Criminal Masterminds

Since the '70s, the United States has produced an estimated 1,400 serial killers -- double the combined total of the rest of the world. What causes a seemingly normal human being to engage in serial acts of murder?

Built on the backs of convicts, gold miners, and outlaws, Australia forged its freedom from the depths of the underground. Host Don Wildman explores a 19th-century prison that housed Sydney's most threatening criminals.

The deserts around Los Angeles were Charles Manson's home, and he hoped the city's underground would be his haven. But Manson and his followers weren't the only dangers lurking beneath the streets of LA.

From body snatchers and serial killers (including Jack the Ripper) to occult clubs and pagan rituals, Victorian Londoners lived by their own rules. See why London's streets ran red.

America's 1933-'34 crime wave is one of the most fascinating in history: an 18-month spree of robberies, killings, and kidnappings that shook the nation to its core and gave birth to a legendary roster of outlaws.

The executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 ignited worldwide protest. To leftists, they were martyrs. To conservatives, they were anarchists. But were they guilty?

As a stream of immigrants crowded into New York's downtown slums from the late 1800s to the mid-20th century, the area known as Five Points nurtured the rise of the American gang and bosses from Capone to Luciano.

60 years before O.J. Simpson, the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnap and murder of the infant son of an American hero was the first in which the surrounding press frenzy captured the nation's attention.

Examine the technology that brought Al Capone to his knees after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, including the speed graphic camera that captured its bloody aftermath and printing presses that reproduced it nationwide.

Learn more about the shadowy liaison between U.S. Naval Intelligence, the Office of Strategic Services, the Army, and the New York and Sicilian Mafia during World War II.

Look inside the network of extraordinary corruption that allowed the formation of a tropical paradise fueled by rum, rumba, and gangsters on America's doorstep.

100 years ago, Portland, Oregon was considered the most dangerous port in the world. Join host Don Wildman as he ventures beneath modern Portland into a nefarious world of fight clubs, slave tunnels, and gambling dens.

Travel back to a time of unimaginable wealth and ruthless mobsters in 1920s Chicago with evidence from excavations, scientific studies, and historical documents.

From vice dens and top-secret railroad lines to sunken shipwrecks and the spark that created the A-Bomb, host Don Wildman unearths the mob history of the Windy City.

Join host Don Wildman as he travels to Sicily to trace the Mafia's roots as a vigilante secret society in an underground network.