Five greatest art thefts As the author of a forthcoming book about a fascinating art theft, I am sometimes asked to name the most impressive or important art heists ever pulled off. These thefts deprived the public of access to masterpieces—not something to celebrate—yet we can deplore the criminal acts while nevertheless admiring their audacity […]

Spooking the Spooks… Bond has Spectre. The NSA has Snowden. The CIA has teen hackers. What else is making everyday spies lose sleep? Here are ten topics the intelligence world is thinking hard about. The “democratization” of spying. Intrusive technology used to eavesdrop, film, and track people and connected objects are for sale everywhere. Anybody […]

Mobsters and mouthpieces, snitches and stool pigeons…history is a graveyard of colorful and controversial gangland prosecutions, and these are my candidates for the all-time Top Ten: 10. Waxey Gordon (1933). After a painstaking investigation that included over 200,000 deposit slips, 100,000 telephone records, and a thousand witness interviews, New York’s “boy prosecutor,” Thomas E. Dewey, […]