The True Crime Issue
Unseen Photos of One of England's Most Notorious Prisons
Chris Steele-Perkins's pictures of Manchester's Strangeways prison from 1980 reveal a slice of the UK's criminal underworld.
A Former English Gangster Walks Us Through a Bank Robbery
"Some press reports stated that I spent the first few days of after escaping custody hiding out at my friend's strip club, up to my eyes in bums, tits, cocaine, and champagne. Which was abso-fucking-lutely true."
Fun with Facial Composite Software
If you need more proof that machines are taking over the world, look no further than the police-sketch industry. Like countless manufacturing and administrative employees before them, sketch artists are now being replaced by software that creates spot...
How It Feels to Live Your Life Under Police Protection
Famed crime writer Roberto Saviano on the eight years he's spent worrying about death threats.
Supernatural Sacrifice: South Africa Wages War on the Devil
The Devil is probably not launching an all-out assault on the people of South Africa, but if you pick up the tabloids, talk to the locals, or ask the police, they’ll all tell you: Satanic crime is a growing problem.
The Face of Camden
The Magnum photographer has always preferred to take pictures “close,” working not by classic fly-on-the-wall documentarian methodology but by getting so up in the action that there’s little chance anything can be lost in the distance between point A...
The Joker Broker: Doing Business with the World’s Foremost Vendor of Nonexistent Oil
Francisco Javier González Álvarez’s life is shrouded in secrecy, but we know this: He was born December 3, 1949, in La Laguna, in the Canary Islands, off of Spain. The next 45 years are a bit of a blank—nothing to indicate he would become the world’s...
Chicago's Torture Victims Want Justice
Starting in 1971, more than 100 black men in Chicago were tortured and forced to confess to serious crimes as part of a police-sanctioned campaign that continued for almost 20 years under then Police Commander Jon Burge.
Russian Hackers Have Been Robbing US Banks for a Long Time
In July 1994, Citibank officials notified the FBI of what was then a novel crime: Hundreds of thousands of dollars had simply disappeared from corporate bank accounts. By October of that year, the total had ballooned to $10 million. It was, according...
Four Years on Line with the Amityville Horror
They ran meds before breakfast, so I used to see the back of Ronald DeFeo Jr.'s head every morning before the sun was up.
Ephren Taylor’s Disastrous Megachurch Ponzi Scheme
How Ephren Taylor, the son of a small-town minister and self-proclaimed "social capitalist," conned thousands of churchgoers out of their life savings.