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 evaded prosecution for years. She did so in the face of the entrenched racial and gender discrimination of the 1930s, whose impact on the...

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 open data projects ever seen, drawing numbers from institutions and individuals, building map upon map of their city, to better understand challenges...

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 billion in unpaid taxes. Abrasive and unsparing with criticism, Birkenfeld is not everyone’s model hero. He spent two and a-half years in a U.S....

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. … Continue reading "The woman who hunts illegal arms merchants"

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 on the laws of six countries allowing for sanctions against human rights offenders. We explore the tragic but inspiring story of a mild-mannered tax lawyer who exposed corruption and theft in Vladimir Putin’s Russia; who was urged to flee his...

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 the Third Reich, earned the Nazis’ trust, and fed them a pack of lies. His tour de force: persuading the Germans of a fabulously fake Allies battle...

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 the deadliest arms dealers on Earth, the artist who reclaimed a crime-ridden city for its residents, the world's least appreciated financial...