Showing results by publisher "The Atavist" in All Categories

Early on the morning of September 1, 1996, the Israeli military began preparing for a war with Syria they were convinced was imminent. The Israelis had received top-secret intelligence from a Syrian general and informant code-named Red Falcon, recruited 23 years earlier by Mossad spy Yehuda Gil - himself known as "the man of a thousand faces." Gil had been the general's sole handler, the conduit of decades of critical intelligence. But now, on the brink of war, questions arose about who exactly was handling whom. What information was real and what was a lie?

At a remote military base in the Pacific Northwest, Navy sonar technicians hear a confounding sound. It is the voice of a whale, but one that sings at a frequency - 52 hertz - never before heard by scientists, and inaudible to other members of its species. The whale seems to be alone in the Pacific Ocean, unable to communicate with its kind.

Yasith Chhun was just a 42-year-old accountant living a comfortable life in California. Then he tried to overthrow the Cambodian government from his humble office in Long Beach. Inspired by films like Braveheart, Chhun planned "Operation Volcano," a scheme replete with espionage, jungle guerrillas, and East German rocket launchers. Could Chhun's quixotic, incredibly risky and potentially bloody coup possibly succeed?

When André Bamberski's daughter died 30 years ago, he was helpless to save her. Suspicions of murder began to surround her stepfather, a German doctor named Dieter Krombach, but Bamberski could only hope the truth would prevail. But when the authorities gave up their pursuit, he knew he had to act. So against the odds, Bamberski embarked on an obsessive quest to capture and punish his daughter's killer. In this riveting true story by Joshua Hammer, a father travels to the limits of law in search of justice.

The bomb appeared early one morning in an upstairs office of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino near Lake Tahoe, an enigmatic box covered in a bewildering array of switches. A neatly typed letter explained that the box contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite. It was the largest improvised explosive device in American history - and its creator promised to explain how to remove it safely if the casino delivered $3 million by helicopter to a remote landing site in the mountains.

In 1948, a young Australian mining engineer named Ben Carlin set out to do the impossible: circumnavigate the globe, by land and sea, in a single vehicle. The vehicle in question was an amphibious jeep developed by the U.S. Army, which Carlin christened Half-Safe, after a deodorant slogan. It was a mechanical mongrel that was supposed to move with equal ease across land and water but in practice wasn't much good for either one. Undaunted, Carlin and his wife Elinore set off across the Atlantic Ocean with dreams of fame and fortune, and of carving a small notch in history.

At first, what happened on the Mekong River on October 5, 2011 seemed like a simple matter of rough frontier justice. A detachment of Thai military commandos reported that they had confronted a band of drug runners smuggling methamphetamines out of the Golden Triangle, the famously lawless borderlands between Burma, Laos, and Thailand. A gunfight ensued, the smugglers fled, and the commandos seized two barges and a haul of nearly a million pills.

In the mid-1920s, young children began to vanish from neighborhoods around New York City. It took the police a decade to find their abductor, an unassuming 64-year-old handyman named Albert Fish. Fish had committed crimes of unspeakable horror: He had not only abducted and murdered the children, but also tortured and, in some cases, eaten them. During Fish's trial, some of the country's most prominent psychiatrists debated the exact nature of Fish's crimes. Was he evil or insane? Who had the power to determine where one ended and the other began?

In 1910, the United States - its population exploding, its frontier all but exhausted - was in the throes of a serious meat shortage. But a small and industrious group of thinkers stepped forward with an answer, a bold idea being endorsed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and The New York Times. Their plan: to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them.

Nobody would've figured the kids from the sleepy beach town of Coronado, California, for criminal masterminds. They were just some hippie surfers, high school friends who'd come up with the idea of swimming bundles of marijuana across the border from Tijuana during the summer of 1969. Within a decade, however, the Coronado Company had become the largest pot-smuggling operation on the West Coast, a $100 million empire with outposts from Mexico to Morocco to Thailand.

