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A skeleton on display in a London medical museum belongs to the man who ran the city's underworld while the public thanked him for fighting crime. Jonathan Wild was born poor in Wolverhampton in the early 1680s and came to a London of around 600,000 people with no police force, only unpaid parish constables. Thrown into the Wood Street Compter for debt in 1710, he learned how corruption worked by running errands for the jailers and lending to inmates, and a prostitute named Mary Milliner taught him the stolen goods trade. He then studied extortion as assistant to the crooked under-marshal Charles Hitchen and took the racket from him.

This episode explains the closed loop Wild built from an office in the Old Bailey. His gang stole the goods, victims paid him a finder's fee to recover them, and any thief who held out was handed to the hangman for the government's 40 pound bounty. The scheme lasted until Wild met Jack Sheppard, a burglar who refused to work for him and kept escaping from prison. The feud turned London against the self-appointed Thief-Taker General, his own men testified, and he was hanged at Tyburn before a jeering crowd.

• When Hitchen tried to expose him in print, Wild answered with a pamphlet revealing Hitchen's visits to molly houses, which ended him as a threat.
• In 1720 the Privy Council asked Wild for advice on crime, and he persuaded them to raise the bounty for thieves from 40 pounds to 140.
• He advertised a lost notebook found near a tavern known as a brothel, a public hint to its owner to pay up or be exposed.
• Blueskin Blake, denied Wild's help at his trial, slashed Wild's throat with a pocket knife in open court.
• Convicted in 1725 over 50 yards of stolen lace, Wild tried laudanum on the morning of his execution, and Arthur Conan Doyle later cited him as the model for Professor Moriarty.

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In July 1882 a man hauling wood in West Turkey Creek Canyon, Arizona found a body seated on a flat rock among five oak trees growing from a single root. The corpse was blackened by the sun, a bullet had entered the right temple, a revolver was still in the right hand, and the feet were wrapped in strips torn from an undershirt. This was John Peters Ringo, the outlaw the movies present as a Latin-quoting rival of Doc Holliday. The record shows someone else: a boy who at 14 watched his father die in a shotgun accident on a Wyoming wagon trail, and who grew into a drifter and a violent drunk.

This episode works from coroner's findings, newspaper clippings, and court records to separate the man from the legend. It covers his killings in the Texas feud known as the Hoodoo War, his loose ties to the Cochise County Cowboys, and a Tombstone more worried about mining investors than gunfights. Then it tests each theory of his death. Wyatt Earp's claim does not fit the calendar, Doc Holliday was in a Colorado courtroom, and the coroner's jury ruling of suicide is the one the evidence supports.

• In September 1875 Ringo and a partner shot an unarmed James Chaney on his own porch while he washed his face in a basin.
• In Safford, Arizona a drunk Ringo shot Lewis Hancock for declining a whiskey and saying he preferred beer. Hancock survived.
• His January 1882 street confrontation with Doc Holliday ended with both men arrested and fined for carrying weapons inside city limits.
• Ringo's horse was found 11 days after the body, two miles away, with his boots still tied to the saddle.
• Court records put Doc Holliday in Pueblo County, Colorado on July 11th, 14th, and 18th, roughly 700 miles from the canyon.

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On a July night in 1934, bystanders in a Chicago alley dipped handkerchiefs and scraps of newspaper in the blood of a man federal agents had just shot. The man was John Dillinger, born in 1903 in Indianapolis and raised by a strict grocer father. His path to that alley began with a clumsy 1924 grocery store robbery that netted about $50. On his father's advice he pleaded guilty without a lawyer, expected leniency, and got 10 to 20 years. He came out in May 1933 after nine and a half years, trained by veteran bank robbers in the stopwatch methods of Herman Lamm.

This episode follows the short, violent career that came next. Dillinger robbed his first bank within weeks, was broken out of an Ohio jail by the mentors he had armed, and walked out of the supposedly escape proof jail at Crown Point. To a public that blamed banks for the Depression, he looked like an avenger. To J. Edgar Hoover, his state-hopping was the argument for a federal police force. The pursuit ran through shootouts in St. Paul and at Little Bohemia, back room plastic surgery, and a betrayal outside the Biograph Theater.

