Original subtitles

[William Shatner] A blood oath that initiates

a recruit into a notorious crime family.

[gunshot]

A double agent who pledged allegiance

to a foreign enemy.

And a 21st century technology that's the digital domain

for elusive cyber crooks.

As long as there have been laws,

there have been people willing to break them.

Individuals who embrace a certain lifestyle

where rules and social contracts don't apply.

From daring outlaws and swashbuckling pirates

to organized crime and modern-day cyber sleuths,

what drives some to choose a life of crime?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

? ?

-[siren wailing] -[Shatner reads on-screen text]

While revelers enjoy Halloween festivities across the city,

tucked away out of sight,

a group of men prepare a deadly serious initiation ritual.

Michael Franzese is about to become a member

of America's most infamous criminal secret society-

the Italian American Mafia,

or, as its members call it,

La Cosa Nostra.

[Michael Franzese] I don't like to use the term "Mafia"

here in America.

In America it's really Cosa Nostra.

I grew up in the life. You know, my dad was the underboss

of the Colombo family.

I was 24 years old when I got, uh, inducted.

It was Halloween night, 1975.

I was called into a room late at night.

Stood in front of the boss, held out my hand,

took a knife, cut my fingers.

Some blood dropped on the floor.

He took a picture of a saint,

lit it aflame,

put it in my hands.

And he said, "Tonight, Michael Franzese,

you are born again into a new life,

into Cosa Nostra.

Betray your brothers and you will die,

burn in hell like this saint is burning in your hands.

Do you accept?"

"Yes, I do." That's how it started.

[Nate Hendley] La Cosa Nostra

wants to make money and amass power.

I would say they are the deadliest criminal

secret society in American history.

To join the Mafia, you have to be pure Italian.

And secrecy is the norm.

You're told you can join this organization

and you'll make all sorts of money, you'll be protected.

But at the same time, if you reveal any secrets,

you're going to be killed.

[Shatner] The dangerous secrets

that La Cosa Nostra keeps

revolve around criminal enterprises like gambling,

drug trafficking,

counterfeiting,

-and murder. -[siren wailing]

It's been estimated that, at the height of their power,

their crimes earned them billions of dollars every year.

So how did this criminal secret society

become so powerful?

[Hendley] The Mafia really starts to sort of

come together in New York City in the 1920s,

and there's a few factors as to why.

Number one, Prohibition.

Because banning alcohol instantly turns

corner street thugs

into very wealthy, powerful gangsters.

The underworld realizes

Americans are still gonna want to drink

and they will be the ones to supply the alcohol.

So it becomes an enormous lucrative opportunity

for gangsters.

[Franzese] In the early 1900s,

the guys started migrating from Sicily

into the United States.

And before Prohibition, we were

just a bunch of guys preying on each other,

trying to do these petty street crimes

and-and being thugs.

Well, those guys figured out, "Hey, alcohol,

people want to drink. We're gonna make 'em happy."

We were good at giving people what they wanted

when they couldn't have it.

In New York State alone,

there were 36,000 speakeasies-

just to give you an idea of how lucrative this was.

And so now we start to get organized,

because no organization is anything without money.

[Shatner] Prohibition turned common thugs into kingpins

and created an opportunity for La Cosa Nostra to get organized.

[Edward McDonald] By the 1930s,

Lucky Luciano and some other, uh, powerful gangsters

formed themselves into a commission.

They decided that it would make sense

if these gangsters were organized,

organized into families.

They designated five people to be the heads

of five families in New York.

And other people were designated to be the leaders of families

in other parts of the country.

[Hendley] Lucky Luciano comes up with the structure

of the Mafia as we know it today.

You have a hierarchal structure.

You have boss,

underboss, capo,

which is like middle management.

Capo is in charge of roughly ten soldiers

who do the actual grunt work.

Underneath the soldiers are associates.

An associate can be anybody who just happens to help the Mafia.

And this really is the birth

of the American Mafia as we know it.

[Shatner] A strict hierarchy meant

that only the bosses would know

all the details of La Cosa Nostra's criminal operations.

