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On January 16th, 1935, federal agents surrounded a vacation cottage in Florida and, after an hours long gun battle, found two bodies inside. One was a 61 year old woman. The FBI told the country it had eliminated the most vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade. Alvin Karpis, who actually ran with her, said she could not have planned a morning breakfast. This episode untangles the real life of Arizona Donnie Clark, born in Missouri in 1873, from the legend of Ma Barker.

Her four sons, Herman, Lloyd, Doc, and Fred, turned to crime early, and she shielded them at every turn while her husband George finally walked away. After years in a dirt floor shack, she followed Fred and Karpis on the run to St. Paul, Minnesota, where a corrupt police chief helped a clumsy gang grow into a kidnapping ring. She rented the houses and made killers look like a family on a road trip. The mastermind story came later, and it served the Bureau well.

• St. Paul police chief Tom Brown supplied safe houses, sat on federal warrants, and warned the gang of raids in exchange for a cut of the profits.
• The gang collected a $100,000 ransom for brewery executive William Hamm Jr. and $200,000 for banker Edward Bremer.
• When the gang had crimes to commit, they handed her money and sent her to the movies. No fingerprints tie her to any crime scene or ransom note.
• A letter mentioning an alligator called Gator Joe led agents to the cottage on Lake Weir, where more than 2,000 rounds were exchanged.
• Facing headlines about agents killing an elderly mother, Hoover fed friendly columnists a tale of a gun toting matriarch found with a submachine gun in her hands.

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For centuries, a neighbor judged too argumentative could be strapped into a crude wooden chair, paraded through town to jeers, and plunged into a freezing river. This episode traces the ducking stool from its origin as the cucking stool, a name that has nothing to do with cuckolds. It comes from an old verb meaning to defecate, and the Domesday Book of 1086 records the device in Chester under a Latin name meaning the dung chair. Offenders sat exposed on a toilet seat while the crowd threw rotten food and mud.

The targets were scolds, gossips, and dishonest tradesmen, but overwhelmingly women. By 1378 the poem Piers Plowman called it women's punishment. A slip of pronunciation turned cucking into ducking, first recorded in 1597, and towns built seesaw rigs on riverbanks to match the word. During the witch hunts the same idea became the water test, a trial no one could win. The physical practice died out in farce, yet its legal ghost survived far longer than anyone would guess.

• Wheeled versions called tumbrels let magistrates drag an offender around the whole parish so that nobody missed the spectacle.
• Suspected witches were bound right thumb to left big toe and thrown into deep water. Floating meant guilt, and sinking meant innocence and often drowning.
• Jenny Pipes of Leominster, branded a notorious scold, became the last woman ducked under English law in 1809.
• In 1817 Sarah Leeke was sentenced, strapped in, and wheeled to the water, only for officials to find it too shallow to dunk her.
• A New Jersey grand jury indicted a woman as a common scold in 1972, and the judge struck the charge down as vague and discriminatory under the 14th Amendment.

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Before it was the most notorious slum in New York, Five Points was Collect Pond, a spring fed lake 48 acres across and 60 feet deep that supplied Manhattan's drinking water. Breweries, tanneries, and a slaughterhouse poisoned it. Pierre Charles L'Enfant proposed cleaning the pond and building a park around it, but the city chose to fill the basin with loose soil, brush, and street sweepings. The fill rotted, leaked methane, and never compacted, so the new houses sank and the middle class fled.

Into the cheapest housing in the city came two groups shut out everywhere else: Black New Yorkers freed in a slow emancipation that ended on July 4th, 1827, and Irish Catholics escaping the great famine. Their forced closeness produced tension, disease, and riots, and also the first large scale voluntary racial integration in American history. This episode follows the neighborhood from its poisoned ground to its erasure beneath Columbus Park and the courthouses of Foley Square.

• At Almack's, a Black owned dance hall also known as Pete Williams Place, Irish jigs met the African shuffle in dance battles that produced tap, popularized by Master Juba.
• When cholera struck in June 1832, wealthy New Yorkers blamed bad air and immorality instead of the missing sewers.
• The penny press claimed the Old Brewery tenement saw a murder a night for 15 years, though the 1850 census counted only about 220 residents there.
• The Dead Rabbits riot of 1857 began on July 4th, drew an estimated 800 to 1,000 gang members, and ended only when the state militia arrived.
• After Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives in 1890, the city razed Mulberry Bend and hired Calvert Vaux to build the park that opened in 1897.

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The most famous police headquarters in the world is not a yard and is nowhere near Scotland. When Sir Robert Peel pushed the Metropolitan Police Act through Parliament in 1829, the first commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, set up in a private townhouse at Four Whitehall Place. The public was sent around to the rear entrance on a narrow street called Great Scotland Yard, and Londoners began calling the whole force by that name. This episode follows the headquarters from that cramped house through every later address.

