HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” stars Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson, a  political boss who rules Atlantic City. The series is fiction; the story of a criminal overlord named “Nucky” is fact. His name was Nucky Johnson, and he turned Atlantic City into a playground for the likes of Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and the rest of the […]

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On March 1, 1932, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old baby of the world’s greatest aviator, was snatched away from his home in Hopewell, N.J., in a crime that struck at the very heart at America’s sense of itself.
In the first 72 hours after the kidnapping, the radio networks issued 300 bulletins — giving birth to the […]

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On Jan. 25, 1942, World War II came home to the United States — just off the Jersey Shore.
The Norwegian oil tanker Varanger was just 28 miles off Wildwood when a German U-boat, the U-130, fired five torpedoes at it. The ship exploded in a roar heard as far away as Atlantic City and sank […]

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On Dec. 21, 1987, political con man and thief David Friedland — who had been missing for two years, and who his lawyer had once insisted was dead — popped up in dramatic style, under arrest in the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean.
The former New Jersey state senator had vanished while scuba diving in September […]

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Probably no gangster in U.S. history had a worse week than Waxey Gordon did and lived to tell about it.
On Dec. 1, 1933, a federal jury found the Paterson-based bootlegging baron guilty of tax evasion — the second big mobster to be found guilty of that offense after Al Capone.
On Dec. 5, Prohibition was repealed […]

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On Nov. 26, 1996, former Somerset County, N.J., Prosecutor Nicholas Bissell — a onetime scourge of drug dealers and spokesman for law and order — was cornered in the Nevada casino town of Laughlin by federal marshals seeking to arrest him as a felony convict.
The Republican official had been convicted earlier that year of stealing […]

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On Oct. 23, 1935, Arthur Flegenheimer — better known as Dutch Schultz, gang kingpin of the New York policy racket — was rubbed out along with three of his henchman at the Palace Chop House in Newark.
The erratic Dutchman brought on his own demise with his plan to assassinate prosecutor Thomas Dewey, a move the […]

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