Crimes and Misdemeanors: Events & People on the Wrong Side of the Law

By Troy Segal

Shady activities. Dark deeds. Scurvy types. Take a walk on the wild side with these talks, readings, and performances that describe immoral individuals, bad behavior, and events on the wrong side of the law.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. AP PHOTO/Paramount Pictures/Mary Cybulsk

Jordan Belfort — the real-life “wolf of Wall Street” — emerges from his lair to discuss securities fraud and money laundering at the 92nd Street Y, Sept. 10; since he’ll be talking with a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, the fur should fly.

Detail from the cover of The Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York.

Throughout much of the 20th century, the Mafia ran the NYC gay nightlife scene, taking advantage of owners’ and patrons’ need for secrecy and inability to seek help from the authorities. Author Alex Hortis recreates those days, with vintage video, at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, Sept. 16.

Even after eight years, the issues embodied in Duke University lacrosse team scandal — teenage drinking, sexual misconduct and protections for college athletes — still push hot buttons, maintains writer William Cohan, whose book The Price of Silence analyzes the affair and its aftermath. At Hunter College, Sept. 22.

English National Opera Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

The Death of Klinghoffer — John Adams’ opera, based on the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro — is getting a new production at the Metropolitan Opera (an event not without controversy itself); its director, conductor and composer all meet for a discussion about it at the Guggenheim Museum, Oct. 10, augmented by excerpts by the cast.

In 1922, Hollywood was rocked by the murder of dapper director and ladies’ man William Desmond Taylor. Whodunit? Suspects at the time ranged from starlets to valets, but now the mystery is finally solved, at this 92nd Street Y lecture, Oct. 21.

A scene from Theo Van Gogh’s Submission

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, screenwriter of the 2004 film Submission, which examines what it deems Koran-mandated violence against women, discusses the short movie and the violent death of its director, Theo van Gogh, at the 92nd Street Y, Oct. 22.

After all these dark doings, it might be welcome to examine the evolution of morality in human beings — the subject of a conversation among religious, psychological and medical experts, part of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, at the Walter Reade Theater, Oct. 25.