And to show their loyalty,

all members of the family would be required

to take a powerful oath of secrecy.

[Franzese] People, they don't understand what the oath is.

They think, once you come into that life, well, you're taking

an oath to lie, steal, cheat, kill.

Now, obviously, as part of that life,

you know, those things happen.

But that's not what the oath is.

The oath of omert� means silence.

We're not even supposed to admit that the life exists.

We're not supposed to talk about it.

If you violate policies and rules,

you can have serious consequences.

[McDonald] Omert� was critical to the success of the Mafia.

In order to stay alive,

in order to stay active, in order to stay powerful,

you can't have your members going out

and talking to other people about what you're doing.

And so you have a code of silence.

People were adhering to omert� because they were afraid

that if they violated the code,

they would be killed.

If your mother is sick and dying and you're at her deathbed

and the family calls you to service,

you leave your mother and you come and serve the family.

The family comes before anything.

You have to think that way.

So, unfortunately, you know, you make a mistake,

it could be your best friend that pulls the trigger on you.

During my 20 years in that life,

unfortunately, I've seen things like that.

[Shatner] While authorities have known about the existence

of La Cosa Nostra since the 1950s,

the power of this criminal enterprise has faded with time.

But is the loyalty and commitment

to the secret society still strong?

[McDonald] There are still organizations.

There's still five organized families in New York.

But they simply don't have the power

or the impact that they had.

The bosses, the leaderships of the families

have been convicted time and time again,

going back to the 1980s.

So, the question, is it possible

that there will be a resurgence of the mob?

I don't think we'll ever see the...

La Cosa Nostra as effective

or as powerful as it, as it once was.

But we don't know.

One can only speculate.

[Franzese] We used to be front-page news.

We had a lot of control in this country

for almost 100 years,

under some very difficult conditions.

We had connections right into the White House, 100%.

Is it the same as it used to be? No way.

But it's not going away in my lifetime.

Just take my word for it.

[Shatner] Blood oaths, family ties,

and a strict code of silence

are all part of the life of a soldier in La Cosa Nostra.

But there's another notorious criminal

whose legendary plunder and mysterious disappearance

earned him the title

the King of the Pirates.

[Shatner reads on-screen text]

Armed with a metal detector,

treasure hunter Jim Bailey hunts for hidden pieces of history

one step at a time.

[beeping]

And in May of 2014...

...he makes a remarkable discovery.

He finds a peculiar object in the ground

that seems to have no business

being in a strawberry orchard in New England.

[Bailey] In 2014,

I recovered a-a very odd, uh, silver coin.

I saw this-this bold, clear, crisp Arabic script

on the coin,

and I was amazed.

It turned out to be a 17th century coin.

And the coin predates direct trade

between the American colonies and the Red Sea,

the East Indies by over a century.

So I knew the coin could have not come through trade.

[Shatner] Just how did such an exotic coin

make its way to a small town in New England?

Jim Bailey believes the silver piece he found

is connected to one of the most dangerous

and wily seafarers in maritime history,

an English captain named Henry Avery,

whose exploits in the Indian Ocean

earned him the nickname the King of Pirates.

Captain Avery's legendary status can be traced back to 1695

and a bloody heist heard around the world.

Henry Avery sails north in the Indian Ocean

to the Strait of Aden,

which is part of the long-established pilgrim route

for Muslims from India traveling to Mecca.

And this is an extremely valuable trade route.

The ships traveling from Western India to Mecca and back

are carrying passengers of all kinds of social ranks

and lots of wealth.

So Henry Avery goes looking for the pilgrim fleet

sailing from Mecca to Western India known as the Mughal fleet.

[Shatner] The Mughal fleet was owned by the Mughal dynasty,

a powerful and wealthy empire

that ruled large portions of India

from the 16th to the 18th century.

Along with carrying pilgrims to and from Mecca,

this armada contained treasure ships

owned by the Grand Mughal of India himself.

And the crown jewel of this royal fleet

was a ship named the Ganj-i-Sawai.

