Paul Castellano

01Gotti personally supervised the hit from a Lincoln Town Car parked on East 46th Street, binoculars optional — the crowd was holiday-thick.
02Four gunmen in identical white trench coats fired simultaneously; underboss Thomas Bilotti was killed in the same volley, ten feet away.
03Castellano had been meeting with his personal chef and chauffeur, who doubled as his bodyguard and his wife's alleged lover.

The epitome of the Rohan Master's art is the " Lamentation of the Virgin " (f. 135, Pl. 57) from the Hours of the Cross. The grieving Virgin cannot be consoled by the Apostle John , who looks up in consternation at a saddened God.

Smoke plumes from a few of the Kuwaiti Oil Fires on April 7, 1991, as seen from Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-37 .

Paul Castellano was shot six times outside Sparks Steak House on December 16, 1985, while John Gotti watched from a car across the street — Castellano's dinner order was still waiting at the host stand.

Jesse Livermore

He made $100 million shorting the 1929 crash, then lost it all twice more. Jesse Livermore walked into a New York coat-check room with a pistol in 1940. The note said he was a failure.

Fall of Singapore

Britain's 'impregnable' Singapore fortress had fifteen-inch coastal guns pointed permanently seaward. Japan's 30,000 troops arrived on bicycles from the Malayan jungle to the north and accepted the surrender of 80,000 Allied soldiers.

Aurelian

Murdered by his own secretaries after single-handedly stitching Rome's three fractured pieces back together in five years. The man who saved the empire couldn't survive his own staff.

Jean-Bédel Bokassa

Bokassa spent $22 million — one-third of the Central African Empire's annual budget — on a coronation modeled on Napoleon's, including a throne cast as a two-ton golden eagle, while France quietly paid the bill.

Michael Milken

Michael Milken financed the 1980s on junk bonds, paid a then-record $600 million fine, served 22 months in prison, and emerged rebranded as a cancer-research philanthropist. The decade he dismantled made him a saint.

Kate Millett

Kate Millett's 'Sexual Politics' (1970) read D.H. Lawrence's and Henry Miller's sex scenes as political documents — finding in their prose the grammar of female subordination. Miller's publishers had called him a liberator.

Rohan Hours

In the Rohan Hours, painted around 1420, a skeletal dying man lies naked on bare ground while God leans down from the sky to address him directly — a private conversation between a mortal and the divine, held across a page smaller than a hardback book.

Kuwaiti oil fires

Retreating Iraqi forces torched 730 Kuwaiti oil wells in early 1991; the fires burned for eight months, turning noon into black night across hundreds of miles. Red Adair's crews took until November to kill the last flame.