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Crime & Notoriety
Assassins, demagogues, gangsters and frauds. Influence is not the same as merit, and this corpus records both.
14 people
John Wilkes Booth 1838–1865Crime & NotorietyActor who assassinated President Lincoln in 1865 — altering the course of Reconstruction.Ted Bundy 1946–1989Crime & NotorietySerial killer whose multi-state murders and televised trial shaped American criminal profiling and true-crime coverage.John C. Calhoun 1782–1850Crime & NotorietyVice president and theorist of slavery and states’ rights whose doctrines intensified sectional conflict.Al Capone 1899–1947Crime & NotorietyGangster whose criminal empire made him the defining symbol of Prohibition-era organized crime.Jefferson Davis 1808–1889Crime & NotorietyPresident of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory.Nathan Bedford Forrest 1821–1877Crime & NotorietyConfederate cavalry commander and early Ku Klux Klan leader whose legacy remains central to debates over racial violence and commemoration.Elizabeth Holmes b. 1984Crime & NotorietyTheranos founder convicted of fraud over false claims about the company's blood-testing technology.J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972Crime & NotorietyLongtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses.Jim Jones 1931–1978Crime & NotorietyPeoples Temple founder whose 1978 Jonestown murder-suicide killed over nine hundred followers.Bernie Madoff 1938–2021Crime & NotorietyFinancier who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history — costing investors tens of billions of dollars.Charles Manson 1934–2017Crime & NotorietyCult leader whose followers’ murders became a lasting symbol of violence and the collapse of 1960s countercultural idealism.Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957Crime & NotorietySenator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties.Timothy McVeigh 1968–2001Crime & NotorietyDomestic terrorist whose Oklahoma City bombing became one of the deadliest attacks in American history.George Wallace 1919–1998Crime & NotorietySegregationist governor whose campaigns helped shape racial backlash and modern populist politics.