Get to know the real story behind your favorite movies and shows and the real historic truth about them. From the souls lost in “Enemy at The Gates” to the souls saved in “Hacksaw Ridge” and “Schindler's List” by Desmond Doss and Oskar Schindler. Going through the life of the well appreciated scientist John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” and witnessing true loyalty with Hachiko.
Rosario Alberto Bufalino (born October 29, 1903) was an Italian-born American mobster who became the crime boss of the Northeastern Pennsylvania crime family known as the Bufalino crime family, which he ruled from 1959 to 1989. He was a cousin of attorney William Bufalino, the longtime counsel for Jimmy Hoffa.
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, film director, and philanthropist, known during his lifetime as one of the most financially successful individuals in the world. He first became prominent as a film producer, and then as an influential figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle – oddities that were caused in part by a worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness.
Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974) was a German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He is the subject of the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark and its 1993 film adaptation, Schindler's List, which reflected his life as an opportunist initially motivated by profit, who came to show extraordinary initiative, tenacity, courage, and dedication to save the lives of his Jewish employees.
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, he was never fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime, due to his homosexuality, which was then a crime in the UK, and because his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
James Riddle Hoffa (born February 14, 1913; disappeared July 30, 1975, declared dead July 30, 1982) was an American labor union leader who served as the President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) union from 1957 until 1971.
Vasily Grigoryevich Zaytsev (23 March 1915 – 15 December 1991) was a Soviet sniper and a Hero of the Soviet Union during World War II. Prior to 10 November 1942, he killed 32 Axis soldiers with a standard-issue rifle. Between 10 November 1942 and 17 December 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad, he killed 225 enemy soldiers, including 11 snipers. A feature-length film, Enemy at the Gates (2001), starring Jude Law as Zaytsev, was based on part of William Craig's non-fiction book Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad (1973), which includes a "snipers' duel" between Zaytsev and a Wehrmacht sniper school director, Major Erwin König.
Desmond Thomas Doss (February 7, 1919 – March 23, 2006) was a United States Army corporal who served as a combat medic with an infantry company in World War II. He was twice awarded the Bronze Star Medal for actions in Guam and the Philippines. Doss further distinguished himself in the Battle of Okinawa by saving 75 men, becoming the only conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor for his actions during the war. His life has been the subject of books, the documentary The Conscientious Objector, and the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge.
Hachikō (November 10, 1923 – March 8, 1935) was a Japanese Akita dog remembered for his remarkable loyalty to his owner, Hidesaburō Ueno, for whom he continued to wait for over nine years following Ueno's death.
John Forbes Nash Jr. (June 13, 1928 – May 23, 2015) was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations. Nash's work has provided insight into the factors that govern chance and decision-making inside complex systems found in everyday life.
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria (1 December 1949 – 2 December 1993) was a Colombian drug lord and narco terrorist who founded and was the sole leader of the Medellín Cartel. Dubbed "The King of Cocaine", Escobar is the wealthiest criminal in history, having amassed an estimated net worth of US$30 billion by the time of his death equivalent to $58 billion as of 2018 while his drug cartel monopolized the cocaine trade into the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.
Christopher Paul Gardner (born February 9, 1954) is an American businessman and motivational speaker. During the early 1980s, Gardner struggled with homelessness while raising a toddler son. He became a stock broker and eventually founded his own brokerage firm Gardner Rich & Co in 1987. In 2006, Gardner sold his minority stake in the firm and published a memoir. That book was made into the motion picture The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith.
The June 1962 Alcatraz escape was a prison break from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility located on an island in San Francisco Bay, undertaken by inmates Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin. The three men were able to escape from their cells and leave the island in a makeshift raft. It remains unknown what happened to them after entering San Francisco Bay.
Christopher Johnson McCandless (February 12, 1968– August 1992), also known by the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp (Alex), was an American hiker who sought an increasingly itinerant lifestyle as he grew up. He is the subject of Into the Wild, a nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer that was later made into a full-length feature film.
Christopher Scott Kyle was a United States Navy SEAL sniper. He served four tours in the Iraq War and was awarded several commendations for acts of heroism and meritorious service in combat. He was awarded one Silver Star Medal, four Bronze Star Medals with "V" devices, a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal and numerous other unit and personal awards.
The Central Park jogger case (When They See Us) was a criminal case in the United States based on the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old white woman who was jogging in the park, and attacks on eight other persons, in areas ranging from the North Woods to the Reservoir of Manhattan's Central Park, on the night of April 19, 1989. Three of the victims were black or Latino. Meili was so badly injured that she was in a coma for 12 days. The New York Times in 1990 described the attack on her as "one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980s".
Gabriel Fernandez (February 20, 2005 – May 24, 2013) was an eight-year-old American boy from Palmdale, California, who was abused and tortured over a period of months that ultimately ended in his fatal beating on May 22, 2013. His mother, Pearl Fernandez, and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, were both charged and convicted of first degree murder with special circumstances of torture. Pearl Fernandez was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and Isauro Aguirre was sentenced to death.
Between 2008 and 2011, a series of rapes in the suburbs around Seattle and Denver were perpetrated by Marc Patrick O'Leary, an Army veteran who had previously been stationed near Tacoma, Washington. Inspired by the article "An unbelievable story of rape" written by Ken Armstrong and T.Christian Miller in 2015
US Airways Flight 1549 was an Airbus A320 which, in the climbout after takeoff from New York City's LaGuardia Airport on January 15, 2009, struck a flock of Canada geese just northeast of the George Washington Bridge and consequently lost all engine power. Unable to reach any airport, pilots Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles glided the plane to a ditching in the Hudson River off Midtown Manhattan.[4] All 155 people aboard were rescued by nearby boats, and there were few serious injuries.