On a spring day in 1961, over-the-road trucker Jim Harper was en route from Mauston, Wisconsin, to his home in Minneapolis. At 70 miles per hour, with a combined 60,000 pounds of man, machine, and material, he approached a curve along the Great River Road and hit the brakes. The tractor-trailer didn't slow. Harper's brake lines had been cut.<br /><br />In preceding months, Harper had led an insurgency in his Teamsters ...
At 9:00 on the morning of March 6, 1963, in the quiet St. Paul neighborhood of Highland Park, Mrs. Fritz Pearson glanced out her window and saw something almost unimaginable: slumped on the front steps of the home across the street was a woman, partially clothed in a blue bathrobe and bloodied beyond recognition. The woman, Mrs. Pearson would come to learn, was her beloved neighbor Carol Thompson, wife and mother of four.<br /><br /> ...
In 1978 seven Norman Rockwell paintings and a supposed Renoir, later discovered to be a forgery, were stolen from Elayne Galleries in St. Louis Park. It is still the biggest theft in Minnesota history, and no one was ever convicted for the crime. This is the story of the theft, the investigation, and the twenty-year quest to return the art to its rightful owners.<br /><br />The FBI suspected an inside job. Was it the scrappy working ...
On May 22, 1970, responding to a bogus emergency call to help a pregnant woman, St. Paul patrolman James Sackett was killed by a sniper's bullet fired from a high-powered rifle.<br /><br />The white officer's assassination was the most shocking event in an era of shocking, racially charged events, punctuated by bombings at Dayton's Department Store and elsewhere, police harassment and shootings of young black ...
Early one morning in March 1985, as he climbed the six steps of Margaret Thatcher’s prime-ministerial jet on the runway of RAF Aldergrove, little did Willie Carlin know the role Freddie Scappaticci played in saving his life. So began the dramatic extraction of Margaret Thatcher’s key undercover agent in Sinn Fein – Willie Carlin, aka Agent 3007. For 11 years the former British soldier worked alongside former IRA commander Martin McGuinness in t ...
In Richard O'Rawe's stunning debut novel, as audacious and well executed as Ructions' plan to rob the National Bank itself, a new voice in Irish fiction has been unleashed that will shock, surprise and thrill as he takes you on a white-knuckle ride through Belfast's criminal underbelly. Enter the deadly world of tiger kidnappings, kangaroo courts, money laundering, drug deals and double-crosses. Northern Heist is a roller- ...
San Quentin is one of the most famous prisons in American history, featured in countless movies and novels, yet few know its colorful early history. In Behind San Quentin’s Walls, noted Old West historian William B. Secrest reveals the beginning of San Quentin, from its unlikely start as a real estate scheme to its essential role in taming the lawless California of the Gold Rush era. Featuring numerous citations from contemporary accounts, plus ...
This fascinating and gripping portrayal is the only book-length account ever written about the illicit career of Clarence Ray Allen, one of the most sinister criminal masterminds and mass murderers in American history. Even hardened detectives were shaken by the scene at Fran's Market in rural Fresno County that night in 1980: four young people lay on the market's concrete floor, bloodily murdered by a killer without mercy or remorse. ...
Fans of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will embrace Poe Ballantine's Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere.For well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, and wondering the big whys. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as a ...
