5 Historical people you should defenitely know.

1. Joseph Valachi
First Person to Expose the MafiaJoseph Valachi was born in East Harlem, New York City, on 22 September 1904. His criminal career began with a small gang named The Minutemen. The gang was known for being able to carry out burglaries and escape in under a minute. In the early 1930s, Valachi was introduced to the Cosa Nostra and became a soldier in the Reina Family (now known as the Lucchese Family) during the height of the Castellammarese War. Valachi fought on the side of Salvatore Maranzano, who eventually defeated rival Joseph Masseria. After Maranzano was murdered in 1931, Valachi became a soldier in the Genovese Family headed by Charles “Lucky” Luciano.In October 1963, Joseph Valachi became an informant for the FBI and testified that the Mafia did exist. He was the first person to publicly acknowledge the Mafia. Valachi’s disclosures did not lead to the prosecution of crime leaders. However, he was able to provide many details on the organization’s history, operations, and rituals. Valachi named members of major crime families and aided in several unsolved murders. His testimony was broadcast on radio and television and published in newspapers. In the early 1960s, Joseph Valachi made the Cosa Nostra a household name. Valachi’s motivations for becoming an informant have been debated. In 1962, while in prison for heroin trafficking, Valachi murdered a man he feared was sent to kill him. Joseph claimed that he testified against the Mafia as a public service, but he might have been attempting to get his prison sentence reduced. In 1966, Valachi attempted to hang himself using an electrical extension cord. He died of a heart attack in 1971, at La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution in Texas. The $100,000 bounty placed on his head went uncollected. Joseph Valachi inspired the characters of Willi Cicci and Frank Pentangeli in the hit film The Godfather Part II (1974).

2. Craig Harrison
 First Person to Record a Sniper Kill at a Range of 2,475 m (2,707 yd)Craig Harrison is a member of the Household Cavalry of the British armed forces. In 2009, while participating in the War in Afghanistan, Harrison shot two Taliban machine gunners south of Musa Qala in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan at a range of 2,475 m (2,707 yd) using an L115A3 Long Range Rifle. The shot was from approximately 1.53 miles (2.4 km) away. It is the longest confirmed sniper kill in combat. Craig Harrison was nearly 3,000 feet beyond the effective range of his Long Range Rifle at the time of the shots. The bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target. The distance was so great that the Taliban members probably didn’t hear the shots. In a BBC interview, Harrison reported it took about nine shots for him and his spotter to range the targets, and then his first attempt was a kill shot. The bullets were aided by the ambient air density near the valley in which Musa Qala is situated. Harrison said the environmental conditions were perfect for long range shooting – with no wind, mild weather and clear visibility. Craig’s shot passed the previous record set by Canadian corporal Rob Furlong in 2002, by 45 m (49 yd). In a remarkable tour of duty, Craig Harrison cheated death a few weeks after the event when a Taliban bullet pierced his helmet but was deflected away from his skull. Harrison later broke both arms when his army vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb. After the bombing, Craig was sent back to the UK for treatment, but insisted on returning to the front line after making a full recovery. He has since said the injury didn’t affect his natural sniper ability.

3. Colin Pitchfork
 First Person Convicted of Murder Based on DNA Fingerprinting EvidenceOn 21 November 1983, a 15-year-old girl named Lynda Mann left her home in Narborough, Leicestershire, England, to visit a friend’s house and never returned. The next morning, Lynda was found raped and strangled on a deserted footpath known locally as the Black Pad. Using forensic science techniques available at the time, police linked a semen sample taken from her body to a person with type A blood and an enzyme profile that matched only 10 percent of males. With no other leads or evidence at the time, the case was left open. Just under three years later, on 31 July 1986, another 15-year-old girl from Enderby, also in Leicestershire, named Dawn Ashworth took a shortcut instead of her normal route home. Two days later, her body was found in a wooded area near a footpath called Ten Pound Lane. She had been beaten, savagely raped, and strangled to death. The semen samples taken revealed that the perpetrator had the same blood type as Lynda Mann’s killer. The prime suspect was a local 17-year-old youth named Richard Buckland who revealed knowledge of Ashworth’s body. Under interrogation, Buckland admitted to Dawn Ashworth’s murder, but said he didn’t kill Lynda Mann. In 1986, Alec Jeffreys of the University of Leicester had recently developed DNA profiling along with Peter Gill and Dave Werrett of the Forensic Science Service (FSS). DNA profiling is used to assist in the identification of individuals by their DNA profiles. Using this technique, Jeffreys compared semen samples from both murders against a blood sample from Buckland, which conclusively proved that both girls were killed by the same man, but not Buckland. As a result, Richard Buckland became the first person to have his innocence established by DNA fingerprinting. There is no doubt that without the DNA evidence Buckland would have been sentenced for the murder of Dawn Ashworth. After the turn of events, the Leicestershire Constabulary undertook an investigation in which 5,000 local men were asked to volunteer blood or saliva samples. This took six months and no matches were found. Later, a man named Ian Kelly was heard bragging to his friends that he had obtained £200 for giving a sample while masquerading as his friend Colin Pitchfork, a local baker. On 19 September 1987, Pitchfork was arrested at his home in Haybarn Close, in the neighboring village of Littlethorpe. His recorded fingerprint DNA sample matched the killer. Colin Pitchfork admitted to the two murders in addition to another incident of sexual assault. He is the first criminal convicted of murder based on DNA fingerprinting evidence and the first to be caught as a result of mass DNA screening. On 14 May 2009, Pitchfork’s legal appeal was heard at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. He won a two-year reduction in his original sentence of a minimum 30 years’ imprisonment. As a consequence, Pitchfork will now be eligible for release in 2016. The Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge stated, however, that “he cannot be released unless and until the safety of the public is assured.” For a child murderer, this should be never.