• Lamm's system gave each robber a role, including a driver who timed the job with a stopwatch, and Dillinger avoided Anderson, Indiana because trains might block his getaway.
• The March 1934 Crown Point escape is credited to a wooden pistol blackened with shoe polish, though a deputy and a later investigator claimed the gun was real.
• A doctor paid $5,000 nearly killed him with an ether overdose during facial surgery, then burned his fingertips with nitric and hydrochloric acid.
• A brothel owner facing deportation to Romania tipped off the FBI and wore an orange dress to the movies on July 22nd, which the papers turned into the Woman in Red.
• An estimated 15,000 people lined up to view his body, and his gravestone at Crown Hill Cemetery has been replaced several times because visitors chip off pieces.

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Jim Corbett killed big cats that had taken hundreds of human lives, and he is also remembered as a founding figure of wildlife conservation with a tiger subspecies named for him. Born in 1875 in Nainital, India, the eighth of nine children of a postmaster who died young, he grew up roaming the jungles near the family's winter home at Kaladhungi. He moved from a catapult to a pellet bow to a muzzle loading shotgun by age eight, and learned to read alarm calls and pug marks from villagers. As an Anglo-Indian he lived among local people, spoke their languages, and respected their beliefs.

This episode follows that boy through 22 years running river transport at Mokameh Ghat, a labor corps on the Western Front, and the hunts that made him famous, beginning in 1907 with the Champawat tigress. It also traces his turn from rifle to camera. Years of tracking taught him that man-eaters were usually injured animals and that the real danger to India's wildlife was vanishing habitat. He filmed tigers with a noisy hand-cranked camera, pressed the government to create India's first national park, and wrote Man-Eaters of Kumaon from a sickbed in 1943.

• The Champawat tigress killed 200 people in Nepal and another 200 in India before Corbett used a beat of nearly 300 men to drive her toward his rifle.
• Of the 500 Kumaon men he personally led to France in World War I, only one died, in part because he built them a brick building with heated bathhouses and drying rooms.
• He hunted the leopard of Rudraprayag for ten weeks in 1925 and killed it on his last night in the region.
• In 1952 at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya he guarded Princess Elizabeth on the night her father died, and wrote in the log book that she went up a princess and came down a queen.
• His first national park was later renamed Jim Corbett National Park, and in 1968 the Indochinese tiger was given the scientific name Panthera tigris corbetti.

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On a January night in 1875, armed men surrounded a Missouri farmhouse and threw an incendiary device through the window. It rolled into the fireplace and exploded, nearly severing a mother's arm and killing her nine-year-old son. The attackers were Pinkerton detectives. The victims were the family of Frank and Jesse James, who were not even home. This episode starts there to ask how a gang of bank and train robbers came to look like the wronged party, and the answer begins in Civil War Missouri, where teenagers like the James brothers and Cole Younger learned ambush and terror as Confederate bushwhackers.

When the war ended, those skills moved to a new target. The February 1866 raid on the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty used cavalry tactics on a bank and took around $60,000. A newspaper editor named John Newman Edwards then recast the robbers as noble knights in an editorial called The Chivalry of Crime, and Jesse James wrote his own letters to the press. The story follows that publicity machine through the Pinkerton war, the catastrophic 1876 raid on Northfield, Minnesota, and the reward money that finally turned the gang against itself.

• At Gallatin in December 1869, Jesse James shot cashier John W. Sheets because he mistook him for Samuel P. Cox, the Union officer who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson.
• During the 1874 Gads Hill train robbery the gang reportedly checked passengers' hands for calluses, then telegraphed their own press release to a St. Louis newspaper.
• In Northfield, citizens grabbed rifles from hardware stores and fought back, and medical student Henry Wheeler shot gang member Clell Miller from a hotel window.
• The Youngers were cornered at Hanska Slough about two weeks later, pleaded guilty to murder to avoid the death penalty, and never informed on Frank or Jesse.
• On April 3rd, 1882, Bob Ford shot Jesse James behind the ear as he stood on a chair to dust a picture, in a deal made with Governor Thomas T. Crittenden.

