The Art of Crime

Today, we're joined by historian Bench Ansfield to talk about their breathtaking book, Born in Flames. It's about the arson wave of the 1970s, during which hundreds--yes, hundreds--of landlords in the Bronx set fire to their property to collect insurance. These crimes displaced thousands of Bronxites and killed a few, too. The crisis gae rise to a genre of sensationalist films Bench calls Bronxploitation that foreground poverty and vice in the borough.
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Today, we're joined by historian Jonathan Gill to talk about the amazing life of Boris Morros. After the Russian Revolution, Morros immigrated to America from Eastern Europe and became a big-time Hollywood filmmaker.  To an outside observer, his life would have seemed all glitz and glam, but what the public didn't know was that Morros was risking his neck every day as a double agent, spying for both the Soviets and the Americans throughout the 1940s.
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This week, I'm re-releasing my 2024 interview with Margalit Fox, author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, a biography of the notorious nineteenth-century New York crime boss, Fredericka Mandelbaum. Next week, we're back with a brand-new interview. Until then!
 
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Today, I'm joined by award-winning journalist Matthew Campbell to talk about his new book, The Man Who Stole the Gods. For decades, the Bangkok-based Brit, Douglas Latchford, bought priceless Cambodian artworks that had been looted from ancient religious sites. Some of these pieces made their way to the collections of museums as august as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In The Man Who Stole the Gods, Matthew shines a light on the looters who stole this art and the international team of sleuths who helped return these works to their native country.
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We've rated the spies, now it's time for the rankings.
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Full transcripts at www.artofcrimepodcast.com.