From the Archives

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On the 27th of October, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt stood before a room full of Naval officers and bragged about a map, which he described as proof of Hitler’s expansionist plans for South America.

MEXICO D.F. (Federal District) – A poignant cartoon titled "Venus de Fentanilo" appeared in a recent edition of Mexican daily, La Jornada, showing a drug-addled Venus de Milo draped in an American flag with multiple syringes protruding from her famously missing arms strewn across the floor.

NEW YORK, NY – A class action lawsuit brought against American fantasy sports gambling company, Draft Kings, in the Southern District of New York (SDNY)

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL – In an interview last week to the Israeli newspaper of record Haaretz, Bulgaria's Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev floated the possibility of filing a "mutual legal assistance request"

SOFIA, BULGARIA – 1989 is marked in the collective Bulgarian memory, along with every other former Eastern bloc country, as the year that everything changed.

LONDON, ENGLAND – All things considered, the likelihood that Ruja Ignatova – a.k.a. the Cryptoqueen – is still alive seems remote.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY – Selim Suner’s luck could have turned out very differently if not for an impulse to put ₺135 lira – roughly a hundred dollars –, into an online gambling website just weeks before he was set to take a leave of absence from his union job at the Turkish daily Sabah to complete his compulsory military service in 2008.

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND – Suspicions of an intelligence agency's involvement did not deter people like Lazlo Hanyecz and other early Bitcoin adopters, who despite concluding that Satoshi was "not a real person" after communicating directly with the furtive cryptocurrency genius...

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY – Bailey Whitfield "Whit" Diffie first heard about the applications of computational work-based cryptographic methods from Alan Tritter at IBM's Thomas J. Watson laboratory, when he met with him and other members of the company's cryptography research team over a weekend in 1974. Diffie was nearing the end of his sojourn across the United States, which semi-official crypto biographer Steven Levy paints as the romantic adventure of an eccentric genius, whose "libertarian ethic" drove him to scour the country in search of the best way to achieve cryptographic privacy.

MAMARONECK, NEW YORK – Carlo Gambino approached 12-year old Walter Shaw, Jr. after his father had been grilled that day by Senator John McClellan about his role in the mob's multiple gambling rackets. "You remember one thing about these politicians, these judges, these big corporations", the top boss of New York's five crime families told the impressionable boy. "They have a license to steal," he continued, "but we don’t need one. You remember that. Your dad’s not the bad guy, kid. They are the bad guys".