The force swelled to 13,000 officers and annexed neighboring houses and stables, was bombed in 1884, then moved in 1890 to Richard Norman Shaw's grand building on the Victoria Embankment. A 1967 office block on Broadway brought the rotating sign and, decades later, a remarkable property deal. Alongside the bricks runs the fictional Yard, shaped by the Jack the Ripper press frenzy, Wilkie Collins, and Sherlock Holmes, which may now be more famous than the real one.

• During construction of the new headquarters in 1888, workers found a woman's dismembered torso in the foundation. The Whitehall Mystery was never solved.
• The police authority bought the Broadway freehold in 2008 for around 120 million pounds and sold it in 2014 to the Abu Dhabi Financial Group for 370 million.
• The original Great Scotland Yard site, bought by Lulu Group International in 2015, is now a luxury Hyatt hotel.
• Queen Elizabeth II was due to open the Curtis Green building on March 23rd, 2017, but the ceremony was postponed after the Westminster terrorist attack the day before.
• The Crime Museum, founded in 1874 and once called the Black Museum, stays closed to the public as a training collection for police.

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Walk into Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 and the local authorities would order you to hand over your firearms. That detail sets the tone for an episode that takes apart the Hollywood gunslinger piece by piece. Nobody in the 1880s used the word, which was coined for a 1920 Western called Drag Harlan. The men themselves said gunfighter, gunman, or bad man, and Bat Masterson simply called them man killers. The low slung, tied down holster is an anachronism too: real holsters were soft, worn high, and often skipped in favor of a waistband or coat pocket.

Real gunfights were rare, sudden, and blind. Black powder filled a saloon with white smoke within seconds, and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted 30 seconds at point blank range. Reputation was mostly public relations, the line between lawman and outlaw barely existed because a marshal's salary was starvation wages, and fame worked like a bounty. The most feared men were shot from behind, not beaten at high noon.

• Wyatt Earp scorned fast shooters as gun fanners and said the winner of a gunplay is usually the one who takes his time.
• In El Paso in 1881, marshal Dallas Stoudenmire left four men dead in five seconds, and in 1882 he dared the town council to take his badge when it tried to fire him.
• Elfego Baca held a tiny cabin for 36 hours against 80 gunmen who fired an estimated 400 rounds, and walked out without a scratch.
• The Hickok and Tutt duel of July 21st, 1865 in Springfield, Missouri began over a gambling debt and a pocket watch and ended with a heart shot at about 50 yards.
• Historians can verify only five lethal incidents involving Wyatt Earp, and there is no evidence Johnny Ringo ever took part in a single gunfight.

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The agents who run the real Con Air and track fugitives from covert surveillance planes belong to an agency that once took the national census and paid the courthouse janitors. This episode follows the United States Marshals Service from the Judiciary Act of 1789, when George Washington appointed the first 13 marshals, through more than a century in which they were paid by the fee, appointed through patronage, and free to swear in a posse of local citizens.

The frontier made them legends, with Bass Reeves credited with arresting over 3,000 felons and Virgil Earp at the O.K. Corral in 1881. The same duty to carry out court orders also had them enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and suppressing the Pullman strike in 1894. The civil rights era forced a centralized, modern service, officially established in 1969, and the episode weighs its tactical power and secrecy against Ruby Ridge, corruption, and discrimination lawsuits.

• Until 1870 marshals took the census every 10 years, and until 1896 they were paid a fee for each paper served or arrest made.
• In September 1962, President John F. Kennedy ordered 127 marshals to accompany James Meredith at the University of Mississippi amid violent riots.
• In Operation Flagship in December of 1985, over a hundred fugitives were arrested after being mailed a fake offer of free Washington Redskins tickets.
• Surveillance planes registered to a front company with a UPS store mailbox in Spring, Texas carry dirt boxes that mimic cell towers to locate a fugitive's phone.
• A 1998 jury found the service a racially hostile environment in its promotion practices, and in September 2023 the agency settled a $15 million class action lawsuit.

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Popular culture promises that a stumble into a South American river means a boiling frenzy of teeth and a polished skeleton in 30 seconds. The real piranha tells a different story. This episode traces the legend to a 1913 Amazon expedition by Theodore Roosevelt, when local fishermen netted off a stretch of river, trapped and starved thousands of fish, then pushed a cow into the water. Roosevelt described the result in his 1914 book Through the Brazilian Wilderness, calling them the most ferocious fish in the world.

The biology is stranger and more sympathetic. Piranhas are close cousins of the docile pacu and silver dollar, most grow only 12 to 35 centimeters long, and their jaws work less like scissors than like bolt cutters built for crushing force. They school out of fear, not to hunt, because dolphins, caimans, and cormorants treat them as a snack. Their diet includes fruit, seeds, and scales nipped from passing fish, which makes them closer to paranoid aquatic raccoons than river wolves.