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In the fall of 1724, the most secure prison in England was beaten by a five foot four carpenter with a slight stutter. Jack Sheppard was born in Spitalfields in 1702, sent to a workhouse at six, and bound to a seven year carpentry apprenticeship in which his labor belonged to his master. For five years he was a model apprentice. Then he fell in with the crowd at the Black Lion, including the thief known as Blueskin and Elizabeth Lyon, called Edgworth Bess, pocketed two silver spoons, and walked away from his contract into full-time burglary.

This episode follows the 20 months that made him a legend. Sheppard refused to fence his goods through Jonathan Wild, the self-styled Thief-Taker General who secretly ran London's organized crime and sent his own men to the gallows for a 40 pound bounty. Wild hunted him, and Sheppard answered with four escapes, each more humiliating to the authorities than the last. His final arrest came two weeks after the greatest of them, when he was found drunk in a stolen black silk suit. An estimated 200,000 people, about a third of London, lined the route to his hanging at Tyburn.

• His first escape took less than three hours: he went through the timber ceiling of St. Giles's Roundhouse, then pointed at the roof so the crowd would look away while he left.
• Chained to the floor of a Newgate strong room called the Castle, he dug an iron bar out of the chimney, smashed through six iron-reinforced oak doors in the dark, and reached a roof 60 feet up.
• Jailers loaded him with 300 pounds of iron and charged visitors four shillings to see him, while he refused an offer to reduce his sentence by informing.
• Friends planned to rush his body to a doctor for resuscitation, but the crowd that rioted to save him from the surgeons kept them from reaching it.
• An 1839 novel by William Harrison Ainsworth set off such a craze that London banned licensing any play with Sheppard's name in the title for 40 years.

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J. Edgar Hoover grew up in Washington, D.C. with a severe stutter and beat it by teaching himself to talk at ferocious speed. At 18 he took a messenger job at the Library of Congress, where he absorbed a cross-referenced cataloging system and a lesson he never forgot: power belongs to whoever can retrieve and connect information fastest. He carried that method into the Department of Justice in 1917, built paper files on political radicals, and helped orchestrate the Palmer raids. In 1924, at 29, he was handed a scandal-ridden Bureau of Investigation to clean up.

This episode traces 48 years in power across eight presidencies. Hoover turned the bungled Dillinger hunt into a public relations triumph, built a national fingerprint database and forensics lab, and pushed aside the agent who actually got Dillinger. He also denied the Mafia existed until a 1957 mob summit in upstate New York made denial impossible, hid decoded Soviet cables from President Truman, and created COINTELPRO to disrupt groups the courts would not let him prosecute. Presidents complained about him in private and kept him anyway, out of fear and because his surveillance was useful.

• The 1934 ambush at Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin left a civilian shot by mistake and an agent dead while Dillinger slipped out the back windows.
• Hoover locked the Venona decryptions of Soviet spy traffic in his office safe and kept them from his attorney general and from President Truman.
• In 1964 the Bureau sent Martin Luther King Jr. an anonymous package with a tape and a letter that King read as a push toward suicide.
• Richard Nixon admitted on tape in 1971 that he could not fire Hoover because he feared the reprisals.
• Hoover died of a heart attack in 1972 at 77 and became the first civil servant to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, while his secretary reportedly destroyed his private records.

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A rotund, unarmed man walks into a 1920s New York speakeasy, points at a wanted poster of a federal Prohibition agent, and bets the patrons that he is the man in the picture. They take the bet. He collects his winnings and arrests the room. That was Izzy Einstein, a multilingual former postal clerk born in 1880 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who talked his way into a badge after the 18th Amendment and recruited his friend Moe Smith, a retired boxer and cigar shop owner. Neither man was a temperance crusader. They simply believed a law on the books should be enforced.

This episode explains why two middle-aged men with no police training outperformed everyone around them. They did not walk or talk like cops, so bouncers scanning for a threat never saw one. Between 1920 and 1925 they used more than a hundred disguises, staged Sunday raids timed for Monday front pages, and built cases careful enough to hold up in court. Their fame was their undoing: in November 1925 a reorganization under General Lincoln C. Andrews laid them off along with other New York agents, because Washington wanted enforcement to look dignified, not funny.

