The compound looked like a call center. Workers who tried to leave were electrocuted.

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01 • 25 Minute Read

The Economist

Sue-Lin Wong and Lian Buan

The Mayor of Scamtown

A Vietnamese man jumped from a second-floor window of a Philippine call center and ran. Sue-Lin Wong and Lian Buan traced what he fled: a compound in the town of Bamban with 2,000 phone banks, trafficked workers tortured with electric shocks, and a pig-butchering fraud operation. The town's mayor, Alice Guo, flew to rallies in a pink helicopter and handed out Christmas hams. She turned out to be a Chinese citizen named Guo Huaping, with $76 million moving through 36 bank accounts. Guo got life in prison. The senior boss fled through a basement tunnel. The government sidelined the investigator who built the case, and he said he no longer knew who to trust.

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02 • 17 Minute Read

The Walrus

Daniel Allen Cox

The Mystery of the Great Antonio, the Montreal Giant Who Could Pull Buses

In 1950s Montreal, a giant with iron chains around his neck stopped traffic by hooking himself to city buses and pulling. Antonio Barichievich claimed a 1952 Guinness record. Guinness didn't exist until 1955. Daniel Allen Cox dug through displaced persons archives and museum storage to unravel a life built on reinvention. Antonio turned out to be a Croatian islander named Baricelli who arrived in Canada six years later than every biography claimed. He kept office hours at a Dunkin' Donuts, sold postcards of his feats to passersby, and died in 2003 waiting for the comeback he believed was owed to him. A neighbor once recalled seeing him with a baby in the 1960s. Nobody, least of all Antonio, ever mentioned it again.

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03 • 28 Minute Read

The Trace

Joe Sexton

A World of Hurt

Brittney Ross was dressing her dead 14-year-old son at a Dallas funeral home when her phone rang. Her 6-year-old daughter had been shot in the head at home, in the room where she played with dolls. Joe Sexton followed the Ross family through what came next. The oldest son shot in the leg, jailed, then told from behind bars that his teenage girlfriend and her mother had both been killed. The boy charged in Ah'Bralen's murder got an ankle monitor, walked out, and was gunned down at a gas station at 15. Brittney moved her surviving children to a suburb outside Dallas. Weeks later, an 18-year-old was shot on her son's school grounds.

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04 • 15 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Julia Curlee

The Wrong Kind of American

CIA officers started a betting pool on when she'd be fired. Julia Curlee, a trans woman, had briefed Vice President Pence every morning for a year, and he asked her to extend. When Trump returned, Curlee stayed as the senior intelligence official in the White House, briefing leaders who then stripped her medical coverage, banned her from federal bathrooms, and signed orders erasing people like her. She kept showing up. Then Laura Loomer posted a bounty for her name, and someone inside the building helped provide it. Curlee walked out the north gate with a box of belongings and resigned from the CIA the day she deleted a two-sentence Pride email rather than send it. In 2017, she had written that trans kids should know the CIA was always recruiting. That promise, she said, had been broken.

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The compound looked like a call center. Workers who tried to leave were electrocuted.

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