Semion Mogilevich is an organized crime boss believed by European and United States federal law enforcement agencies to be the "boss of bosses" of most Russian Mafia syndicates in the world. Mogilevich is nicknamed "The Brainy Don" because of his business acumen and his degree in economics from Lviv University.
Lake Peigneur was a 3-meter deep freshwater lake popular with sportsmen until an unusual man-made disaster on November 20, 1980 changed the structure of the lake and surrounding land. The lake then drained into the hole, expanding the size of that hole as the soil and salt were washed into the mine by the rushing water, filling the enormous caverns left by the removal of salt over the years. The resultant whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven barges, many trees and 65 acres (260,000 m2) of the surrounding terrain.
Sawney Bean was the legendary head of a 48-member clan in 15th- or 16th-century Scotland, reportedly executed for the mass murder and cannibalization of over 1,000 people.
Rollie Free was a motorcycle racer who broke the American motorcycle land speed record in 1948. He was prone to wearing a bathing suit.
Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before.
For 20 years, one man - Oxford-educated Howard Marks - was responsible for running an international drug market that shipped marijuana into the US by the ton.
Seawise Giant was a supertanker and the longest ship ever built, and possessed the greatest deadweight tonnage ever recorded. Fully laden, her displacement was 657,019 tonnes.
Ron Galella is an American photographer, known as a pioneer paparazzo. Dubbed "Paparazzo Extraordinaire" by Newsweek and "the Godfather of the U.S. paparazzi culture" by Time Magazine and Vanity Fair. On June 12, 1973, notoriously-reclusive actor Marlon Brando punched Galella without warning outside a restaurant in Chinatown in New York City, breaking the photographer's jaw and knocking out five of his teeth on the left-side of his mouth.
After Admiral Kolchak's White Russian Army abandoned Tomsk and Omsk and fled eastward along the Trans-Siberian Railway, they came to a halt on the shore of Lake Baikal near Irkutsk. With the Red Army in hot pursuit, the White Army had to escape southward to China across the frozen Lake Baikal in sub-zero temperatures. About 30,000 White Army soldiers, their families and all their possessions as well as the Tsar's gold, made their way across the lake toTransbaikalia. As the Arctic winds blew unobstructed across the lake, many in the army and their families froze to death. Their bodies remained frozen on the lake in a kind of tableau throughout the winter of 1919–20. With the advent of spring, the frozen corpses and all their possessions disappeared in 5,000 feet of water.
Percy Fawcett was a British artillery officer, archaeologist and South American explorer. Along with his son, Fawcett disappeared under unknown circumstances in 1925 during an expedition to find "Z" — his name for what he believed to be an ancient lost city in the uncharted jungles of Brazil.