THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU NEEDED TO KNOW

In 1931 the toughest gangster in America went down hard. Felled not by a blaze of bullets,  Al Capone  was sent to prison on three counts of tax evasion. The man behind his arrest was a 32-year-old Prohibition agent. Eliot Ness was tough, loyal, and incorruptible. He fought for the law. This once untouchable G-Man became an alcoholic whose law protecting days were long gone. Although Eliot Ness' tale ended sadly, his story should be told as a lesson that some law men do fight for what is right. Eliot Ness  was born in 1903 in Chicago. His parents ran a bakery and had three children by the time Eliott came along, ten years after the birth of their third child. A shy bookish kid who excelled in school, Eliot loved the tales of Sherlock Holmes. Eliot Ness attended college, graduating in 1925 with degrees in political science and business administration. He took a job administering background checks for a credit card company. Ness' brother-in-law worked for the Bureau of Inve...

The 1920s roared with jazz, booze and shorter skirts and hairstyles for ladies. Prohibition caused economic hardship and a rise in crime. A married couple expecting their first baby went on a short-lived robbery spree and captured New York City's attention. Celia Cooney, "The Bobbed Hair Bandit," and her husband Ed predated Bonnie and Clyde as bank robbing sweethearts. Celia and Ed Cooney were not criminal masterminds.  In fact their crimes spree lasted only three and a half months and netted barely enough money to eke out a meager survival. Sylvia Roth was born in poverty in New York City, in 1904. She and her eight siblings were neglected by their parents. Celia left home at 16 and found work in a laundry. She married Ed Cooney, a mechanic five years for senior, in 1923. The couple soon found they had a baby on the way. Ed and Celia hatched a plan to attain the money they would need for proper furniture and baby gear. January 5th, 1924 Celia entered a Park Slope grocery...

Three of the twentieth centuries biggest wits - Noel Coward, Fanny Brice, and Dorothy Parker - all recieved a career boost years after their deaths from an unlikely source, forger Lee Israel. Not exactly a master criminal, Israel forged letters from literary and entertainment legends. Her operation was fairly low-key. She wasn't caught in some grand sting that culminated in a shootout. She was simply approached by FBI agents and agreed to be questioned. Lee Israel's greatest lie wasn't the letters she made up, but the story she told about her forgery operation in her 2008 memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me? (upon which the 2018 film is based.) Contradictions abound, but, as a writer, Lee Israel knew how to tell a good story. Leonore Carol Israel was born December 3, 1939 in Brooklyn to a Jewish family, with whom she wasn't close. She graduated CUNY Brooklyn in 1961. For most of the 1960s she was a freelance writer, writing for Soap Opera Digest and The New York Times . I...