Elena Semander

popular name: Frank Palermo

date_of_death: May 12, 1996

age: 91

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Boxing has a dark history of gangsters, crooked fights and mysterious murders. In the world of boxing at the time, Frank “Blinky” Palermo, a member of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra crime family, was indeed royalty. Along with his partner, Frankie Carbo, a New York Lucchese crime family member, Palermo managed and controlled many of the professional boxers around the country. Although this Philly hustler was only five feet tall, he was a giant at assault and battery, big at bootlegging, jobbing, racketeering, numbers runner, petty thief, shakedown artist, wiseguy - Blinky was a man of many talents. Palermo's partner was Mafioso Frankie Carbo, a soldier in New York's Lucchese family who had been a gunman with Murder, Inc. During the 1940s, Frankie Carbo became a boxing promoter, working along with Ettore "Eddie" Coco, James "Jimmy Doyle" Plumeri, Frank "Blinky" Palermo, Harry "Champ" Segal, & Felix Bocchicchio. The group was known as "The Combination", together they were highly successful in fixing high-profile boxing matches. Even worse Palermo would cheat his stable of fighters out of their share of the purses of their fights. In 1961, the Feds zeroed in on Carbo and Palermo and were charged, tried and convicted of committing a dozens of crimes. Blinky Palermo was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Upon his death, he was laid to rest at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, PA.

popular name: Vincent Flemmi

date_of_death: October 16, 1979

age: 44

cause_of_death: Drug overdose - heroin

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: There's only one Boston mob hitman and psychopath more vicious that Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi (long time associate of Whitey Bulger) and that was his brother Vincent "Jimmy the Bear" Flemmi. Suspected or convicted of dozens of murders throughout the greater Boston area, Vincent, along with mob associates Joe "The Animal" Barboza and Johnny “The Butcher” Martorano (whom has over 50 confirmed kills under his belt), was a free-lance hitman, bank robber and muscle for the Winter Hill Gang and the Patriarca crime family. He was also a long-time rat and informant for the FBI and helped pin the murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan on four rival members of the Patriarca family when, in fact, it was Barboza and Flemmi who murdered Deegan. Shortly after the murder of Deegan he told another associate, "all I want to do now is kill people ... it's better than hitting (robbing) banks." In 1975, while serving an 8-to-18-year sentence for assault with intent to commit murder, Flemmi received one of the state's first weekend furloughs from prison. Vincent had immediately fled, and was not apprehended until three years later in Maryland, Maine. A year later Vincent died of a drug overdose in his prison cell.

popular name: Mary Lily Flagler Bingham

date_of_death: July 27, 1917

age: 50

cause_of_death: Edema with myocarditis along with high levels of morphine, arsenic and mercury

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham was an American philanthropist and heiress who became notorious when she married one of the richest men of the Gilded Age - Henry Flagler - a founder of Standard Oil with John Rockefeller. Growing up in an affluent household, she soon moved with her family to Wilmington in the late 1870s. Her affluence afforded her education, uncommon for a woman on the cusp of the twentieth century. She first met Henry Flagler in 1891 at a party in Newport, Rhode Island. Kenan was only twenty-three years old; Flagler was sixty-one, and still married to Ida Alice. As they became more romantically involved, Mary Lily’s family grew suspicious of Flagler’s intentions, at least until the tycoon gifted her two million dollars’ worth of jewelry and stock in Standard Oil, along with a mansion in Palm Beach that would come to be known as Whitehall. Flagler also set about divorcing Ida Alice, which resulted in him paying Florida state legislators off in order to have insanity declared a viable reason for initiating divorce proceedings. Two months after the law was passed, Flagler divorced her, and he married Mary Lily, a woman nearly half his age, on the Kenans’ family plantation ten days later in 1901. Henry Flagler and Mary Lily Kenan Flagler by most accounts had a comfortable and loving marriage. Their marriage lasted until May of 1913, as after a fall down the stairs at Whitehall, the 83-year-old Flagler passed away, leaving his massive fortune to her. Mary Lily Kenan thus became the world’s richest woman. Three years later she became reaquinted with and married Robert Worth Bingham. A seemly healthy and active socialite, she slowly succumbed to a mysterious illness and died just 8 months later after her marriage to Bingham.