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Alcatraz sat a mile and a quarter off San Francisco, close enough for inmates to smell the sea air and hear laughter drifting across the bay. When the Department of Justice took over the island in 1934, it offered no rehabilitation, only containment. Men lived in cells nine feet long, five feet wide, and seven feet high, flushed their toilets with salt water, and were counted 13 times a day. Under the first warden, James A. Johnston, they were also forbidden to speak, a rule that produced paranoia, depression, and hallucinations until it was relaxed in the 1950s.

This episode sets aside the movie myths and looks at how the federal penitentiary actually worked from 1934 to 1963. It covers the oddly excellent food, served to keep the dining hall calm, the pitch black cells of D Block, and the guards' families who lived a short walk from the cell house. It also explains what really closed the place. Salt water rotted the concrete from within, everything had to arrive by barge, and by 1959 an inmate cost $10 a day to keep there against $3 elsewhere. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered it shut in 1963.

• Early metal detectors from the Teletouch Corporation kept short circuiting in the salty fog, and the contract was eventually cancelled.
• The cell house corridors were named Broadway, Times Square, and Park Avenue, a constant reminder of the world the inmates had lost.
• Al Capone, who had practically run his previous prison in Atlanta, was reduced to menial labor and played the banjo in the shower block to stay safe. Robert Stroud, the Birdman, kept no birds in his 17 years there.
• Men sent to the hole for 3 to 19 days would throw a uniform button into the dark and crawl around searching for it, just to give their minds a task.
• In 1962 Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers left dummy heads in their beds, dug out their vents with reinforced spoons, and sealed a raft of more than 50 raincoats against hot steam pipes. The U.S. Marshals Service still considers the case open.

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Charles Edward Stuart was born in Rome on December 31, 1720, in a household living on the Pope's charity and certain that God meant it to rule Britain. His grandfather, James II, had been deposed in 1688, and his father was the claimant known as the Old Pretender. Raised as a king in waiting, Charles found at 17 that most European courts would not even receive him as a prince. When a French invasion planned for 1744 was wrecked by a storm, he borrowed 180,000 livres, pawned his late mother's Sobieski jewels, and sailed for Scotland in July 1745 on his own.

This episode strips the folk songs away from the Jacobite rising. Charles lost his warship and heavy weapons before he arrived, landed at Eriskay with seven companions, and still talked the clans into war. He took Edinburgh and won at Prestonpans in minutes, then marched as far as Derby before the campaign came apart. What followed was the slaughter at Culloden on April 16, 1746, five months as a fugitive in the Hebrides, and four decades of drink, exile, and irrelevance that ended with his death in Rome in 1788 at age 67.

• He won over Donald Cameron of Lochiel by personally guaranteeing the full value of his estate if the rising failed, with money he did not have. The standard was raised at Glenfinnan on August 19, 1745.
• At Derby he confessed to his council that he had not received a single message of support from English Jacobites since leaving France, which broke his commanders' trust for good.
• Against the advice of Lord George Murray he fought on the flat, marshy ground of Culloden Moor, where government grapeshot tore into his men for almost half an hour before the order to charge.
• Flora MacDonald smuggled him from Benbecula to Skye dressed as an Irish spinning maid named Betty Burke, a disguise locals found tall and unladylike.
• In 1748 the French had him arrested on his way into the Paris Opera and expelled, and when his father died in 1766 the Pope refused to recognize him as king.

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Frank Hamer survived 17 gunshot wounds, was left for dead four times, and killed somewhere between 53 and 70 people, all while wearing a badge. Born in 1884 in rural Texas, the son of a blacksmith, he left school after the sixth grade but had a near photographic memory and learned tracking by studying the Comanche and the Kiowa. At 21 he captured a horse thief on his own, and by 1906 he was a Texas Ranger on the Mexican border. He thought of an outlaw as a coyote, always looking over its shoulder, and built his detective work on that idea.