• Izzy posed as a streetcar conductor, a grave digger, a fisherman carrying raw fish, an ice man, and an opera singer, and the pair's disguises were never detected.
• He sometimes knocked on a speakeasy door and announced that he was Izzy Einstein, Prohibition agent, and the bouncer would laugh and let him in.
• The duo made 4,932 arrests with a 95 percent conviction rate, helped by a funnel in Izzy's pocket that drained each shot into a hidden flask as evidence.
• With reporters and photographers in tow, they reportedly carried out 71 raids in just over 12 hours on a single Sunday.
• After their firing both men thrived selling insurance for New York Life, and Izzy's 1932 autobiography, Prohibition Agent Number One, reached almost a million readers.

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The phrase "up the river" dates to 1891 and describes a real trip: roughly 30 miles up the Hudson from New York City to Sing Sing. In May 1825, warden Elam Lynds brought a hundred men from Auburn Prison to a 130 acre site in Mount Pleasant that held no walls and no cells, only a marble quarry. The inmates mined the stone and built their own cage under the Auburn system, a regime of total silence enforced by the whip. Their marble also went downriver to build Grace Church and the Lyndhurst Mansion, and the profit made Sing Sing a model prison when it opened in 1826.

This episode follows the long tug of war between punishment and reform that came next. Eliza Farnham handed Dickens novels to the women's ward in 1844. Thomas Mott Osborne tore out a culture of bribes and was indicted for it. Lewis E. Lawes ran the prison for 21 years, building libraries and sports teams while personally overseeing executions he publicly opposed. The story runs through a prison football team sponsored by the owner of the New York Giants to today's theater and college programs, and to plans to turn the original cell block into a museum.

• The name comes from a Native American phrase meaning stone upon stone, which is exactly how the first hundred inmates built the prison.
• From 1891 until 1963, 614 men and women died in the electric chair nicknamed Old Sparky, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 and Eddie Lee Mays, the last person executed in New York State.
• Thomas Mott Osborne spent a week incognito as an inmate at Auburn before becoming warden in 1914, and prisoners threw a jubilant celebration when he returned after his acquittal.
• The Sing Sing Black Sheep played only home games, with ticket revenue going to inmates' families, until the starting quarterback and two other starters escaped on a game morning in 1935.
• Rehabilitation Through the Arts, founded at Sing Sing in 1996, inspired the 2023 film Sing Sing, in which Colman Domingo stars beside program alumnus Clarence Maclin.

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Deadwood was never supposed to exist. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota, so every prospector and merchant who arrived was a squatter breaking federal law. After the Custer expedition found gold on French Creek in 1874, the rush overwhelmed the army, and by 1876 as many as 25,000 people filled a narrow gulch with no government at all. This episode shows who filled the vacuum: freighters like Charlie and Steve Utter, brothel keepers like Dora DuFran, and Al Swearengen, whose Gem Theater combined saloon, stage, and brothel.

The town's real story is reinvention. It survived smallpox in 1876 and a fire in 1879 that destroyed over 300 buildings, then turned from placer camp to corporate mining center around the Homestake Mine, with a narrow gauge railroad and electric light only four years after Edison's lamp. The 20th century brought more fires, a bypass by Interstate 90, and a 1980 raid on its last brothels. In 1989 Deadwood legalized gambling to pay for preserving its 19th century buildings, betting on the vices that built it.

• Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok on August 2, 1876, and was acquitted by a miners' court. Because that court had no jurisdiction, he was tried again, convicted, and hanged.
• A Chinatown of about 250 residents grew on Main Street, led by merchants such as Wong Fee Lee, with Black and white neighbors living in the same quarter.
• In September 1883 Judge Squire P. Romans ordered an Edison dynamo and 15 incandescent lights and hauled them into the gulch.
• The Homestake Mine, established in 1877, operated until 2002, the longest continuously operating gold mine in the United States.
• The 1959 fire burned 4,500 acres and took 3,600 firefighters to contain, and a 1987 blaze destroyed the historic Syndicate building.