Marcus Junius Brutus, often referred to simply as Brutus, was a politician of the late Roman Republic. He is best known in modern times for taking a leading role in the assassination conspiracy against Julius Caesar....

Bonfire Night, also known as Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes Night or Fireworks Night, is a celebration (but not a public holiday) which takes place on the evening of the 5th of November every year in the United Kingdom (and New Zealand). It celebra...

Robert Roy MacGregor was a Scottish outlaw, who later became a folk hero. Rob Roy became a well-known and respected cattleman—this was a time when cattle rustling and selling protection against theft were commonplace means of earning a l...

Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, was an English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of Britain's North American colonies. Little is known about his early life, but he may have been a sailor on privateer...

Jean Lafitte was a French pirate and privateer who operated in the Gulf of Mexico in the early 19th century. He and his older brother Pierre spelled their last name Laffite, but English language documents of the time used "Lafitte". This ha...

Cesare Lombroso was an Italian criminologist and physician, founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature. Inste...

John Wilkes Booth was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Booth was a member of the prominent 19th century Booth theatrical family from Maryland and,...

Ned Kelley is Australia's most famous bushranger and, to many, a folk hero for his defiance of the colonial authorities. From the age of fourteen, Ned began committing a series of minor crimes that escalated into more serious crimes and eve...

Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney, and known popularly as Billy the Kid, was an American Old West gunfighter who participated in New Mexico's Lincoln County War. He is known to have killed eight men. Before he started using...

Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, was an American train and bank robber and the leader of a gang of criminal outlaws known as the "Wild Bunch" in the Old West. Parker engaged in criminal activity for more than a decade...

Luigi Lucheni was an Italian anarchist who assassinated the Austrian Empress, Elisabeth (commonly referred to as Sissi, Viennese for Elisabeth), in 1898. Lucheni believed in propaganda of the deed, a philosophy advocating spreading beliefs...

Gavrilo Princip was a Bosnian Serb and Yugoslav nationalist associated with the movement Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia). Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June...

John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, w...

Alphonse Gabriel Capone, sometimes known by the nickname "Scarface", was an American mobster, crime boss, and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit. His seven-year rei...

Marinus (Rinus) van der Lubbe was a Dutch council communist convicted of, and executed for, setting fire to the German Reichstag building on 27 February 1933, an event known as the Reichstag fire. According to the Berlin police, van der...