True Crime Art

On March 18, 1990, two men disguised as police officers entered Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and vanished with masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, and more—an art haul worth over $500 million. Decades later, not a single piece has been recovered. The Gardner Museum Heist unravels the daring crime, the mob connections, the false leads, and the enduring mystery that haunts the art world. Equal parts true crime and cultural history, it’s the definitive account of America’s greatest unsolved art theft.

The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world—everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud.

Jack the Ripper was probably the first serial killer to appear in a large metropolis at a time when the general populace was literate and the press was a force for social change. The press was also partly responsible for creating many myths surrounding the Ripper. Robin Odell's Ripperology is the first study to present a sequential history of literary investigations of Jack the Ripper's crimes and to address the seven principal phases of Ripper speculations....

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder.

I Turned Phone Hacking from a Backstreet Business into Industrial-Scale Organised Crime... for the British Press. But I started life as the penniless son of Ukrainian immigrants. Then I rose to be one of the most powerful news executives in Rupert Murdoch’s empire. My dad was in Hitler’s SS. My mum was a Nazi slave – I was born ready for the Fleet Street cauldron. At the News of the World, I broke the biggest exclusives. However, I discovered a secret weapon that would revolutionise news gathering: the use of Illegal Private Investigators to hack and blag.