So Avery and his confederates pursue that ship.

And they find it.

A cannon explodes.

The mast is hit and collapses.

And so Henry Avery and his fellows sweep aboard the ship

and spend days plundering, torturing,

do all kinds of horrible things to the crew and the passengers.

And the cargo they have seized

is one of the most valuable

crossing the Indian Ocean at that time.

And so Henry Avery became known as the King of the Pirates

as a figure who appears in ballads and plays

and in books that appear

very, very quickly after his capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai.

[Shatner] Henry Avery's huge score made him a legend.

But when word got back to the Mughal emperor

that an English pirate was responsible

for these atrocities,

Avery became public enemy number one

and triggered the first global manhunt in human history.

[Simon] The capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai

infuriated the Mughal Empire

to the point where they threatened to cut off all trade

and declare war against the British.

Especially because Henry Avery and his crew had gotten away.

So it's very, very important for Britain to maintain

this good relationship with the Indian Mughals.

So the British government stages this huge manhunt,

going after Henry Avery.

[Kevin P. McDonald] The idea that

the manhunt for Avery was the first global manhunt is factual.

That there are authorities all over the world

literally looking out for this man.

And he becomes one of the most infamous,

notorious pirates of all time.

[Shatner] Despite the entire world looking for him,

Captain Avery manages to elude authorities.

And to this day, the legend of his heist

and his ability to hide out

has forever made Henry Avery the King of Pirates.

[McDonald] No one knows exactly

what happened to Henry Avery.

And he escaped into legend and mystery.

And that's why he becomes one of these key enduring figures.

Basically every pirate that came after him

wanted to emulate that huge hit, that big score,

and then disappear and presumably spend the riches.

The big mystery here is what happened to Henry Avery.

Maybe he went into hiding somewhere in the Caribbean.

Or it's possible he went back to England.

He may have actually

also been able to kind of

blend into colonial American society,

maybe change his identity,

and just set himself up somewhere.

-[gulls calling] -[Shatner] Is it possible

that this Houdini of the high seas

ultimately escaped to a life of anonymity

in the American colonies?

Jim Bailey believes the coins he's found might hold the answer

to where the King of Pirates may have come ashore.

I found the first complete coin,

but other coins started to follow.

There's been 27 Arabic silver coins

that have been found throughout New England.

Here's the thing-

the coins, they're all silver.

They're all Arabic.

They all circulated in the Red Sea.

They all correlate perfectly

with the date for the capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai.

And in the course of my research,

I found Henry Avery's ship by the name of the Seaflower

arriving in Newport

around April of 1696.

So Henry Avery's men,

they've been on the run for a long time.

So maybe it was best to stay in the American colonies.

When I started researching the coin,

Henry Avery was the farthest thing from my mind.

But the evidence was far stronger

than I could have ever imagined.

I think these coins were carried by Henry Avery's men

upon coming to the American colonies

to seek new lives of comfortable obscurity.

[Shatner] We may never know if the exotic coins

found in New England were part of Avery's famous exploits,

because the secret of his treasure's whereabouts

disappeared,

along with the King of Pirates himself.

But there is another criminal who also made a fortune

not by keeping secrets but instead

by selling them.

[Shatner reads on-screen text]

President Harry Truman establishes

the Central Intelligence Agency.

In the wake of World War II

and with the rise of atomic weaponry,

a new covert war is about to begin

between the United States and the Soviet Union.

This unprecedented era of espionage

from 1947 to 1991

is known as the Cold War.

[Lubin] At the start of the Cold War

as we know it in the 1950s, the U.S. realized

that it needed to advance its internal security measures.

This is why Truman...

...would ultimately generate a presidential executive order

on confidential materials,

which still to this day is the way by which we set

different degrees of confidentiality

around secret documents here in the United States.

[Shatner] During the Cold War,

both the CIA and the Soviet Union's KGB

employed spies to steal each other's national secrets.

And while any civilian could be recruited to spy

on their home country for the other side,

even more valuable were those already working

in the intelligence community.

