The true story of a spree of bank robberies that shook Sweden is finally told in a new book titled The Father… Q: STEFAN, WHEN DID YOU FIGURE OUT THAT YOUR BROTHERS WERE BANK ROBBERS? A: I was in my early twenties, studying at an art school in Stockholm in 1990. I remember coming to my […]

The paramedic couldn’t remember what had happened. That’s what she said, anyway. I was asking her to describe the position of a handcuffed man she had been called to treat over a year before. I had worked like hell to prepare for this moment. If she gave me one answer, there was a decent chance […]

10 Ways Cops Know You’re Lying In fiction, the murderer is always an evil genius, a professional hit man, or a taunting serial killer.  But in my experience as a police detective, most criminals are hapless goofs whose crimes are wholly unplanned, the result of impulse or passion.  They are caught because they make dumb […]

THE FLIP SIDE OF PROFILING: COERCION & THE CAPTIVE MIND By Carla Norton Years ago, I wrote a true account of an astonishing crime that gave me nightmares: Twenty-year-old Colleen Stan was kidnapped at knifepoint, locked in a coffin-sized box, and held captive for over seven years. She was subjected to unthinkable deprivation and abuse. […]

Having grown up devouring books like Helter Skelter and Hollywood Babylon, I understand the power of a Hollywood crime story: the shocking twists, the legendary players, the insidious role of the entertainment industry and its power to build and shatter dreams. The story in my new book, What Remains of Me, explores all of those […]

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, […]

Back when I was a beat cop working 999 Response (911 calls) in Liverpool, England, I had a partner named Jimmy. Jimmy was one of those old school cops who had joined the job as a cadet aged 16, and was coming up to having over thirty years in the uniform. We hit it off […]

Top Ten Mysterious Disappearances Dr Patrick Henry Cronin I have to start with this one, for it was an account of Cronin’s disappearance that led me to investigate the story behind his kidnap and murder in Chicago in 1889, which has recently been published as Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago. […]

Bow Street: Birthplace of the London Metropolitan Police Force by Daniel L. Friedman, M.D. and Eugene B. Friedman, M.D. Central London’s Bow Street was the birthplace of what was to evolve into the Metropolitan Police Force. Its Magistrates’ Court was a glowing departure from the apathy and corruption so prevalent and dominant in the latter […]