This episode weighs the contradictions in his record. He fought the Ku Klux Klan and stood down lynch mobs, yet the Sherman riot of 1930 ended with the man he was guarding killed. He exposed fellow officers who murdered innocents for bank reward money, then quit the Rangers in 1932 because he refused to serve under a female governor. In 1934 he was hired to stop Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, mapped their loop between Dallas, Joplin, and northwest Louisiana, and ended the chase on a dirt road near Gibsland on May 23.

• The Texas Bankers Association offered $5,000 for dead bank robbers and nothing for live ones. In 1928 Hamer took proof that corrupt officers were framing and killing men for the bounty straight to the capitol press room.
• Prison chief Lee Simmons hired him at $180 a month after Clyde's January 1934 prison farm break, with a promise of reward money and his pick of the gang's possessions.
• Because police submachine gun rounds had bounced off Clyde's V-8 Ford, Hamer ordered a Remington Model 8 rifle with a 20 round magazine. The posse fired more than 150 rounds in the ambush.
• In 1948, while investigating disputed ballots in Alice, Texas for Coke Stevenson during his Senate race against Lyndon B. Johnson, Hamer cleared two groups of armed men from a bank without drawing a gun.
• After the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde portrayed him as a bumbling fool, his widow and son sued the studio and won an out of court settlement.

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Albert Pierrepoint was born in 1905 into a struggling Yorkshire family and learned at age 11, from a newspaper serializing his father's memoirs, that both his father Henry and his uncle Tom had been state hangmen. Henry had been struck from the Home Office list in 1910 for arriving at a prison drunk. Albert set out to redeem the family name through sobriety and precision. He first assisted his uncle in Dublin in 1932, and by the 1940s he had turned execution into a 12 second procedure, built on the official table of drops, a look at the prisoner through the cell door, and a sandbag left hanging overnight to stretch the rope.

This episode traces how that efficiency made him the most prolific British executioner of the 20th century, working from 1931 to 1956. He hanged 15 German spies during the war and more than 200 Nazi war criminals at Hamelin, including Bergen-Belsen commandant Josef Kramer and guard Irma Grese. Between jobs he ran a pub and kept the two lives apart, until the day in 1950 when he had to hang one of his own regulars. His 1974 autobiography ended with a verdict few expected from him: capital punishment was not a deterrent.

• His uncle Tom gave him the rule he lived by: if you can't do it without whiskey, don't do it at all.
• German spy Karl Richter fought so hard in 1941 that he burst the leather strap on his wrists. Pierrepoint kept the broken strap and later used it for executions he considered significant.
• James Corbett, a pub regular who sang duets with him, greeted him in the condemned cell with the words hello, Tosh. Pierrepoint answered hello, Tish, and carried out the sentence.
• He hanged Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley, and Ruth Ellis, cases that provoked public outrage, and later hanged John Christie, the serial killer who had framed Evans.
• He resigned in January 1956 after a reprieved execution in Manchester, when a sheriff offered 4 pounds instead of his full 15 pound fee.

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Frank James was born in 1843 in Kearney, Missouri, the son of a Baptist minister with a large library. He loved Shakespeare and hoped to become a schoolteacher. Then the Civil War broke out in 1861, when he was 18. He joined the secessionist Missouri State Guard, fell ill at the siege of Lexington, was left behind, and went home on parole, only to be forced by a pro-Union militia of his own neighbors to sign an oath of allegiance. He ignored both pledges and became a bushwhacker under William Quantrill, riding in the Lawrence Massacre of August 1863, where roughly 200 mostly unarmed civilians were killed.

This episode follows the older, quieter brother of Jesse James from guerrilla war to the James Younger gang, through at least four deadly robberies between 1868 and 1876 and the disastrous Northfield, Minnesota raid. It then turns to the stranger second act. Five months after Jesse was assassinated in 1882, Frank took a train to Jefferson City, handed his gun to Governor Thomas Crittenden, and walked out of two trials a free man. He spent the rest of his life selling his own notoriety, and died peacefully on the family farm in 1915 at age 72.