These turncoats are known as double agents.

[Andrew Hammond] To be a double agent-

for example, I'm an agent.

I'm working with the CIA over here

but also working with the KGB over here.

I'm a double agent in the middle.

But it's quite often used in shorthand

to refer to anybody who works in this world

who also works for the other side.

[Lubin] There will be a closed universe

of individuals in the know

about particular secrets,

and you need to penetrate those kinds of closed networks.

And so the best way to do that

is by turning a double agent, a person,

into an information sharer.

[Shatner] The U.S. intelligence community is made up

of 18 different agencies and organizations.

So we have to wonder, are there double agents among them

sharing our most closely guarded secrets with our enemies?

Remarkably, the answer is yes.

And many consider the most damaging double agent

ever discovered

was a 31-year veteran of the CIA

named Aldrich Ames.

[Nigel West] Aldrich Ames was a counterintelligence officer

in the Directorate, uh, of Operations.

And he was a senior individual who, in 1985,

as a result of a bad divorce,

was short of money

and he sold out to the Soviets.

He just simply went to the embassy,

asked to speak to a KGB officer,

and then sold information through letters,

which was highly classified operations

and a large number of identities

who were people who had worked either for the FBI or the CIA

in the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.

[Lindsay Moran] There were suspicions

that there was a spy within the CIA

because, in the 1980s,

many of our Russian sources in Russia

started kind of dropping like flies.

And this set off alarm bells at the CIA.

And so an investigation was launched.

But, bizarrely, it took many, many years

to realize that it was Aldrich Ames,

even though Aldrich Ames displayed

many of the characteristics

of what would be a viable target for recruitment.

He had a known problem with alcohol.

He had married a Colombian woman who had very expensive tastes.

He bought a house in Virginia with cash

for $540,000.

He bought a Jaguar.

He started to dress really well.

He got new teeth.

And all of these are pretty obvious indicators

that someone is working for a foreign intelligence service,

because he couldn't afford all that on his CIA salary.

Aldrich Ames is one of the most famous CIA compromises

of all times.

He went many, many years clandestinely acquiring

and giving information to the Russians

until his ultimate arrest in the 1990s.

It's very difficult to be able to quantify

the amount of damage that Aldrich Ames did.

We know that CIA spies were systematically killed.

And, even to this day, CIA is always training new recruits

to understand Aldrich Ames to make sure

that they don't have another instance like that happen again.

[Shatner] Aldrich Ames was sentenced to life in prison,

and his wife Rosario got five years for aiding her husband

in his crimes against the United States.

But Ames was not the only double agent discovered inside

an American intelligence agency.

In 2001,

an FBI agent named Robert Hanssen

was arrested for selling highly classified information

to Russia for over 20 years.

And it begs an urgent question.

How many more double agents might be operating

within the American intelligence community right now

that have never been caught?

[Lubin] It is very likely

that there is a Russian double agent

within the U.S. government today.

In the same way, it is very likely

that there is a double agent

working for the Chinese government

or the Iranian government or the North Korean government.

The United States has many enemies around the world,

and those enemies are interested in gathering

intimate information about U.S. doings.

[Bustamante] It's very uncomfortable to admit,

but one thing that CIA officers

are taught right out of the gates

is that you must always assume at any given time

that the CIA and the FBI are penetrated

by a foreign intelligence service.

We have to assume that.

If we're lucky, there's only one.

Probability-wise, there is more than one.

It's unsettling

to know that a foreign spy with access to government data

or top secret files

is operating undetected in the shadows.

And as technology advances,

the security measures needed to stay one step ahead of criminals

has become an increasingly difficult problem to solve.

Such is the case surrounding a daring heist

with a modern twist

focused on the alluring and very valuable world

of cryptocurrency.

[Shatner reads on-screen text]

32-year-old Sindri Thor Stefansson

and a group of thieves break into the Advania data center,

which is home to one of the largest concentrations

of computer power in the world,

and steal 550 computers.

The value of these devices is about $2 million.

But the bigger score is not the computers themselves

but the information stored inside them.

