Eunice Hunton Carter, a granddaughter of slaves, went on to become the lawyer who built the case against Charles “Lucky” Luciano, one the 20th century’s most powerful criminal kingpins. It was an assignment fraught with danger, but one Carter performed with tenacity, intelligence and a sense of mission, discovering the Achilles heel of a man who’d …

Gabriella Gómez-Mont is neither an urban planner nor an engineer nor a politician. She’s an artist. But as creative director of Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City), she has tackled some of the thorniest problems confronting the modern metropolis—with astonishing success. She and her team launched one of the biggest op…

One spring day, Bradley Birkenfeld boarded a flight out of Geneva, beginning a journey that would make him one of the greatest whistleblowers in financial history. The former banker with UBS provided information to U.S. authorities that would shatter Swiss banking secrecy and lead some 14,000 well-heeled Americans to fork over an astounding US$5 bi…

Kathi Lynn Austin has targeted, investigated and helped to bring down some of the world’s most dangerous arms dealers, exposing transactions that fuelled the Rwandan genocide and shutting down smuggling networks that helped power years of civil war in the Congo. But she is neither a cop nor a CIA agent nor a crusading prosecutor. She’s merely an Am…

It’s been a decade since Sergei Magnitsky was tortured and killed in a Moscow prison. In that time, his name has become synonymous with rule-of-law and international justice—even as those principles come under attack around the world. It is memorialized in the laws of six countries allowing for sanctions against human rights offenders. How did Magn…

On this 75th anniversary year of D-day, the world marked the invasion that started the liberation of France from Nazi rule. Forgotten in the celebrations was a lynchpin of that operation, a man operating very far from the front. Juan Pujol Garcia was perhaps the most important spy from WWII. As Agent GARBO, he walked into the innermost circles of t…

History doesn’t call them heroes—but only because not enough people know their stories. The Power of One is a podcast dedicated to the extraordinary stories of ordinary people whose actions have dramatically changed the world in some way. Subscribe to hear the stories of unlikely heroes— the fantasist who saved D-Day, the woman who went up against …