• Union militiamen raided the family farm and partially hanged his stepfather, Dr. Reuben Samuel, from a tree to make him reveal where the guerrillas were hiding.
• The Northfield raid of September 7, 1876 failed because the gang left its network of Southern sympathizers in Missouri. Townspeople in Minnesota simply picked up rifles and fired back.
• At his surrender, Frank told the governor he had been hunted for over 20 years and had not let another man touch his weapon since 1861.
• Juries acquitted him of a Missouri train robbery and an Alabama payroll heist, helped by character witnesses such as former Confederate General Joe Shelby.
• His later jobs included shoe salesman, telegraph operator, racetrack betting commissioner, and ticket taker at a St. Louis burlesque theater. He ended up charging tourists 25 cents for tours of the James farm.

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Robert Stroud never kept a single bird at Alcatraz, and the gentle figure Burt Lancaster played on screen bears little resemblance to the man. Born in Seattle in 1890 to an abusive, alcoholic father, he ran away at 13 and by 18 was in Juneau, Alaska, working as a pimp. In January 1909 he knocked a bartender named Charlie von Dahmer unconscious in a dispute over an unpaid fee and a beating, then shot him dead. A manslaughter conviction brought 12 years at McNeil Island, where he stabbed one inmate and assaulted a hospital orderly before being moved to Leavenworth.

This episode follows him from the Leavenworth mess hall, where in 1916 he stabbed guard Andrew Turner through the heart in front of some 1,500 inmates, to a death sentence commuted by President Woodrow Wilson and a lifetime in solitary. There, in 1920, he found three injured sparrows in the yard. What followed was real science done with razor blades and broken glass, a mail-order business, and decades of calculated manipulation of the people holding him.

• He kept nearly 300 birds in his cells, wrote two respected manuscripts on avian disease, and found a treatment for hemorrhagic septicemia by dissecting the birds that died.
• When officials tried to shut him down in 1931, a petition with 50,000 signatures went to President Herbert Hoover, and he married Della Mae Jones by proxy to block a transfer under Kansas law.
• The marriage cost him his mother's support. She opposed his clemency bids until her death in 1938.
• Guards found he was using his laboratory equipment to distill alcohol, and in December 1942 he was given ten minutes' notice and shipped to Alcatraz, where pets were banned.
• An Alcatraz psychiatrist diagnosed him a psychopath in 1943. He died in 1963 at 73 after 54 years in custody, 42 of them in solitary confinement.

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On August 21, 1911, a handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia, who had helped build the Louvre's protective glass cases, tucked the Mona Lisa under his work smock and walked out. The museum had more than 400 rooms and few guards, and staff took a full day to notice, assuming the photographers had it. According to the famous account, the theft was ordered by Eduardo de Valfierno, an Argentine con man who styled himself a marquis and did not want the painting at all. What he wanted was the headline.

This episode lays out the scheme credited to him: six forgeries painted by restorer Yves Chaudron, shipped to six wealthy and unscrupulous buyers before the theft, then each sold as the stolen original once the news broke. It follows Peruggia, left for two years with a painting he could not sell, to his arrest in Florence in 1913. And it weighs the evidence that the whole story was invented by journalist Karl Decker, whose 1932 article in the Saturday Evening Post is its only source.

• The forgeries were sent abroad before the theft so that customs would pass them as ordinary replicas, with no stolen masterpiece yet to look for.
• Faking a Leonardo meant sourcing centuries-old wood panels, mixing period pigments, and baking and freezing the paint to produce the fine cracking of age.
• The buyers could never complain to the police, since doing so meant admitting they had tried to buy stolen cultural heritage.
• Peruggia insisted he acted alone out of patriotism. He hid the painting in a trunk before offering it to a Florentine dealer who called the police.
• Decker wrote that the Mona Lisa was on canvas and got its size and weight wrong, and none of the six copies has ever surfaced.

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On the morning of February 14, 1929, seven men waiting for a whiskey delivery in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago were lined up against a brick wall by men dressed as police and cut down with Thompson submachine guns. One of them, Frank Gusenberg, lived long enough to tell real officers that no one had shot him. The target, North Side Gang boss Bugs Moran, was running late, saw the uniforms, and went for coffee instead. From hiding he told reporters that only Capone killed like that.

