Perfectly Awesome

Among the vineyards and fruit farms of South Africa’s Western Cape, the mysterious death of a farmworker reveals a violent history.

Noah Musingku made a fortune with a Ponzi scheme and then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he still commands the loyalty of his Bougainville subjects

How I (possibly) solved a cold case on my summer vacation.

No one in my family wanted to talk about Harold’s life as a contract killer for the Mob. Then one day he called me.

Two scammers, a web of betrayal, and Europe’s fraud of the century.

Zach Horwitz came to Los Angeles hoping to make it in the movies. He ended up running a seven-hundred-million-dollar scam, defrauding a sprawling group of investors, starting with his best friends.

A friendship born out of the ruins of a nation, a dangerous journey home, and a 40-year search for the truth.

Is the killer behind the 1982 Tylenol poisonings still on the loose? Exclusive revelations by investigators yield the first authoritative account of what happened and who likely did it.

"For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name."

After Zac Brettler mysteriously plummeted into the Thames, his grieving parents discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son. Would the police help them solve the puzzle of his death?

Kyle de Rothschild Deschanel was an instant New York sensation who seemed to live on a 24/7 carousel of mega-dollar deals and raucous parties. Then his best friend found an ID marked “Aryeh Dodelson.”

For some of us, dark times call for dark reads.

Venture inside the minds of some of the greatest scammers.

Ken Eto rose through the ranks of the Chicago mob, and then it tried to kill him. The underworld would never be the same.

In the spring of 1961, Georges Lemay, a dapper thirty-six-year-old French Canadian, spent his days holed up in his cottage on a private island on a river in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montre…

Tomb raiders, crooked art dealers, and museum curators fed billionaire Michael Steinhardt’s addiction to antiquities. Many also happened to be stolen.

The comedian and podcast host—and bonafide scam expert—shares her favorite capers, along with what makes them so irresistible.

The tech company Wirecard was embraced by the German élite. But a reporter discovered that behind the façade of innovation were lies and links to Russian intelligence.

George Stebbins was tearing down a stone wall in the cellar of his home in Northfield, Massachusetts when he uncovered the bones. A skull emerged first, then the spine and the bones of the arms and…

Local sleuths help find a suspect in gay porn actor Bill Newton's murder. His dismembered head and feet were found in a Hollywood dumpster in 1990.

The long read: In 2016, artist César Aréchiga talked one of Mexico’s most dangerous maximum security prisons into letting him run art classes for its inmates, many of them violent gang members. Could he really change their lives?

Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi’s forgeries infiltrated museums, auction houses and private collections. A decade after their conviction, psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer asks: Why did they do it?

Anne-Elisabeth Hagen, 68, was married to one of the wealthiest men in Norway. But four years ago, she disappeared, and police still have no solid leads. The entire country has been obsessed by the case ever since.

Nature - A boost to the ratings.

Suzanne Wooten did the impossible and became the first candidate to defeat a sitting judge in Collin County. What followed is the unbelievable, epic tale of the craziest case in the history of jurisprudence.

You can't make this shit up

Welcome to Video’s customers thought their payments were untraceable. They couldn’t have been more wrong. The untold story of the case that shredded the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity.

Suddenly, a New York cop remembered a long-ago double murder.

It was the deadliest U.S. transportation disaster in a decade. The man behind it was one of the most notorious confidential informants in FBI history.

Mandy Matney kept a harsh spotlight trained on South Carolina’s Murdaugh family until they became impossible for anyone to ignore

On a remote island in Maine, a group of friends thought they witnessed one man killing another with an ax. But no one was ever arrested. In a small town far out at sea, justice sometimes works a little differently.

For five years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. Is it espionage? Revenge? A trap? Or a complete waste of time?

In the mid-sixties, Candace Mossler was one of the most widely known socialites in Houston. She was in her forties, vivacious and full of charm, with wavy blond hair, deep-blue eyes, and a surgically enhanced figure that was often remarked upon in the many newspaper columns written about her.

Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit

The long read: An intrepid expert with dozens of books to his name, Stéphane Bourgoin was a bestselling author, famous in France for having interviewed more than 70 notorious murderers. Then an anonymous collective began to investigate his past

Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police

It was the most shocking crime of its day, 27 boys from the same part of town kidnapped, tortured, and killed by an affable neighbor named Dean Corll. Forty years later, it remains one of the least understood—or talked about—chapters in Houston's history.

