Its star was a very blueblood Mary Alice Livingston who sent her 10 year old daughter out for a bowl of chowder which she laced with arsenic to finish off her mother and inherit her fortune.

The Great Chowder Murder - 1895 - Mary Alice was a Livingston, descended from one of New York’s oldest and most prominent families, well represented in “Mrs. Astor’s 400.” She had never married, but after a breach of promise suit against Henry Fleming—the father of her first child—a judge allowed her to use his name. By the time of the murder she already had three illegitimate children by different fathers, and she was pregnant with a fourth, who would be born in New York’s notorious Tombs prison.

1st recorded murder trial - 1799 - The first recorded murder trial in America involved the disappearance and death of Gulielma “Elma” Sands in 1799. Elma Sands, the lover of a man named Levi Weeks, was found strangled and drowned at the bottom of the well in 1799.  Weeks, accused of the murder, was defended by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Despite strong evidence against him, Weeks was acquitted after just five minutes of jury deliberation. Supposedly, the cousin of Elma placed a curse on all in the courtroom that day. The case became infamous, and many involved, including Hamilton, Burr, and Judge John Lansing, later faced tragic fates, leading to a belief in the curse. The well where Sands' body was found still exists under 129 Spring Street, New York.

The murder of Stanford White - 1906 - Despite the scandal, White remains one of the most influential architects of the Gilded Age, known for landmarks including the original Madison Square Garden and many of New York’s grand mansions and civic buildings.

Murder in the Harvard medical school - 1849 - Dr. George Parkman disappeared at the Medical School in one of the most famous murder cases in Harvard history. Earlier, Parkman had lent money to colleague Dr. John White Webster. To secure the loan, Webster gave Parkman a mortgage on his personal property, including a valuable collection of minerals. When Parkman learned that Webster had backed another loan with the same collection, he began relentlessly pursuing Webster to collect the debt. A week after the disappearance, a suspicious janitor broke through a brick vault below Webster’s lab and found human body parts, which the authorities soon discovered all around the lab. Found guilty of first-degree murder, Webster belatedly confessed and appealed for clemency, but was hanged on Aug. 30, 1850. Parkman’s widow led a fund drive to support Webster’s wife and children.

The Artichoke : The fruits of organized crime - Cynara scolymus, aka the artichoke, is native to the Mediterranean, So was Ciro Terranova. Long before ordinary New Yorkers had ever heard of the Black Hand or the Mafia, Terranova had imported the latest incarnation of ethnic crime from Corleone in Sicily. Terranova-the name itself suggesting a hearty transplant-also imported artichokes, an original staple in minestrone soup, from California. Headquartered in East Harlem, then an Italian enclave, he cornered the market, terrorized merchants into carrying his produce, and earned the sobriquet "The Artichoke King."In New York and other big cities, homegrown organized crime typically was accompanied by an ethnic dimension--beginning with nativist gangs and later encompassing virtually every immigrant group, each of which imposed its own distinctive cast. Irish and Jewish gangs proliferated in their respective ghettos, supplanted- as the sons and grandsons of gangsters graduated into medicine and law and Wall Street and moved to the suburbs--by blacks, Puerto Ricans, Asians, Colombians, and Russians.Virtually no group was exempt from the curse of criminality, but none captured the public's imagination more than the Italians (they had the best nicknames). It would take Fiorello La Guardia, an Italian-American (and part Jewish) mayor-so sensitive about stereotypes that he banned organ grinders and their monkeys from the city-to challenge their stranglehold over immigrant neighborhoods and entire industries.Terranova was larger than life, almost literally. He was the sole survivor of a trio of racketeer siblings (the other two had been gunned down) and the step-brother of Giuseppe "Clutch Hand" Morello. He was the father of ten children; moved them into a million-dollar home (in today's dollars) on Peace Street in Pelham, just across the Westchester border; and drove an armored limousine. He also figured in the unsolved robbery of a testimonial dinner he was attending on behalf of a Bronx magistrate. The dinner triggered sweeping investigations into the judiciary by Samuel Seabury, a descendant of the first Episcopal bishop in America. Seabury's crusading commission forced the resignation of Mayor James J. Walker and laid the political ground work for the election of La Guardia.Introduced by the blare of uniformed police buglers, La Guardia went to the heart of the matter in 1935. He banned the sale, display, and possession of artichokes in New York City in an attempt to topple Terranova's empire. "There is only one way of breaking a racket," he declared, "and that is either to remove the source or remove the individuals from the scene of operations. In the retail markets we removed the individuals. In the wholesale traffic of the commodity we are going to remove the source."Terranova might also have been the only person threatened with arrest if he ventured into the city. La Guardia exiled him to Westchester. The threat was fulfilled when he was charged with vagrancy in 1937. He died at age forty-nine, supposedly penniless, after a stroke.

