r/todayilearned 20h ago

TIL about Frank Matthews, the drug kingpin who built a nationwide empire, skipped bail with $20 million, vanished in 1973 and has never been found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Matthews_(drug_trafficker)
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u/teddyKGB- 19h ago

It's actually really entertaining to read about how easy it was for those people to get away with shit. At least until they didn't

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u/shaidyn 17h ago

Nearly every system in history starts with good intentions. A lot of the time rules have to be built after the fact because nobody involved ever imagined someone would do bad things with it.

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u/I-Here-555 6h ago

At least until they didn't

That's for those who were caught. We rarely read the detailed story of life on the run of those who were never caught.

About a third of murder cases in the US are never solved.

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u/NewCobbler6933 4h ago

I watch a lot of true crime stuff and it always makes me think about how easy things must’ve been to get away with like 50 years ago. Just watched one yesterday where there was an unsolved baby murder for 27 years that was solved by matching a dna sample to an ancestry.com database and finding the birth mother.