This episode traces how Al Capone reached that morning. He inherited the Chicago Outfit from Johnny Torrio in 1925, built a bootlegging business the government estimated at $105 million a year by 1926, and fought Moran over hijacked shipments of Old Log Cabin whiskey. It then follows the fallout: a horrified public, pressure from fellow crime bosses, and a federal case that reached him through his spending. Capone had a Florida alibi for the killings. He had none for his tax returns.

• The Outfit spent an estimated $15 million a year on bribes and carried a weekly payroll of $300,000.
• In 1926 a convoy of ten cars fired more than a thousand rounds into the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero while Capone ate, and a bodyguard pushed him to the floor.
• Ballistics pioneer Calvin Goddard used a comparison microscope to show that Chicago police guns had not fired the garage bullets, and the trail led to hired gunman Fred Burke.
• After learning that three of his own men were plotting against him, Capone hosted a dinner in their honor and beat them to death with a baseball bat.
• IRS agent Frank Wilson built the case that convicted Capone in 1931 on 22 counts of tax fraud, and the massacre's machine guns helped bring about the National Firearms Act of 1934.

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On July 9, 1931, a clean-shaven stranger with a Scandinavian accent and plenty of cash arrived at Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories. He told Constable Edgar Millen almost nothing, built an 8 by 10 foot cabin on the Rat River, and never took out a trapping license. The authorities called him Albert Johnson, almost certainly not his real name. That December, after local Indigenous trappers complained about him, two officers trekked 60 miles to his door. He ignored them. When they came back with a warrant on December 31, he fired through the wood and wounded Constable Alfred King.

This episode follows what came next: a 15-hour siege at 40 below with dynamite thawed inside the officers' coats, a cabin blown apart over a dugout he had carved from the permafrost, and a 33-day, 150-mile pursuit in which the fugitive never spoke a word. It ends on the frozen Eagle River on February 17, 1932, and then picks up decades later, when an exhumation and DNA work began to name the family of a man who died protecting his anonymity.

• During a firefight on January 30 he shot and killed Millen, and the only sound the posse ever heard from him was a laugh.
• With the two known passes blockaded, he crossed the Richardson Mountains by climbing a 7,000-foot peak in a blizzard.
• To hide from pilot Wop May, a First World War flying ace, he took off his snowshoes and walked in caribou tracks on a frozen river. May found him on February 14 by scanning the banks.
• His body carried more than $2,000 in cash, gold, a compass, a dead bird, and a dead squirrel, and he had expensive gold dental work.
• A 2007 exhumation revealed scoliosis and a fractured femur, and in 2021 Othram traced his ancestry to a specific family in Sweden.

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Alphonse Bertillon was born in Paris in 1853 into a family of noted statisticians and seemed determined to disappoint them. He was expelled from school, drifted through menial jobs and a stint in the army, and in 1879 took a clerk's post copying files at the Paris Prefecture of Police that his father arranged. The records around him were useless. Repeat offenders gave false names and nothing tied a man in custody to an earlier file. Bertillon's answer was to measure them, reasoning that a criminal could lie about his name but not about his skeleton.

This episode follows his system of anthropometry from the jeers of inmates at La Sante prison to adoption across Europe and North America, along with the standardized front and profile photograph that survives as the mugshot. It also follows the certainty that ruined him. Called as a handwriting expert against Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 and again in 1899, with no training in the field, he offered a theory dressed in probability that helped send an innocent man to Devil's Island.

• His first five measurements were the length and breadth of the head, the middle finger, the left foot, and the forearm.
• He preserved footprints by electroplating plaster casts in copper and used a dynamometer to record the force a burglar applied to a door or window.
• In 1912 he set a standard of 16 ridge characteristics for matching latent fingerprints, helping write the rules for the method that replaced his own.
• In Minneapolis, Black women targeted by police with his system defeated it by rotating aliases, most often the name Mamie.
• He argued Dreyfus had forged his own handwriting to make it look like a forgery. In 1904 Henri Poincare and two fellow mathematicians found the analysis without scientific value, and Dreyfus was exonerated in 1906.