"Big Bob" Bashara put on a respectable face. To his friends in Detroit's affluent suburb of Grosse Pointe, he was a married father of two, Rotary Club President, church usher and soccer dad who organized charity events with his wife, Jane. To his "slaves," he was "Master Bob," a cocaine-snorting slumlord who operated a sex dungeon and had a submissive girlfriend to do his bidding--and he wanted more slaves to serve him. But Bashara knew he couldn't rule a household of concubines on his income alone. He eyed his wife's sizable retirement account and formulated a murderous plan. This meticulous account tells the complete story of the crime, the nationally watched investigation and trials, and the lives affected.

In 2010, University of Kansas officials were shocked to learn that the FBI and IRS were on campus investigating Rodney Jones, former head of the Athletics Ticket Office, for stealing Jayhawks basketball tickets and selling them to brokers. Investigators found that for more than five years Jones and a small ring of university officials had conspired to loot the university of $2 million in tickets, reselling them for $3-5 million. In what was perhaps the biggest scandal in college sports history, all seven members of the "Kansas Ticket Gang" pleaded guilty to RICO Act indictments. Five went to prison--two were given probation for turning state's evidence.

Some criminals become household names, while others--even those who seek recognition through their crimes--are forgotten. The criminal's actions are only a part of every famous true crime story. Other factors, such as the setting and circumstances of the crimes and the ways in which others take control of the narrative, ultimately drive their notoriety. Through a comparison of the tellings and retellings of two famous cases more than a century apart--the Jack the Ripper killings in 1888, and the murder trials of Steven Avery as documented in Making a Murderer--this book examines the complicated dynamics of criminal celebrity.

Already part of a genre known for generating controversy, some true crime and scandal books have wielded a particular power to unsettle readers, provoke authorities and renew interest in a case. The reactions to such literature have been as contentious as the books themselves, clouding the "truth" with myths and inaccuracies. From high-profile publishing sensations such as Ten Rillington Place, Fatal Vision and Mommie Dearest to the wealth of writing on the JFK assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe and the Black Dahlia murder, this book delves into that hard copy era when crime and scandal books had a cultural impact beyond the genre's film and TV documentaries, fueling outcries that sometimes matched the notoriety of the cases they discussed and leaving legacies that still resonate today.

For six decades, Pittsburgh-based forensic scientist Cyril Wecht has been an outspoken authority when horrible things happen to everyday people--murders, childhood deaths, tragic accidents and police brutality. His expertise and testimony have been called upon in high-profile cases, including the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Elvis Presley, JonBenet Ramsey, Laci Peterson and others. As a criminal defendant, in 1979, he was acquitted on charges of personally profiting from his office as Allegheny County Coroner; a federal public corruption charge was dismissed in 2008. Both cases, his attorneys argued, were politically motivated. Wecht's memoir describes his work on famous cases, his life in the public eye and his legal battles with determined and powerful authorities, from his hometown DA to a U.S. Attorney and the FBI.

A Generation X transgender woman, Sherilyn Connelly came out of the closet in 1999. Her own identity still emerging, she had stumbled into a difficult, stifling relationship. Also, her employment at a tech company ceased when the dot-com bubble burst. It was a goth boy from Bolinas that first took her shopping for make-up, and the San Francisco goth scene became her respite. This wickedly eye-opening memoir reveals how Connelly dealt with a toxic partner and found her voice as a woman. A longtime cinephile, it tells how she became a writer, rekindled a love for cult films and horror conventions, and learned "the secret to becoming a star." Her remembrances are also a tale of a bygone era of sex, music and San Francisco and its darkened underworld of goth strays--her literate vampires and beautiful ghosts.

Umberto Anastasio, better known as Albert Anastasia, was an Italian-American mobster and hitman who became one of the deadliest criminals in American history and one of the founders of the modern American Mafia in New York City. For all-out savagery and ruthlessness, few other leaders of the Mafia worldwide have rivaled Anastasia, known to peers as "The Mad Hatter" and to journalists as "The Lord High Executioner." After escaping a death sentence in 1921 and multiple other arrests for murder, he later served as director of the national crime syndicate's contract murder department ("Murder, Inc.") from 1931 until informers brought it down ten years later. By 1951 he led one of New York City's Five Families, a post he held until his public barbershop assassination in October 1957. This first-ever book-length biography of Anastasia traces the mobster's life and the ripple effects his career had on the American crime world. The story also tracks his brothers and their families, while debunking certain widespread myths about their parentage, various deportations, trials, convictions, and eventual retirement from the mob, dead or alive.