by...
American serial killer
Ed Gein was an American murderer whose gruesome crimes gained worldwide notoriety in the 1950s, when it was discovered that he robbed graves and used body parts to make household items. In 1968 Gein was...
British physician and serial killer
Harold Shipman was a British doctor and serial killer who murdered about 250 of his patients, according to an official inquiry into his crimes. Shipman’s murders raised troubling questions about the powers...
American serial killer
H.H. Holmes was an American swindler and confidence trickster who is widely considered the country’s first known serial killer. Mudgett was born into a wealthy family and showed signs of high intelligence...
American gangster
Meyer Lansky was one of the most powerful and richest of U.S. crime syndicate chiefs and bankers. He had major interests in gambling, especially in Florida, pre-Castro Cuba, Las Vegas, and the Bahamas....
American singer
David Daniels is an American opera singer who, as the preeminent countertenor of his generation, was best known for his lead roles in George Frideric Handel’s operas, including Giulio Cesare, Rinaldo,...
Palestinian-born Jordanian assassin
Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian-born Jordanian citizen who was convicted (1969) of fatally shooting U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. He received the death penalty, but the sentence was later...
American assassin
Leon Czolgosz was an American labourer and anarchist who fatally shot U.S. Pres. William McKinley on September 6, 1901; McKinley died eight days later. Czolgosz was found guilty and executed. While various...
American murderer
Richard Speck was an American mass murderer known for killing eight female nursing students in a Chicago town house in 1966. Speck was the seventh of eight children. Soon after he was born, the family...
Scottish noble
James Hepburn, 4th earl of Bothwell was the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. He evidently engineered the murder of Mary’s second husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, thereby precipitating the revolt...
French serial killer
Marcel Petiot was a French serial killer who preyed on Jewish refugees attempting to flee France during the Nazi occupation. His crimes were the inspiration for Henri Troyat’s novel La Tête sur les épaules...
American serial killer
Richard Ramirez was an American serial killer, rapist, and burglar who murdered at least 13 people in California in 1984–85. He was convicted and sentenced to death but died while in prison. Ramirez grew...
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