Articles tagged as Crime | Smithsonian Magazine

"It caught the public's imagination," says Heaney. "We will be dead and gone for years, and people will still be saying, coming off the boat: 'That's Alcatraz.'"

Breaking into Alcatraz

A former guard’s inside look at America’s most famous prison

April 30, 2007

Talking to the Feds

The chief of the FBI’s organized crime unit on the history of La Cosa Nostra

March 31, 2007

The Old Bailey (in 1809) was the venue for more than 100,000 criminal trials between 1674 and 1834, including all death penalty cases.

Digitizing the Hanging Court

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey is an epic chronicle of crime and vice in early London. Now anyone can search all 52 million words

April 2007

After the shooting at Ford's Theatre, sentiments ran high, both for the slain president and against the actor who had killed him (on whose likeness a War Department telegraph operator wrote out his thoughts).

An Assassin’s Final Hours

John Wilkes Booth, cornered in a Virginia barn, wanted to go down fighting: “I have too great a soul to die like a criminal”

June 2006

The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872

How a Kentucky grifter and his partner pulled off one of the era’s most spectacular scams — until a dedicated man of science exposed their scheme

June 2004

Policing America’s Ports

19,000 cargo containers flowing into the US each day pose a needle-in-the-haystack challenge to security officials worried about hidden terrorist weapons

January 2004

Shadow Wolves

An all-Indian Customs unit possibly the world’s best trackers uses techniques to pursue smugglers along a remote stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border

January 2003

Review of ‘The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief’

October 1997

Visualization of a portion of the routes on the Internet

Cybercops Take a Byte Out of Computer Crime

A detective working the computer crime beat still needs street smarts, but there’s a lot of uncharted legal territory out there

April 30, 1997

If His Life Were a Short Story, Who’d Ever Believe It?

Being locked up for embezzlement freed him to write, launching William Sydney Porter on a brilliant but boozy career as O. Henry

January 1, 1997

Defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg trials

Fifty Years Ago, the Trial of Nazi War Criminals Ended: The World Had Witnessed the Rule of Law Invoked to Punish Unspeakable Atrocities

In the war-shattered city of Nuremberg, in November 1945, an Allied tribunal convened to seek justice in the face of the Third Reich’s monstrous war crimes

October 1996

There Was Never a Harder Place Than ‘the Rock’

Used for 29 years to house the nation’s worst criminals, the penitentiary on Alcatraz earned its reputation as ‘Uncle Sam’s Devil’s Island’

September 1995