The Art of Crime

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

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!
 
If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/artofcrimepodcast.