Forty years ago, millions of Americans turned on their TVs to watch The Mysteries of Al Capone's Vault. In this live broadcast, construction workers blasted their way into a subterranean chamber beneath Chicago's Lexington Hotel, believed to have been a secret vault that belonged to the crime boss. My guest, William Elliott Hazelgrove, author of the new book, Capone's Vault, tells the story of how this broadcast got made and what investigators discovered underneath the Lexington once the cameras were rolling.

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Today, I'm joined by Alex Hortis, author of The Witch of New York, a riveting account of the 1843 trials of Polly Bodine. A resident of Staten Island, Bodine was accused of murdering her sister-in-law and her infant niece, sparking public outrage. Bodine went to trial not once, not twice, but three times for the crimes, and Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and P.T. Barnum variously took part in the attendant media circus.

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Today, we're joined by historian Bench Ansfield to talk about their breathtaking book, Born in Flames. It's about the arson wave of the 1970s, during which hundreds--yes, hundreds--of landlords in the Bronx set fire to their property to collect insurance. These crimes displaced thousands of Bronxites and killed a few, too. The crisis gae rise to a genre of sensationalist films Bench calls Bronxploitation that foreground poverty and vice in the borough.

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Today, we're joined by historian Jonathan Gill to talk about the amazing life of Boris Morros. After the Russian Revolution, Morros immigrated to America from Eastern Europe and became a big-time Hollywood filmmaker. To an outside observer, his life would have seemed all glitz and glam, but what the public didn't know was that Morros was risking his neck every day as a double agent, spying for both the Soviets and the Americans throughout the 1940s.

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This week, I'm re-releasing my 2024 interview with Margalit Fox, author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, a biography of the notorious nineteenth-century New York crime boss, Fredericka Mandelbaum. Next week, we're back with a brand-new interview. Until then!

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Today, I'm joined by award-winning journalist Matthew Campbell to talk about his new book, The Man Who Stole the Gods. For decades, the Bangkok-based Brit, Douglas Latchford, bought priceless Cambodian artworks that had been looted from ancient religious sites. Some of these pieces made their way to the collections of museums as august as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In The Man Who Stole the Gods, Matthew shines a light on the looters who stole this art and the international team of sleuths who helped return these works to their native country.

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We've rated the spies, now it's time for the rankings.

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Virginia Oldoini considered herself the most beautiful woman of the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, a high-ranking Italian official deployed her to France on a secret mission to seduce Emperor Napoleon III for political reasons. After her stint as a spy, the Countess emerged as a poioneer of photography, leaving behind one of the most stunning bodies of photographic self-portraits of the 1800s.

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Anthony Blunt was about as much of a rock star as an art historian could be. Then, in 1979, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher exposed him as a Soviet spy on the floor of Parliament, destroying his reputation.

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Today, we're joined by art historian Grace Anna, host of the fabulous ArtMuse podcast, to talk about surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington. After Carrington fell in love with the famed German painter, Max Ernst, the couple moved to the south of France, where they lived happily. With the outbreak of World War II, however, both Leonora and Max were arrested on espionage charages, triggering a mental breakdown for Leonora.

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For show notes and transcripts, visit www.artofcrimepodcast.com.