4. Tsutomu Yamaguchi
First Recognized Survivor of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic BombingsDuring the final stages of World War II in 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japan cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first landed on 6 August 1945, and the second on 9 August, these two events are the only use of nuclear weapons in war to date. Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a Japanese national who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. It should be noted that at least 160 people are known to have been affected by both bombings, but Yamaguchi is the only person to have been officially recognized by the government of Japan as surviving both explosions. In 1945, he was a resident of Nagasaki, and in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15am on August 6. When the bomb went off, Yamaguchi was approximately 3 km (1.8 miles) away. Yamaguchi recalls seeing the bomber and two small parachutes, before there was “a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over.” The explosion ruptured his eardrums, blinded him temporarily, and left him with serious burns over the top half of his body. Yamaguchi did not receive treatment until he got back to Nagasaki the next day. Despite being heavily bandaged, Yamaguchi reported to work three days after the explosion. At 11 am on August 9, he was describing the blast in Hiroshima when the American bomber Bockscar dropped the Fat Man atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Yamaguchi’s location was again 3 km (1.8 miles) from ground zero, but this time he was unhurt by the blast. When the Japanese government officially recognized atomic bomb survivors as Hibakusha in 1957, Yamaguchi was only identified as being present at Nagasaki. As he grew older, his opinions about the use of atomic weapons began to change. In his eighties, Yamaguchi wrote a book about his experiences and was invited to take part in a 2006 documentary about 165 double A-bomb survivors. At first, he didn’t feel the need to draw attention to his double survivor status. However as he aged, Yamaguchi applied for double recognition. The application was accepted by the Japanese government in March 2009, making Yamaguchi the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both bombings.In 2009, Tsutomu Yamaguchi learned that he was dying of stomach cancer. He passed away on 4 January 2010 in Nagasaki at the age of 93. On 22 December 2009, Canadian movie director James Cameron and author Charles Pellegrino met Yamaguchi while he was in a hospital in Nagasaki, and discussed the idea of making a film about nuclear weapons. Yamaguchi said, “I think it’s Cameron’s and Pellegrino’s destiny to make a film about nuclear weapons.”

5.Vasili Blokhin
First and Only Person to Execute Over 10,000 PeopleVasili Blokhin was a Soviet Major-General who served as the chief executioner for the NKVD (Soviet secret police). He was hand-picked for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926. Blokhin led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous mass executions during Stalin’s reign, most notably during the Great Purge and World War II. Vasili Blokhin is recorded as having personally executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including 7,000 condemned Polish POWs in one mass execution, making him the most prolific official executioner in world history. During his time as executioner, Vasili Blokhin made sure he personally pulled the trigger on all high-profile cases conducted in the Soviet Union. His most infamous act was the April 1940 Katyn massacre, in which Blokhin killed 7,000 Polish officers. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria’s proposal to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps, dated 5 March 1940. The mass executions conducted by Blokhin in Poland were carried out on 28 consecutive nights. He used a specially-constructed basement execution chamber at the NKVD headquarters in Kalinin, Russia (now Tver). In April of 1940, Vasili Blokhin performed 300 executions per night. He engineered a deranged system in which the prisoners were individually led into a small chamber. The chamber was painted red and was known as the “Leninist room.” The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a long wall for the prisoners to stand against. Vasili Blokhin was outfitted with a leather butcher’s apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform. He had no procurator present and did not read any death sentences to the victims. Over and over again, Blokhin pushed the prisoner against the wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol. The use of a German pocket pistol, which was commonly carried by Nazi intelligence agents, provided plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later. Blokhin had his men escort prisoners to the basement, confirm identification, and then remove the bodies and hose down the blood after each execution. He was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly without interruption. The executions were conducted at night, starting at dark and continuing until dawn. The bodies were continuously loaded on flat-bed trucks through a back door and buried in mass graves. Vasili Blokhin worked without pause for ten hours each night, executing an average of one prisoner every three minutes. The event is the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record. On 27 April 1940, Blokhin secretly received the Order of the Red Banner from Joseph Stalin. In 1955, Blokhin sank into alcoholism, went insane, and died, with the official cause being “suicide.” In 1943, the government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest. The revelation led to the end of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the London-based Polish government-in-exile. The Soviet Union continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when the government officially acknowledged and condemned the event.