What these devices could do is mine Bitcoin.

And mining Bitcoin can produce millions and millions

and millions of dollars.

These computers are basically like gold.

But they're not mining gold.

They're mining digits and mathematical formulas,

which, in the 21st century, is something of value.

[Shatner] Released in 2009,

Bitcoin was the first of a new kind of money

known as cryptocurrency,

a form of digital cash that eliminates the need

for traditional banks.

Unlike normal forms of currency like the dollar or the euro,

the value of a bitcoin

is not tied to any nation or government.

For Sindri Thor Stefansson,

the benefit of stealing 550 Bitcoin computers

was in the future bitcoins they could create.

What you get for the risk

is essentially a money-printing machine.

And the difference is, it's not printing cash,

it's printing billions of dollars' worth

of bitcoins at a very rapid rate.

And all that information

is encrypted and untraceable.

It's the perfect crime if you can pull it off.

[Shatner] Less than a month after the Bitcoin heist,

Stefansson was arrested and charged

with stealing the computers.

After confessing, he was sentenced

to four and a half years in prison.

But the case wasn't resolved

because the stolen computers were never recovered,

and Stefansson claims to not even know where they are.

There was a greater conspiracy

behind this Bitcoin heist,

and he blames it on a guy

whose identity he's never revealed.

[Hochman] Mr. Stefansson has said that the idea

of doing it did not come from him,

but there is this "Mr. X"

that he mysteriously ascribes the mastermind role to.

There are a lot of wild theories about who Mr. X could be.

One of them

is, it could be Satoshi Nakamoto.

[Shatner] By all accounts, "Satoshi Nakamoto" is an alias,

a pseudonym for the shadowy creator of Bitcoin,

whose real identity is unknown.

[Hochman] We don't even know if Satoshi Nakamoto

is a he or a she or a they

because Satoshi Nakamoto has never come forward.

[Wittman] In 2009, when this started,

Nakamoto was very enthusiastic about spreading his ideas.

Spreading out this code.

This allowed him to establish a new currency

called Bitcoin, which was not government-controlled.

Around 2011, he just went dark.

And no one knows who he is.

[Shatner] There are those who believe that Satoshi Nakamoto

and Mr. X are one and the same,

and that this unidentified person

or group of people

has been hoarding and manipulating

the value of Bitcoin from its inception

to the heist in Iceland right up to today.

[Hochman] Every single state and every single country

is doing its best to rein in the Wild West of cryptocurrency.

So the IRS in the last couple of years

is very much stepping up its enforcement

to go after people who are not reporting

their cryptocurrency transactions.

Because they by themselves could crash the market

or they could grow the market.

[Jeff Lanza] Cyber fraud, it's one of the top three

priorities of the FBI.

And in order to really get ahead of this problem,

we need to be thinking more in an innovative way,

uh, just as the criminals do in the cyber world.

[Ebner] Somewhere on this planet,

those computers are humming

and they are creating Bitcoin revenue

for somebody somewhere.

Is it just some amorphous Mr. X?

We don't know.

But those 550 computers,

I can guarantee you,

they didn't wind up in a waste dump somewhere.

[Shatner] Is Mr. X a visionary

who changed how currency is controlled

or a brilliant mastermind who created a safe space

for cybercriminals?

Perhaps he's a bit of both.

The same might be said for a Wild West outlaw

who was a notorious robber

and a generous...

-[horse neighs] -Robin Hood.

[Shatner reads on-screen text]

Here, 13 miles outside the small town of Coalinga,

stand three jagged sandstone outcroppings

known as the Joaquin Rocks.

They are named after an infamous outlaw named Joaquin Murrieta

who, according to legend,

hid a treasure beneath these peaks

worth millions of dollars in gold.

[Peter Murrieta] Joaquin Murrieta

was my fifth great-grandfather.

He was, uh, an outlaw, a vigilante,

a robber in the 1840s.

And that is where the legends of not only his adventures

but the gold of Joaquin

and where he put his treasure come about.

