Art Crime

Dangerous Rhythms tells the symbiotic story of jazz and the underworld: a relationship fostered in some of 20th century America’s most notorious vice districts. For the first half of the century mobsters and musicians enjoyed a mutually beneficial partnership. By offering artists like Louis Armstrong, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and Ella Fitzgerald a stage, the mob, including major players Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, provided opportunities that would not otherwise have existed.

By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America's new favorite pastime and one of the nation's largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence; yet Hollywood's glittering ascendancy was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies - including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now.

Follow a journalist and TV producer from 48 Hours and 60 Minutes as she carves out a career in the ruthless, knives-out world of true crime television . . . one killer story at a time.

Trois femmes vivaient dans un village. La première était méchante, la deuxième était menteuse, la troisième était égoïste. Elles possédaient pourtant un point commun, un secret en quelque sorte : toutes les trois rêvaient de fuir... Le jour paraît sur Giverny. Du haut de son moulin, une vieille dame veille, surveille. Le quotidien du village, les cars de touristes... Des silhouettes et des vies. Deux femmes, en particulier, se détachent : l'une, les yeux couleur nymphéa, rêve d'amour et d'évasion ; l'autre, onze ans, ne vit déjà que pour la peinture.

Gabriela Rose, recovery agent extraordinaire, can find just about anything. Too bad she can’t seem to lose her gorgeous-but-infuriating ex-husband Rafer Jones. And now he needs her help. His cousin, Harley, is in trouble…big trouble. As the president of a too-big-to-fail bank, he invested an astronomical amount of money in insuring some of the world’s most priceless artifacts at the urging of his board. It seemed like a low-risk, high-reward business move, so he jumped in with both feet. But recently, these insured pieces started going missing.

In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.

A former US naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one best seller in the American prison system. According to Behold a Pale Horse, JFK was assassinated - because he was about to reveal that extraterrestrials were about to take over the earth - by his driver, an alien himself; AIDS is a government conspiracy; and much more.

Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression.

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder.

When Goodfellas first hit the theaters in 1990, a classic was born. Few could anticipate the unparalleled influence it would have on pop culture, one that would inspire future filmmakers and redefine the gangster picture as we know it today. From the rush of grotesque violence in the opening scene to the iconic hilarity of Joe Pesci’s endlessly quoted “Funny how?” shtick, it’s little wonder the film is widely regarded as a mainstay in contemporary cinema.

On a hot August day in Paris, just over a century ago, a desperate guard burst into the office of the Director of the Louvre and shouted, La Joconde, c’est partie! The Mona Lisa, she’s gone! No one knew who was behind the heist. Was it an international gang of thieves? Was it an art-hungry American millionaire? Was it the young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who was about to remake the very art of painting?

In the first major history of crime fiction in 50 years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the 18th century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world’s most popular form of fiction.

As Paris rediscovers its joie de vivre, Tabitha Knight, recently arrived from Detroit for an extended stay with her French grandfather, is on her own journey of discovery. Thanks to her neighbor and friend Julia Child, another ex-pat who's fallen head over heels for Paris, Tabitha is learning how to cook for her Grandpere and Oncle Rafe and Tabitha's sojourn is proving thoroughly delightful. That is, until the cold December day they return to Julia's building and learn that a body has been found in the cellar.

Gallery owner Ally Blake risks everything to exhibit at an art fair in Bogotá in the 1990s. She needs wealthy collectors to boost her gallery's sales and save her family from bankruptcy. When her art crates are tampered with and she discovers an ex-boyfriend and colleague from her State Department days in Santiago has involved her in a money laundering scheme, she devises a strategy to thwart the fraud, protect her children, and secure her family's future—but pulling it off will require her to make the art deal of a lifetime.

Max the Forger is an artist and gentleman whose colorful lifestyle has spanned over 70 years. He has lived under the strict regime of Barnardo’s children’s homes, been an elephant handler in the circus, lived rough, busked his way from Brighton to Bombay, sold his fakes up and down the country, dined with dukes, socialized with celebrities, associated with gangsters, served time in prison, and donated tens of thousands to charity. And through it all, he never stopped smiling, and loving life - and missing his mum.

Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum - still the largest unsolved art theft in history - one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece - the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years - may itself be a forgery.

Art scams are today so numerous that the specter of a lawsuit arising from a mistaken attribution has scared a number of experts away from the business of authentication and forgery, and with good reason. Art scams are increasingly convincing and involve incredible sums of money. The cons perpetrated by unscrupulous art dealers and their accomplices are proportionately elaborate. Anthony M. Amore's The Art of the Con tells the stories of some of history's most notorious yet untold cons.

Bobby Gunn has been fighting for his existence since a childhood spent living under the hand of his volatile father, and would do anything to give his seven-year-old daughter a better life—including betting on himself in the underground world of bare-knuckle boxing. In 1984, Gunn was an eleven-year-old boxer in Ontario when his father woke him in the middle of the night to fight grown men in motel parking lots for money, his old man pocketing the cash.

En esta galardonada producción de Audible Studios, Trevor Noah cuenta su salvaje historia sobre la mayoría de edad durante el ocaso del apartheid en Sudáfrica. Es una historia que comienza con su madre arrojándolo desde una camioneta en movimiento para salvarlo de una disputa potencialmente fatal con gánsters, luego sigue el camino del comediante hacia el autodescubrimiento a través de episodios conmovedores y cómicos.

In a secret meeting in 1981, a master thief named Louis Royce gave career gangster Ralph Rossetti the tip of a lifetime. As a kid, Royce had visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made a habit of sneaking in at night to find a good place to sleep. He knew the Museum's security was lax, and he gave this information to a boss of the Boston criminal underworld. It took years before the Museum was hit. But when it finally happened, it quickly became one of the most infamous art heists in history.