• The name comes from an old Tupi word that first appears in a Portuguese-Tupi dictionary from 1585 and translates simply as scissors.
• A Miocene ancestor called Megapiranha lived about 8 to 10 million years ago and may have reached 128 centimeters, more than four feet long.
• In flooded forests, piranhas crack seeds that fall from the canopy, and one study found roughly 10 percent of stomach contents were seeds.
• Almost every documented attack on a human comes in the dry season, when fish are stranded in shrinking, oxygen starved pools and mistake splashing for dying prey.
• Around 190 bites were reported near Palmas, Brazil in 2007 and about 70 in Rosario, Argentina in 2013, nearly all single nips to the extremities.

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Early European explorers in Tasmania heard unearthly screeches in the dark and named the unseen creature Beelzebub's pup. Daylight revealed a chubby, shuffling, dog sized marsupial that stores fat in its tail. This episode looks past the cartoon and the settler myths to the mechanics of a specialized survivor: an animal that once ranged across the Australian mainland until a drying climate, vanishing megafauna, and the pack hunting dingo pushed it out, leaving Tasmania as its island sanctuary.

The devil is built like a walking pair of bolt cutters, with a bite force quotient of 181, jaws that open to 80 degrees, and teeth that keep growing for life. Its screaming feasts turn out to be an orderly system of 20 postures and 11 vocal sounds that settles disputes without bloodshed. Then came devil facial tumor disease, identified in 1996, a transmissible cancer that exploits the species' low genetic diversity and has cut wild populations by up to 80 percent.

• Pound for pound, a Tasmanian devil bites harder than a lion, a tiger, or a grizzly bear, thanks to a pronounced sagittal crest anchoring enormous jaw muscles.
• A devil can eat up to 40 percent of its body weight in 30 minutes, and researchers find snake fangs, echidna spines, and denim in the scats.
• A mother delivers 20 to 30 young the size of a grain of rice after three weeks of gestation, but her pouch has only four nipples.
• Because the devils' MHC genes are nearly identical across the species, the immune system fails to recognize tumor cells passed by a bite as foreign.
• Culling failed, yet wild devils are evolving natural resistance, and in 2020 healthy animals were reintroduced to a sanctuary on mainland Australia.

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In January of 1871, a sleigh crash in snowy New York City fatally injured James Watson, the secret bookkeeper of the Tweed ring. His unguarded ledgers reached the press and revealed tens of millions of dollars embezzled by a shadow government. This episode treats Tammany Hall as the subject of a biography, following its 180 year life from the Society of St. Tammany, founded by William Mooney in 1789 as a club for so called pure Americans, to the most infamous political machine in American history.

The story runs through Aaron Burr, who saw a voting network where others saw a fraternity, and through the ward system that traded jobs, winter coal, and fast naturalization papers for lifelong loyalty at the ballot box. Boss Tweed turned graft into an art, Richard Croker turned it into a franchise, and Fiorello LaGuardia starved it with the civil service exam. What remains is an uncomfortable paradox: a corrupt organization that was also the only safety net many desperate immigrants ever had.

• Burr used Tammany's membership to mobilize working class voters block by block, helping secure the 1800 presidential election for Thomas Jefferson.
• A group that sparked an anti-immigrant riot in 1817 reversed course after 1821 voting reforms and the arrival of more than 130,000 Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine.
• The New York County Courthouse was budgeted at $250,000 and cost taxpayers over $13 million, with contractors told to inflate bills by at least 65 percent.
• Thomas Nast's Tammany tiger cartoons in Harper's Weekly reached voters who could not read the New York Times, and Tweed died in a jail cell.
• After mob ties to Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano poisoned the brand, reformers including Eleanor Roosevelt and Ed Koch ousted Carmine DeSapio, and Tammany dissolved by 1967.

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Jefferson Randolph Smith II was born in Georgia in 1860 to a wealthy family that lost everything in the Civil War. In Texas he saw the outlaw Sam Bass die and concluded that a deck of cards was safer than a revolver. His masterpiece was the prize soap racket. He wrapped real bills around a few bars in front of a crowd, mixed them into the pile, and sold every bar for a dollar. A shill would tear one open and wave a hundred dollar bill, the crowd would rush in, and sleight of hand kept the cash with his own men. A policeman who forgot his first name wrote Soapy in the ledger.

A street corner has a ceiling, so Smith used his profits to buy protection. In Denver he paid off the mayor and police chief and opened the Tivoli Club, fake diamond auctions, and a stock exchange selling shares in companies that did not exist. He ran the silver camp of Creede the same way, and in 1897 he carried the whole playbook north to Skagway, Alaska, where gold rush prospectors paid to send messages from a telegraph office whose wires ended at the back wall.

• In Creede he charged ten cents to see a fake petrified man called McGinty while his gang ran shell games on the people waiting in line.
• During Denver's 1894 City Hall War he held the building's tower with rifles and dynamite against a state militia armed with cannons and Gatling guns.
• Wearing a deputy's badge, he staged fake raids on his own rigged poker games so cheated victims would run and leave their money behind.
• In 1898 his Skagway Military Company won recognition from the War Department, and he rode as marshal of the Fourth of July parade.
• Days later his men stole a miner's $2,700 sack of gold. On July 8, 1898, Smith and guard Frank Reid shot each other on the Juneau Wharf.