Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast

Gerald Payne was the pastor and director of Greater Ministries International, a Tampa-based religious organization that operated in the 1990s as a massive Ponzi-style fraud cloaked in faith-healing rhetoric, promising believers that if they “gifted” money to the ministry they would receive double their money back in about 17 months through supposed divinely blessed investments in foreign currency, mines, and other ventures. The scheme pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of devout investors across the United States.

In January 2007, a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Adult Swim show Aqua Teen Hunger Force triggered a widespread public panic in and around Boston when LED light boards depicting the show’s Mooninite characters were mistaken for explosive devices.

Sandra Beltrán, known as La Reina del Pacífico, was a prominent Colombian drug trafficker who rose to power in the 1990s and early 2000s as a key intermediary between Colombian cartel and Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel.

Gilberto Valle, a New York City police officer nicknamed the “Cannibal Cop” by the media, was arrested in 2012 after investigators discovered his online chats and writings.

Mary Ellen Samuels was a California woman who orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot in 1988 to kill her estranged husband, Bob Samuels.