Timothy O'Bryan

popular name: Salvatore Maranzano

date_of_death: September 10, 1931

age: 45

cause_of_death: Murdered - mob hit

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Salvatore Maranzano, nicknamed Little Caesar, was an Italian-American mobster and an early Cosa Nostra boss who led what later would become the Bonanno crime family in New York City. He instigated the Castellammarese War in 1930 to seize control of the American Mafia, winning the war after the murder of rival faction head Joe Masseria in April 1931. He then briefly became the Mafia's capo di tutti capi ("boss of all bosses") and formed the Five Families in New York City but was murdered on September 10, 1931, on the orders of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, who established the Commission, in which families shared power to prevent future turf wars. The grave of Salvatore Maranzano can be found at St. John Cemetery in Queens, New York.

popular name: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

date_of_death: June 19, 1953

age:

cause_of_death: Execution by electric chair

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: It was a case that mesmerized the country and the world. On June 19, 1953, at the height of the Cold War, New York City–born Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death in the electric chair. Convicted of conspiring to pass atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, they were the first civilians to be executed by the United States on espionage charges. Their conviction of spying for the Soviet Union included providing top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs. Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed in 1953 at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York. For decades, many people, including the Rosenberg's sons (Michael and Robert Meeropol), maintained that Julius and Ethel were innocent of spying on their country and were victims of Cold War paranoia. Several years after their execution, top nuclear scientist Boris V. Brokhovich stated the Soviets had developed their own bomb by trial and error. "You sat the Rosenbergs in the electric chair for nothing", he said. "We got nothing from the Rosenbergs." The notes allegedly typed by Ethel Rosenberg as dictated by her husband apparently contained little that was directly used in the Soviet atomic bomb project. According to Julius's contact Feklisov, the Rosenbergs did not provide the Soviet Union with any useful material about the atomic bomb: "He [Julius] didn't understand anything about the atomic bomb and he couldn't help us."

popular name: Ernest Haywood

date_of_death: December 14, 1946

age: 86

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: The Haywood family was a politically and socially influential white family in Raleigh, North Carolina during with 1800s through the early 1900s with plantations dependent on slave labor in North Carolina as well as Alabama. Ernest Haywood was an attorney practicing in Raleigh where he specialized in commercial, insurance, corporation, and real estate law. On February 21, 1903, Saturday afternoon, the young lawyer Haywood met Ludlow Skinner, his mistress's brother-in-law, on the steps of the Fayetteville Street Post Office. After a brief argument Haywood pulled out a pistol and shot at Skinner one time and missed. He then chased Skinner briefly and shot him dead in the street with 100 witness. The murder and subsequent trial achieved nationwide attention and rocked the foundations of turn-of-the-century Raleigh society. As a lawyer and founding member of the Raleigh Bar Association, he was found innocent by a jury of his peers after only 15 minutes of deliberation.