Independent history writing about the parts of the American record that get skipped. Every claim here is sourced — check the citations and argue with them.
Gang History
Teenagers in a reform school started it. A few years later it had a nonprofit charter, an ice cream parlor and a Rockefeller grant. Then the city declared war on gangs, and the experiment was over.
Gang History
Jeff Fort turned the Blackstone Rangers from a War on Poverty grant recipient into a gang convicted of negotiating terrorist attacks with Muammar Gaddafi's Libya.
Gang History
A gang leader ran a corporation from a prison cell, tried to turn it into a political machine, and watched the federal government choose to crush it instead. Then his sentence outlived his power.
Gang History
The complete history of the Crips Bloods Tookie Williams the 1992 truce and Suge Knight — the gang war that shaped South Central Los Angeles.
Gang History
A former defensive end turned a reputation for menace into the hottest label in rap. Then Tupac was shot in the passenger seat of his BMW, and it took nearly 30 years for a jury to name anyone responsible.
Gang History
The Watts gang truce was signed three days before the Rodney King verdict — and cut gang homicides 44 percent before the city refused to fund what peace required.
Gang History
Tookie Williams co-founded the Crips at 17 spent 24 years on death row writing children's books against gang violence and was executed in 2005 maintaining his innocence.
Gang History
It started with a few neighborhood crews deciding they were tired of being pushed around. It became a war with no front line, no generals and no peace treaty that lasted.
Gang History
The Bloods formed in 1972 when Piru Street Boys in Compton refused Crip pressure and built a rival alliance around the color red.
Gang History
How two teenagers in South Central Los Angeles built the Crips in 1969 — and why the LAPD's occupied-territory policing guaranteed what grew.
Organized Crime
From Prohibition bootleggers to Mexican cartels generating $39 billion annually — 24 articles across four series covering how organized crime became a permanent feature of American life from 1920 to the present.
Organized Crime
Irish mobs Jewish gangsters motorcycle clubs and Mexican cartels each represent a distinct criminal model operating alongside or outside the Italian-American Mafia's framework. This series covers them all.