Corruption

Dec 14, 2009

Bryan de la Beckwith

It would take 31-years to bring white supremacist Bryan de la Beckwith to justice for the assassination of Medgar Evers.

by Randy Radic

by Allan May

In August 1943, Thomas A. Aurelio stood at the threshold of a dream. After nine years as an assistant prosecutor and 12 as a judge in New York City, he was about to be elected to a seat on the Supreme Court for the State of New York. As the nominee of both the Democratic and the Republican parties, the election of the 48-year-old father of two appeared to be a formality.

Aurelio’s career had the sense of manifest destiny to it. He was a native New Yorker who grew up on the city’s East Side. Educated in the public school system, he went to college at New York University where he also earned a law degree. During World War I he served in Company F of the 51^st Infantry Regiment. After the armistice, he taught American soldiers commercial law in a military school in Germany.

by J.J. Maloney

Every city dreams of greatness. To achieve an identity it constructs symbols (the Eiffel Tower, the St. Louis Arch), or, like New Orleans, has an area, such as the French Quarter, that assumes an identity of its own.

Traditionally Kansas City has been known as a cowtown. It was famous for its stockyards, and the biggest annual event still is the American Royal, during which journalists shake cow patties from their shoes. Kansas Citians are sensitive about that image, feeling it gives them a "hick" reputation.

They point with pride to the Country Club Plaza or Westport, but neither has ever achieved a national reputation. They promote Kansas City as the birthplace of jazz, a claim other cities dispute. They go so far as to call Kansas City the home of great barbecue; local politicians devote great amounts of space to that subject. Such is the desperation for an identity.

It is in this context that River Quay must be seen. River Quay was a light industrial area at the north edge of the city. In the early 1970s a movement began to convert River Quay into a "family entertainment area" filled with rustic restaurants, shops, nightclubs and artists—-a miniature Greenwich Village.

July 22, 2007
(updated 02/16/09)

Ryan Ferguson

by Jane Alexander

On a warm Halloween night in 2001, Kent Heitholt, the sports editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune, worked into the night. He logged off his computer at 2:08 a.m., chatted with some colleagues, and made his way out of the Tribune building to his car in the newspaper's parking lot. There he had a conversation with colleague Michael Boyd that lasted until approximately 2:17 a.m. Minutes after that, Heitholt was brutally beaten, hit 11 times over the head with a metal object, and strangled to death with his own belt.

June 1, 2007

by Tim Newark

Top Mafia Mobster Vito Genovese fled New York in 1937 and settled in with the Fascist regime in mainland Italy. When the Allies invaded Italy, he swiftly changed sides and became close to the senior Allied administration. It would take a remarkable young CID officer by the name of Orange C. Dickey to hunt him down.

Mafia Goldmine

As the Allies entered Vito Genovese's realm in Nola, near Naples, in the autumn of 1943, he offered to help them as translator and guide to the region. U.S. Major E.N. Holmgreen, the civil affairs officer in Nola, was so impressed with Vito Genovese that he wrote him a letter of recommendation on Nov. 8, 1943.

April 15, 2007

Howard Hughes in the 1940s with his new Boeing
Army Pursuit Plane in Inglewood, California.

by Don Fulsom

"I am determined to elect a president of our choosing this year and one who will be deeply indebted, and who will recognize his indebtedness. Since I am willing to go beyond all limitations on this, I think we should be able to select a candidate and a party who knows the facts of political life … If we select Nixon, then he, I know for sure knows the facts of life." – Howard Hughes, early in the 1968 presidential campaign.

August 30, 2004
updated January 14, 2007

Nixon addressing his cabinet and White House staff
prior to his departure, 08/09/1974.

by Don Fulsom

Thirty years ago, President Gerald Ford stunned the nation by granting his crooked predecessor, Richard Nixon, a preemptive blanket pardon for all of his White House crimes. He did so, Ford said, for the good of the country: "My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it."