This True Detective from November 1939 features a cover painting of mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, whose flight from authorities had taken him from the U.S. to Mexico, and then to Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and Cuba, and across the ocean to England, France and Germany. Buchalter had begun his career in organized crime by shaking down pushcart operators in Brooklyn, and had risen through the ranks of the criminal-controlled fur industry by doing every type of dirt imaginable, from issuing threatening phone calls to garment union activists to throwing acid in a competitor’s face. Eventually he was running a criminal empire that stretched to both coasts, and was acting as head of the infamous assassination squad Murder, Inc.

In 1936 Buchalter went into hiding after he became aware that criminal charges were being prepared against him. Not long after he dropped out of sight, he was indicted for smuggling an estimated $10 million in heroin into the U.S. from Hong Kong. The FBI printed a million posters and displayed them in every post office, police station, and federal building in America. All this attention was a problem for U.S. mob bosses, and so with characteristic unsentimentality, they decided Buchalter had to surrender. Convincing him was not difficult. While he undoubtedly had the flair and intelligence to dodge the feds indefinitely, living in another country away from the old neighborhood and away from the hundreds of underlings who respected him was not his style. Buchalter was a mobster through-and-through. To him, an anonymous existence, even in a tropical paradise or cosmopolitan foreign capitol, was little different from being in prison.

Buchalter’s associates got word to him that if he came back to the U.S. he would be able to surrender personally to J. Edgar Hoover. Surrendering to the Feds meant he would not face a more serious group of charges brought by Manhattan D.A. Thomas Dewey. But it was wishful thinking. The federal charges were rapidly followed by Dewey’s charges and Buchalter earned a fourteen-year jolt in the pen. His legal team hoped tohave the sentence reduced via appeals and procedural maneuvers, but when a snitch fingered Buchalter for ordering the murder of a candy store owner named Joe Rosen, he was tried for the killing, convicted, and sentenced to execution. By some estimates Buchalter had been responsible for a thousand murders as head of Murder, Inc., but all it took was one to seal his fate. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter was electrocuted in Sing-Sing prison's famous "Old Sparky" electric chair on March 4, 1944, perhaps while realizing life on a beach in Costa Rica hadn’t been so bad after all.

From previous episodes pretty much everyone in the world knows that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is not one of those guys who enjoys the attention that comes with fame—unless the attention is coming from Brazilian models. Two photographers found out firsthand just how camera shy Brady is, and the mess that resulted led to them suing Brady and his wife Gisele Bundchen yesterday. The court papers read like a chapter from an Ian Fleming novel, complete with the leafy tropical hideaway, menacing bodyguards, and lethal gunfire. The alleged incident occurred in Costa Rica in early April, when AFP photographer Yuri Cortez and colleague Rolando Aviles of the daily newspaper Al Dia tried to photograph Brady and Bundchen at a party being thrown on private property. The photogs had gotten permission to venture onto a neighboring property, from which they shot photographs of the party occurring next door. So far so good for the shutterbugs.

However, according to the court papers, when the two were returning to their rented SUV, bodyguards hired by Brady and Bundchen appeared, demanding their cameras and memory cards. Aviles immediately booked for the car, leaving Cortez to deal with the bruisers. Cortez claims one bodyguard twisted his arm behind his back and told him the Brady-Bundchen family wanted to have a chat. Aviles was still with the SUV at this point, and the confrontation moved in that direction. At some point the photographers claim they spotted a gun in the hands of one bodyguard and decided to drive away. That bodyguard or another then fired at the SUV, the bullet shattering the rear window and ricocheting off the windshield. Asked for comment Brady’s lawyer said he had not seen the court papers yet, and Bundchen’s people said they had no comment. But we have a comment. If the charges are true, we wonder if the NFL’s zero tolerance conduct policy will apply to Brady. We doubt it. New York Giants receiver Plaxico Burress just got two years for accidentally shooting himself in the leg in a Manhattan nightclub and will face a league suspension even after he gets out of jail, but we think employing bodyguards who shoot at two fleeing men is equally disturbing. Just saying—and no we aren’t Jets fans.

Personally, we think if aliens were able to traverse the immense gulfs of space to visit Earth, by definition they’d be technologically advanced enough to prevent us from seeing them. But UFO believers are legion, and UFO websites continue to grow in popularity, particularly in France, where unidentified flying objects are known as Objets Volant Non-Identifié, or OVNIs. The images here are from the French website forum-ovni-ufologie.com. From top to bottom they were shot—or perhaps faked, depending on your beliefs—in Catalina, U.S.A. July 9, 1947, Bulawayo, Rhodesia 1953, Barra-da-Tijuca, Brazil 1952, Liege, Belgium 1990, Phoenix, U.S.A. 1997, Lac Chauvet, Puy de Dôme, France 1952, and above Lago di Cota, Costa Rica 1971.