From the depths of poverty, Du Yuesheng rose through Shanghai’s underworld to become one of the most influential, and overlooked, figures in modern China.

Fifty years ago, a shooting that nearly killed police officer Daril Cinquanta set in motion a decadeslong chase across the American West

Conservationists saw the 6-year-old brown bear as a symbol of hope. Villagers saw him as a menace. Then he turned up dead.

Dozens of people were killed, died by suicide, or went missing from the Texas military base last year alone. What is behind the violence and tragedy at Fort Hood?

The young woman who mysteriously drowned in the Ropers Motel pool in 1966 might have remained anonymous forever, if not for cutting-edge genetics, old-fashioned genealogy—and the kindness of a small West Texas town.

In Scott Kimball, the FBI thought it had found a high-value informant who could help solve big cases. What it got instead was lies, betrayal, and murder.

A man returns home from the army and gets a surprising offer from his father: Join the family business and help mom & pop pull off a string of daring cross-country heists. No one expects the betrayals coming.

How did Ruja Ignatova make $4bn selling her fake cryptocurrency to the world - and where did she go?

When nearly $3.5M of rare books were stolen in an audacious heist at Feltham in 2017, police wondered, what’s the story?

In 1974, John Patterson was abducted by the People’s Liberation Army of Mexico—a group no one had heard of before. The kidnappers wanted $500,000, and insisted that Patterson’s wife deliver the ransom.

‘It’s a trip just being out’: at the local Greyhound bus station with newly released men from the Texas State Penitentiary

In Sept. 9, 1975, William Osterhoudt, a local school principal, looked out at an implausible scene unfolding at the pink house belonging to his neighbor on United Street. Key West Fire Chief Joseph…

John Franzese Jr. helped send his father, notorious Colombo family mobster Sonny Franzese, to prison. Then he turned up in Indianapolis.

The long read: In my career, I have investigated many of the UK’s worst disasters. Few cases were as harrowing as the sinking of the Marchioness in 1989, which left scores dead and almost impossible to identify

The feds knew him as a prolific bank robber. But the bearded man who eluded them for so long was not who they imagined him to be. And absolutely no one expected the story to end the way it did.

Hitman-for-hire darknet sites are all scams. But some people turn up dead nonetheless

How an obscure legal document turned New York’s court system into a debt-collection juggernaut.

Two people went for a hike on the Appalachian Trail. Only one made it out.

Last December, a Canadian pharmaceuticals executive and his wife were found strangled in their home. No one knows who did it or why, but everyone has a theory.

The shooting of a civilian exposes the underbelly of a small town police department.

The author spent a day with three men in a high-end security detail to find out how it feels to be safe.

Discover extraordinary true stories celebrating the diversity of humanity. Click to read Narratively, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

A long-dormant police investigation gives the case new life.

A father took his 10-year-old fishing. She fell in the water and drowned. It was a tragic accident—then he was charged with murder.

Mexico’s drug cartels are moving into the gasoline industry—infiltrating the national oil company, selling stolen fuel on the black market and engaging in open war with the military.

Andrew Goldstein’s crime set in motion a dramatic shift in how we care for the violent mentally ill. Including for himself—when he’s released this month.

Is the Chinese government behind one of the boldest art-crime waves in history?

Having fallen on hard times, a former football star and the pride of his small town decides to rob the local bank. His weapons of choice: Craigslist, bear mace, and an inner tube.

Earlier this spring, Jeff Pike, the head of the infamous Texas-based Bandidos motorcycle club, went on trial in federal court for racketeering. Prosecutors called him a ruthless killer, the man behind one of the deadliest biker shoot-outs in American history, at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco. Pike, however, said he was just a good family man. On Thursday, jurors announced their verdict.

Can Mark Gonzalez change the system?

The inside story of the first homicide in America’s most secure prison.

The inside story of the first homicide in America’s most secure prison.

The long read: Under Vladmir Putin, gangsterism on the streets has given way to kleptocracy in the state

She keeps watch over one of the largest databases of missing persons in the country. For Meaghan Good, the disappeared are still out here, you just have to know where to look.

In Northern Albania, vengeance is as likely a form of restitution as anything the criminal-justice system can offer.