Robert Hanssen

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Close-up of a barbed wire

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Robert Hanssen attended Mass every morning, carried a rosary, and sold the FBI's deepest secrets to Moscow for 22 years. He betrayed at least three Soviet double agents who were subsequently executed.

A spectator's fist on the Puy-de-Dôme cracked Eddy Merckx's cheekbone during the 1975 Tour — the blow that broke the greatest cyclist alive and handed Bernard Thévenet the race.

Born to a mule-driver's family, Vespasian taxed public urinal collections and, when his son Titus complained, held a coin to his nose and asked if it smelled. On his deathbed he quipped, 'I think I'm becoming a god.'

The last Dacian king slit his own throat on horseback as Roman cavalry reached him — the moment was carved in stone on Trajan's Column, his severed head then paraded to Rome.

Flemish weavers and guild workers slaughtered the flower of French chivalry at Courtrai in 1302, collecting 700 golden spurs from the dead knights and nailing them to a church ceiling. Class warfare, in plate armor.

A Czech church decorated with 40,000 human skeletons arranged into chandeliers, garlands, and a coat of arms — all assembled by a half-blind monk in 1870. The bones had to come from somewhere.

Bill Wilson co-founded AA on the principle of complete abstinence, then took LSD with Aldous Huxley in 1956 and spent years lobbying AA's board to adopt it as a sobriety tool. The board said no. He kept taking it.

To swing a 1984 county election in Oregon, Rajneeshees poured salmonella cultures onto ten restaurant salad bars, sickening 751 people — the first bioterror attack on U.S. soil. The plot was conceived by Ma Anand Sheela.

Joseph Glidden's 1874 barbed-wire patent — filed after sketching the design on a coffee grinder — closed the American open range within a decade and then reappeared at the Somme, herding men into machine-gun fire.