Famous Cases & Criminals. The Weinberger Kidnapping. It was—at least for residents of Long Island, New York—the "crime of the century" when one-month-old Peter Weinberger was kidnapped from his suburban home on July 4, 1956.
Certainly the fallout from the incident reached national proportions. This child was not from a well-to-do family, like the Lindberghs. This child came from a middle class family in suburbia—where people weren't afraid of being targeted by extortionists. The Weinberger kidnapping struck fear in the hearts of average Americans. People started locking their doors. The Weinberger case also resulted in new legislation—signed by President Eisenhower—that reduced the FBI's waiting period in kidnapping cases from 7 days to 24 hours It all started... On that particular July 4 in 1956, Betty Weinberger wrapped her month-old son Peter in a receiving blanket and placed him in his carriage on the patio of their home in Westbury, New York. When Mrs. Parents ask for media blackout The second attempt to collect.
Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. - Aircraft Hijacking. Certain names in the following description are fictitious names to protect peoples' identities.
Fourteen year-old Peter Fanning (fictitious name) of Provo, Utah, made a surprising discovery. Lying in front of him, beside a steel culvert, was what he thought might be a parachute pack. He brought the strange object to his father who was replacing a flat tire on the family car a short distance away. The father notified the local sheriff of their find after returning home that afternoon. It was soon learned that the Fannings had stumbled upon one of the four parachutes furnished to a lone gunman who had commandeered a passenger plane on April 7, 1972, in the Colorado skies. United Airlines Flight 855, a Boeing 727 en route from Newark, New Jersey, to Los Angeles, California, with 85 passengers and a crew of six, had resumed flight after a Denver, Colorado, stopover. Approximately 20 minutes after takeoff, at 5:18 p.m., a male passenger was observed in his seat holding a hand grenade. Operation Greylord. Today marks an important anniversary in the annals of public corruption investigations in the United States.
Twenty years ago today, in a federal courtroom in Chicago, a jury found Harold Conn (top center in photo) guilty on all 4 counts of accepting bribes to be passed on to Cook County judges as payment for fixing tickets. The evidence? He had been caught live on FBI tapes. This “bagman” had been Deputy Traffic Court Clerk in the Cook County judicial system, and he was the first defendant to be found guilty in a mammoth sting investigation of crooked officials in the Cook County courts. It was called OPERATION GREYLORD, named after the curly wigs worn by British judges.
That’s really the whole point. How’d that happen? But in the 1970s, state and local officials asked for help. Who’s investigated? What kind of crimes? How serious of a problem is it? Patty Hearst Kidnapping. Around 9 o’clock in the evening on February 4, 1974, there was a knock on the door of apartment #4 at 2603 Benvenue Street in Berkeley, California.
In burst a group of men and women with their guns drawn. They grabbed a surprised 19-year-old college student named Patty Hearst, beat up her fiancé, threw her in the trunk of their car and drove off. Thus began one of the strangest cases in FBI history. Hearst, it was soon discovered, had been kidnapped by a group of armed radicals that billed themselves as the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA. Led by a hardened criminal named Donald DeFreeze, the SLA wanted nothing less than to incite a guerrilla war against the U.S. government and destroy what they called the “capitalist state.” Art Heists, Art Thieves, and Famous Missing Masterpieces. The theft of art is an old crime.
Archaeological investigation has revealed court records dating to Egypt's 20th Dynasty (around 1100 BC) in which workers were convicted of robbing tombs in the Valley of Kings. In another instance, the mayor of Western Thebes and several local officials were prosecuted for tomb robbery. The theft of art is often controversial. The removal of art, especially ancient objects taken from the county of origin by colonizers can be defined as theft. In 1846, the Elgin Marbles were removed from Greece by Thomas Bruce and shipped to the British Museum with permission of the Ottoman Empire.
More recently, the looting of the Baghdad Museum created a controversy that rocked the world. As art lovers and historians wailed across the globe, museum staffers claimed that most of the museums' missing objects had been removed or stored away for safekeeping.