The Italian sculptor-falsifier Alceo Dossena, whose name is associated with the most notorious scandal in the world of art of the first half of the twentieth century, was a genius of his work.

One May day in 1927, a grief-stricken elderly man sat in a small, shabby room, and beside him on the bed lay a woman who had just died. They were Alceo Dossena and his much-loved wife Maria. He had struggled in vain for her frail life - the unfortunate one had been ill for a long time, and in the end death had proved stronger. And now the inconsolable husband had not even money to bury her. Those to whom he had appealed for help had ruthlessly refused him.

"Potemkin villages" - a stable phrase that means visible, ostentatious prosperity and an attempt to cover with it the unsightly aspects of Russian reality. Its origin is due to the grandiose journey of Empress Catherine II in January-July 1787 in Novorossiya, during which her favorite, Prince Grigory Potemkin, responsible for the development and improvement of this region, demonstrated crowded rural settlements with well-established economy. At the same time, rumors spread that all this splendor was just a set and a theatrical production.

The case of a couple from El Paso, Texas, ranks among the greatest mysteries of the 20th century. The husband and wife disappeared without a trace, leaving behind all their belongings, including valuables.

On August 15, 1957, a friend of the Patterson's, Cecil Ward, called the police and reported the couple, whom he had last seen on March 5, missing. Law enforcers searched their home and concluded that William and Margaret had left in a hurry: there were still unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, clothes were spread out on the bed and chairs. In addition, the couple had left all communications turned on, the mail was still being delivered on schedule, and Margaret had not even picked up her expensive fur coat from the dry cleaners.

The robbery attack (in the language of RSDLP members, "expropriation" or "exp"), committed on June 13, 1907, on Tbilisi's Erivan Square, has gone down in history as one of the most daring and major crimes of the early twentieth century. The attackers, having killed, according to official data, three people accompanying a collection vehicle and wounded 50 others, escaped with 250 thousand rubles, a sum equivalent to 5 million dollars today.