In November 1934, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler sat down in front of a congressional committee and calmly explained that a group of wealthy businessmen had spent the previous year trying to recruit him to lead a private army of half a million veterans, march on Washington, and turn President Franklin Roosevelt into a puppet figurehead. Congress investigated. Its final report concluded there was no question the plot had been discussed and planned, and might

Shortly before midnight on 15 August 1953, an Iranian colonel named Nematollah Nassiri climbed into a car in Tehran carrying a piece of paper that was supposed to end a war fought entirely with money, radio broadcasts and rented crowds. The paper was a royal decree, signed by the Shah, dismissing Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Nassiri never got to deliver it. Mossadegh's people were waiting for him, and by morning he was under arrest rather than the man doing the arrestin

Most retellings of Elvis Presley's funeral stop at the hearse pulling out of Graceland's gates on 18 August 1977. That's usually where the story ends: eighty thousand mourners lining Elvis Presley Boulevard, a white suit, a Cadillac procession, a nation stopped in its tracks. What most of them leave out is that Elvis didn't stay buried where he was buried. Nine days after the funeral, three men tried to steal his body out of its tomb, and the break-in that followed changed wh