[Shatner] Did Joaquin Murrieta hide a stockpile of stolen gold

in the Diablo Mountains?

Perhaps, but according to historians,

Murrieta did not start out as a dangerous criminal.

In fact, he reportedly immigrated with his family

from Mexico to California

in the late 1840s to mine for gold.

[Valadez] In 1848,

gold was discovered up in the foothills

of the mountains here in California.

And Joaquin Murrieta, so we are told,

he established a mining claim...

...to make his fortune with his wife,

his brothers and perhaps

other family members from Sonora, Mexico.

And started making money in the early years

of the California gold rush.

[Shatner] By all accounts, Murrieta and his family

soon amassed a substantial fortune.

But then a gang of American prospectors

attacked him

and stole his land.

[Valadez] According to the story,

his brother was lynched...

...his wife was

brutally, uh, raped and then murdered...

...and Joaquin himself was left for dead.

[Valadez] Having just barely survived

this harrowing circumstance where he lost everything,

Joaquin began to organize

other bands of dispossessed Mexicans,

and then they began

a series of attacks for revenge...

...from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Sacramento

to the gold fields.

[Shatner] Over the next three years, Joaquin Murrieta

and his band of vigilantes

delivered their brand of justice throughout Gold Country.

In doing so, they acquired huge amounts of treasure.

[Murrieta] Joaquin had a lot of gold

that he had amassed over time.

And during the process of that, he started to build

a network of people that were giving him harbor.

And that's where the legend starts,

of Robin Hood, of somebody who would

take money from white people

and then give it to a family that gave him safe harbor.

[Shatner] Word of Murrieta's exploits

soon spread throughout California.

Eventually, the governor offered

a $1,000 cash reward

and called upon the newly formed California Rangers

to hunt Murrieta down.

Joaquin knows that these Rangers are closing in.

He's starting to figure out he's got to do something.

He's got this treasure that he carries with him.

What's he gonna do?

The most prominent idea would be that

he buried his treasure somewhere.

[Shatner] According to the story,

the California Rangers eventually caught up

with Joaquin Murrieta and his gang

in the Diablo Mountains.

The Rangers reportedly returned to Sacramento

a few days later with a severed head in a jar

as proof that Murrieta had finally met his end.

But that wouldn't be the end

of Joaquin Murrieta's legacy.

[Valadez] The way that we know

about Joaquin

is that there was a young writer

living up in the gold fields, a guy named John Rollin Ridge.

And he published a book

called The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta.

And when that book came out, it was

the equivalent of a New York Times Best Seller.

It was a blockbuster.

[Murrieta] Joaquin Murrieta's story is the story

that Johnston McCulley used to create Zorro,

and, of course, Bob Kane used the story of Zorro

to create Batman.

And so, if you ask a lot of scholars,

"Who's the first Latinx superhero," they say,

"Oh, that's Joaquin Murrieta, no doubt."

[Shatner] Today Joaquin Murrieta is celebrated

by many as a folk hero.

But the question remains:

what happened to all the gold

he was rumored to have stashed in the Diablo Mountains?

Well, some historians believe Joaquin Murrieta

never buried his fortune in the first place.

They claim he wasn't killed by the California Rangers

but rather escaped to Mexico.

[Murrieta] A powerful part of the legend in our family is that

the same people that he gave help to

and gold to and that hid him

also gave this great last act of care

by going to a courthouse, where there's a head in a jar,

and saying, "Yeah, that's totally him, I swear to it."

And that was how he was able to get away and live,

because that wasn't his head.

The biggest mystery to me is, where did that gold go?

We certainly don't know where,

but it's got to be somewhere.

[Shatner reads on-screen text]

Two months before the horrific Whitechapel killing spree began,

an American named Francis Tumblety arrived in the city,

although this was not his first trip to London.

For more than a decade, Tumblety had sold

a number of medicinal remedies

in both the United States and England

and had also claimed to be a doctor

and treated numerous patients,

in spite of the fact that he was not a licensed physician

and had no formal medical training.

