Bernie Madoff
Bernie Madoff is a former stock broker, investment adviser, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.
Sidney Reilly
Sidney Reilly, famously known as the Ace of Spies, was a Jewish Russian- or Ukrainian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard, the British Secret Service Bureau and later the Secret Intelligence Service. He is alleged to have spied for at least four nations. His notoriety during the 1920s was created in part by his friend, British diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who sensationalized their thwarted operation to overthrow the Bolshevik government in 1918.
Hal Lipset
Hal Lipset was the most respected and also the sleaziest private detective in America. Lipset began as an investigator in the U.S. Army. Later he became a pioneer in electronic surveillance techniques (Coppola's movie The Conversation was partly a portrait of Lipset), while remaining busy with a variety of cases that range from standard divorce snooping through insurance fraud to catching a jewel thief in Europe. Lipset had an apolitical approach to his work: according to him, guilt or innocence is the court's concern, not his; he worked for anyone who paid.
TransMedics
TransMedics is a medical device company. They have developed a technology capable of maintaining donor organs in a near-physiological state outside the body from donor to recipient: the heart is beating, lungs are breathing, and liver is making bile. The portable technology was designed to be transported in all modes of transportation typically used for organ retrieval, to reduce the time-dependent damage associated with cold storage.
Thomas Phillipps
Sir Thomas Phillipps was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century, due to his severe condition of bibliomania. He was the illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and inherited a substantial estate which he spent almost entirely on vellum manuscripts, and, when out of funds, borrowed heavily to buy manuscripts, thereby putting his family deep into debt. Phillipps recorded in an early catalogue that his collection was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts. Philipps began his collecting while still at Rugby School and continued at Oxford. Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created, and coined the term vello-maniac.
Upside-down catfish
As its name implies, the upside-down catfish will swim upside down. One theory accounts for this unusual behavior as a feeding strategy. In the wild, it often grazes on the underside of submerged branches and logs, and swimming upside down makes these areas more accessible.
Belgrade Phantom
In 1979, Vlada Vasiljević stole a white Porsche-Targa 911-s, and then, for about ten evenings drove the police mad with his reckless driving to the Slavija Square in Belgrade. During an official visit of the president Tito to Cuba in 1979, the attention of the capital was directed to the phantom in the white Porsche. The mysterious driver that drove like crazy in a stolen car over the square Slavija made in the midnight hours a real spectacle, constantly managed to get away from the police. Over the radio he openly called the police to catch him, which was the first oppositional act in the post-war Yugoslavia. Several tens of thousand people went on the streets to support him.
Saint Crispin
Saints Crispin and Crispinian are the Christian patron saints of cobblers, tanners, leather workers and, since it came into being, of the leather subculture.
Mercedes-Benz W113
The Mercedes-Benz W 113 automobiles were produced from 1963 through 1971.
Mohamed Mrabet
Mohammed Mrabet is a Moroccan storyteller, mostly known in the West through his association with Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams. Fiercely independent, he left home at the age of 11 after a bloody fight with a school teacher and a self-imposed evacuation from a third storey window. Things didn't improve when he returned home to his father who beat him, pushing a young Mrabet over the edge and away for good. At the age of 12 he lost his virginity to a 27 year old woman, Aisha - from that first taste of promiscuity he indulged in a life of petty criminality. He stabbed people, got drunk and got into fights. His physicality was noteworthy. Tall and strong, he caught the eye of the city's notoriously promiscuous gay community, and also of the men in power - the ones who would use him first for labour and then as a prizefighter. His acquired reputation as a man-of-action, as noble as he was notorious, endeared him to those that began to congregate around him to hear him speak. Inspired by the observations of writers, rockstars, homeless people and market stalls - the ebb and flow of a rapidly changing city dictated the flow of his life and sharpened his tongue whilst late-night re-tellings refined his imagination and delivery. It was both his innate brooding charisma and one that developed over-time that has kept him somewhat in the public's eye.