It was the most mundane of arguments, teenagers fighting over a stolen bicycle and bruised egos on a hot summer evening in one of the worst neighborhoods in Oakland, California. No one was supposed to get hurt, not seriously. But by the end of the night, a 13-year-old boy was lying dead in the street from a gunshot wound, and Tony Davis, the 18-year-old drug dealer and small-time thug who had fired the gun from the backseat of his friend's car, was on his way to a life in prison.

Before Ian Fleming there was Dennis Wheatley. A best-selling spy novelist at the outset of World War II, Wheatley became a master of deception for Great Britain, turning pulp fiction fantasies into real-life espionage. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg tells the amazing true story of one man who applied the plots of his own novels to the battlefield - and changed the course of history.

On her deathbed, David Dobbs's mother Evelyn Jane revealed a secret she'd kept for 60 years about the man she had truly loved, and lost. His name was Norman "Angus" Zahrt, a married World War II flight surgeon with whom she'd engaged in a secret love affair, just before he deployed to the Pacific and disappeared. Intrigued by his mother's hidden longing, Dobbs embarked on a reporter's quest to uncover Zahrt's fate, and that of his family. The story he returned with is an extraordinary tale of love, war, and how we confront the lost chances in our lives.

They called him the Gold Czar. In the lawless Colombian gold-mining town of Segovia, he was rarely spoken of in more than a whisper. But investigators were convinced he was behind the gangland killing of several local mine owners - a massacre that many believed was responsible for the nightmarish wave of violence that turned the town into one of the world's murder capitals. The question was: Could they prove it?

It was the spring of 1987, and crack cocaine had turned whole swaths of Detroit into veritable combat zones. The city thought it had seen everything - until one evening that May, when the police arrested a 17-year-old kid named Rick Wershe. They called him White Boy Rick. In a city known for its fraught racial divide, Wershe had somehow joined the ranks of the drug kingpins on the predominantly Black East Side before he was old enough to shave.

With its manicured lawns and well-kept college-style buildings, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida-the largest reform school in the country-always seemed like a model for how to turn wayward teens back into productive members of society. But for decades, the century-old school's alumni whispered about a nightmarish reality that lurked behind the gleaming facade - a legacy of beatings, sexual abuse, and even murder, the evidence buried in unmarked graves on the overgrown fringes of the property.

In March of 1994, Simon Lewis was a Hollywood man on the rise. He had started in the film industry as a lawyer and worked his way up to become a big-budget studio producer. He'd helped shepherd one of the most successful comedies in film history. He'd married the love of his life. And then one night, in a few seconds, everything changed. In Blindsight, author Chris Colin unspools the remarkable true story of a horrific accident and the life that followed it. A killer at large. Unlikely twists of fate. Miraculous medical oddities. Otherworldly perceptions.

Anni and Shrien Dewani's life together was the stuff of romance novels: Love at first sight, a whirlwind courtship, a wedding proposal in Paris after a flight on Shrien's private plane. Young, wealthy, and attractive, the Dewanis were the kind of couple that seemed immune to misfortune - until they arrived in Cape Town, South Africa on their honeymoon. Barely a day later, a brutal carjacking left Anni dead and Shrien wandering alone through one of South Africa's most dangerous neighborhoods. At first, Anni Dewani's death seemed to be a random tragedy. But the police investigating the killing soon began to suspect that something more nefarious had happened.

In 1928, on a desolate island off the coast of Haiti, the American writer William Seabrook came face-to-face with a zombie. "The eyes were the worst," Seabrook would later write in The Magic Island, his book about Haitian voodoo culture. "They were in truth the eyes of a dead man." The book sold half a million copies, forever changing popular culture by introducing the zombi cadavre - the walking dead - to the American imagination.

It was known as the Living Grave: A remote Hawaiian peninsula called Kalaupapa, housing the largest settlement for leprosy patients in the United States. Once it had been a forbidding place of exile, inhabited by thousands of the disease's victims who had been removed from their families and confined against their will, far away from a society that feared and misunderstood their condition.