Salvatore Maranzano Murdered - 1931 - After emigrating from Sicily to New York in the 20's, Salvatore became involved in bootlegging. That led to prostitution and narcotics and he built up a large gang. With Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, he organized the Mafia into the Five Families with Lucky Luciano as his lieutenant. This arrangement didn't last all that long.By September 1931, Maranzano realized Luciano was a threat, and hired Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, an Irish gangster, to kill him. However, Tommy Lucchese alerted Luciano that he was marked for death. On September 10, Maranzano ordered Luciano and Genovese to come to his office at 230 Park Avenue. Convinced that Maranzano planned to murder them, Luciano decided to act first. He sent to Maranzano's office four Jewish gangsters whose faces were unknown to Maranzano's people. They had been secured with the aid of Lansky and Siegel. Disguised as government agents, two of the gangsters disarmed Maranzano's bodyguards. The other two, aided by Lucchese, who was there to point Maranzano out, stabbed the boss multiple times before shooting him.

The 1st recorded murder in New York - 1609 - "Typically, about half the homicides in New York City are solved within the first year. This one has remained a bit of a mystery for four centuries.The victim was John Colman, an Englishman, accomplished sailor, and second mate aboard the Half Moon (Halve Maen) in 1609, as Henry Hudson explored the harbor and Upper Bay. It is the first recorded murder in New York.The only existing account of the crime was gleaned from eyewitnesses by Robert Juet, aka Jouet, Hudson's first mate. After morning prayers on September 6, four crew members accompanied Colman in a sixteen-foot shallop on a reconnaissance mission from the Half Moon, anchored between Coney Island and Sandy Hook. They surveyed lands "as pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly trees as ever they had seen, and very sweet smells came from them." They sailed about six miles, possibly to Kill Van Kull, Newark Bay, or even farther north to Upper New York Bay, where they "saw an open sea.Upon returning toward nightfall, "they were set upon by two canoes," one with twelve men and the other with fourteen. Colman was "slain in the fight," Juet wrote in his log, "with an arrow shot into his throat and two more hurt." (His chest may have been sheathed in armor, but he was struck in the neck by a stone arrow-head and bled to death.) The survivors drifted in the dark, their light having gone out in the rain (which also left them unable to ignite a small cannon, although they may have routed the marauders with musket fire). They returned to their ship by ten the next morning with the dead man, "whom we carried on land and buried and named the point" - probably some spot in Coney Island, Staten Island, Sandy Hook, or Keansburg, New Jersey (where a Colman's Point still exists)- “after his name.”Modern detectives say the perfunctory investigation, if not details of the murder itself, were suspect. The only account of the crime is secondhand, pieced together from a few witnesses among a largely Dutch crew, some of whom might have harbored a grudge against the Englishman. (Colman, in a letter to his wife, contemptuously wrote of the Dutch men: "Looking at their fat bellies, I fear they think more highly of eating than of sailing.")Colman had served Hudson as a trusted boatswain on an earlier voyage, but Juet was described by Hudson himself as mean-tempered, and later led a mutiny against the captain. Colman's body was hastily buried and has never been found. The arrow was recovered but vanished. The chief suspects were singled out because of racial profiling but were never questioned. No one was ever prosecuted. Just two days after the murder, Juet recounted, natives boarded the Half Moon to trade while the crew kept a careful watch to "see if they would show any sign of the death of our man, which they did not" (suggesting that they were either innocent or duplicitous or that the killers had come from a different tribe).The murder is memorialized in a mural in the Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City and in a poem by Thomas Frost that hinted at Colman's disdain for the crew:"What! are ye cravens?" Colman said;For each had shipped his oar.He waved the flag: "For Netherland,Pull for yon jutting shore!"Then prone he fell within the boat,A flinthead arrow through his throat!

Fisk murdered by Stokes - 1872 - James Fisk Jr. (1835–1872) was an American stockbroker, known as "Big Jim," who played a key role in the financial schemes of the Gilded Age. Alongside Jay Gould, Fisk tried to corner the gold market, leading to the infamous Black Friday of 1869. Though reviled for his business practices, he was admired by the working class.