Art theft expert, security expert and author of “The Rembrandt Heist: The Story of a Criminal Genius, a Stolen Masterpiece, and an Enigmatic Friendship,” Anthony Amore introduces us to Boston native, Miles Connor Jr., a combination rock star, samurai sword collector, and brilliant art thief. Connor's fascinating motives for stealing art were tied up with his policeman father’s passion for collecting, and also for avenging what he felt was a grave insult to his father by a local museum, the Forbes House. His first theft was to break into that museum as a teenager and steal dozens of artifacts.

One of his remarkable heists was stealing from the famed Woolworth collection housed in Maine. In one of his more brazen acts, Miles also stole and then helped in repatriating a Rembrandt in order to lessen his sentence for that art theft.

Amore's book explores Connors most audacious theft and of the most unusual art crimes in history -- the 1975 theft of Rembrandt's Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn from the Boston Museum. His reason for stealing the painting was even bolder and more surprising. Today in his eighties, Connor lives on a sprawling property with about a dozen horses in Blackstone, Massachusetts.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee was home to 75,000 residents, who consumed more energy than New York City. Most of the world didn’t know that the town even existed. And most of the people who lived there, who were largely young women from small towns across the America, didn’t know the true nature of the work they were doing day after day in the hulking factories that had been hastily built in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains. That is until the end of the war when Oak Ridge’s important secret was revealed, namely that Oak Ridge had served as the production site of the Manhattan Project, and the huge factories there produced highly enriched uranium and plutonium as fuel for the world’s first nuclear weapons.

Oak Ridge’s important historical mission and the lives of the mostly women who worked there are brought to life in Denise Kiernan’s excellent book, The Girls of Atomic City, which is an important addition to our country’s history.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Retired FBI agent Pete Lapp helped capture Ana Montez, a Puerto Rican-born American and UVA alumna who was a senior analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency overseeing the Cuban account. For 17 years, she was also a spy for Cuba and was an avowed communist. Ironically, as many of four of Anna’s close family members worked for the FBI and despite Anna’s more extreme political views, assumed she was a loyal American.

From his book “Queen of Cuba,” Pete relates how Ana was identified as a potential national security risk, secretly investigated, and ultimately apprehended after years of committing espionage. He describes how she transmitted information and also shares his view of her psychology: Withdrawn, lonely, at odds with her father, and driven by her political convictions and personal disagreement with U.S. foreign policy (including its policy towards Nicaragua) rather than financial gain, by which so many other spies have been enticed.

Recruited while in college in 1983 during the Reagan administration by Cuban agent Marta Velasquez, (who was also a Puerto Richan-American) Ana’s steadfast career rise at the Department of Defense gave her increased access over time to information of value to Castro’s Cuba, stopping short of putting agents in personal peril. Cuban intelligence has been chronically underestimated over decades and makes Ana’s case a warning example of an organized program to infiltrate critical branches of the U.S. government, along with the recent apprehension of former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, whose been identified as a Cuban spy.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com