And there are those who believe that this dishonest,

self-proclaimed doctor was,

in fact,

Jack the Ripper.

[Lynn Picknett] Francis Tumblety,

he was an American so-called

"Indian herb doctor."

In other words, he basically was a quack

who went round selling

alleged remedies, cure-alls, and preying on the gullible.

And he was over in London

during the time of the Ripper murders.

[Mark Donnelly] Tumblety was horribly misogynistic.

It seems that

early in his life he had, uh, married young.

Found out later that the woman he married was a prostitute

and had continued prostitution after they were married.

And so he would often espouse

hatred toward all of womankind and especially the prostitutes.

[Picknett] He was a,

an unpleasant character.

He used to host dinners,

at which his great party trick

was to pass round anatomical specimens

in glass jars of female body parts,

including uteruses.

[Shatner] As London was shaken

by the first four Ripper murders,

investigators began to suspect that Francis Tumblety

could be the killer.

[Donnelly] Several of the medical examiners

who looked at the mutilated bodies of the victims

did comment that the killer seemed to possess

some rudimentary medical knowledge,

and we know that Tumblety was known in the States

to have performed at least, uh, one abortion

that went, um, fatally wrong

and was wanted by the police in both the U.S. and Canada

for passing himself off as a fake doctor.

[Tony McMahon] There is no doubt that the London police

viewed Francis Tumblety as a key suspect.

They looked at his attitude towards women,

they looked at his desire to be taken seriously as a surgeon

and his odd collection of uteruses,

and they believe that Tumblety could have been Jack the Ripper.

[Shatner] According to London police records,

Tumblety was questioned about the Ripper murders.

But he was ultimately released for lack of evidence.

Then, shortly after the Ripper's

fifth and final victim Mary Kelly was murdered,

Tumblety left London and returned to New York City.

Some historians believe that the timing

of these events is no coincidence.

[Donnelly] When Tumblety

first arrives, um, in London,

right after he gets there, the Ripper murders begin.

And right after he leaves, they stop.

While we don't know exactly where Tumblety was

or exactly what he was doing,

there was a woman who ran a lodging house

at 22 Batty Street,

and that is about a ten-minute walk

from each of the crime scenes.

She had a lodger and she referred to him

as an "American doctor."

There were rumors that she had found a bloody shirt

after this lodger had returned late at night...

...covered in gore.

And then the lodger took up new residence

at the Charing Cross Hotel.

The day after the last Ripper murder,

the lodger from the Charing Cross Hotel

disappeared without paying his bill

but left behind a small black doctor's bag.

Once it was turned over to the police

and the contents were examined,

inside they found

some herbal medicines, some clothing,

little bit of jewelry,

and, um, some pornography,

which Tumblety is known to have sold.

Now, it's hard to know for certain

because this is just a theory.

[Shatner] The London police may have had trouble

proving that Francis Tumblety, the so-called American doctor,

could have been Jack the Ripper.

But upon his return to the United States,

the press had no such trouble convicting him

in the court of public opinion.

Is it possible that Francis Tumblety

was Jack the Ripper?

Many researchers believe the evidence is compelling.

And as proof, they point to a curious object

that was in Tumblety's possession when he died.

[Stewart Evans] When Tumblety died

in 1903,

he was in hospital run by nuns in St. Louis,

and certain things were found on his person,

which included a plain brass ring,

almost like a curtain ring.

And the only Ripper victim

who actually lost anything

of a substantial nature was Annie Chapman.

And she'd had such a ring, a plain brass ring,

stolen off her finger by the killer.

So, with regard to Tumblety actually being Jack the Ripper,

for a lot of people now,

he's the favorite Ripper suspect.

What is it about criminals

and the lives they lead that we find so interesting?

While no one wants to be the victim of a crime,

we certainly are curious about what drives someone

to commit dangerous or unspeakable acts.

From historical characters like outlaws and pirates

to organized crime, espionage and cyber sleuths,

while we may learn the methods

behind some of the most notorious misdeeds on record,

the question of why

someone would choose a life of crime

remains unexplained.

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