WArkady Arkadyevich Babchenko is a Russian print and television journalist. From 1995, Babchenko served in the communication corps in the North Caucasus while participating in the First Chechen War. He later volunteered for six months during the Second Chechen War. After leaving the army in 2000 he worked as a war correspondent for more than a decade. Since 2017 he has worked as a presenter for the TV channel ATR. In 2006 he published the book One Soldier's War, about his experiences in Chechnya.
WLawrence Joseph Bader, also known as John "Fritz" Johnson, was an American cookware salesman from Akron, Ohio who disappeared while on a fishing trip on Lake Erie on March 15, 1957. Declared dead in 1960, Bader was found alive five years later as John "Fritz" Johnson, a local TV personality living in Omaha, Nebraska. The incident is described by author Jay Robert Nash as "one of the most baffling amnesia disappearances on record, a weird story forever unanswered."
WMay Charlesworth, known as Violet Charlesworth was a British fraudster.
WClayton Counts was an American musician and composer, a former DJ, and one half of the experimental band Bull of Heaven.
WAleister Crowley was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
WClement John ("Jack") De Garis was an Australian entrepreneur and aviator. He worked in the dried fruits industry in the Sunraysia area around Mildura in the early 20th century, and was noted for his vibrant personality and colourful marketing style.
WJacquotte Delahaye, was a pirate of legend in the Caribbean sea. She was depicted as operating alongside Anne Dieu-le-Veut, was one of very few 17th-century female pirates. There is no evidence from period sources that Delahaye was a real person. Stories of her exploits are attributed to oral storytelling and Leon Treich, a French fiction writer of the 1940s.
WFerdinand Waldo Demara Jr. was an American impostor.
WTimothy Dexter was an American businessman noted for his writing and eccentricity.
WPrince Georgy Aleksandrovich Gruzinsky was a Russian nobleman of royal Georgian descent. An influential landowner and official in Nizhny Novgorod, he was known for his authoritarian rule over his estates as well as charity. During Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, he raised a local militia force to fight the French.
WFriedrich Gulda was an Austrian pianist and composer who worked in both the classical and jazz fields.
WJaroslav Hašek was a Czech writer, humorist, satirist, journalist, bohemian and anarchist. He is best known for his novel The Fate of the Good Soldier Švejk during the World War, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. The novel has been translated into about 60 languages, making it the most translated novel in Czech literature.
WSamuel Israel III is an American former hedge fund manager for the Bayou Hedge Fund Group, which he founded in 1996.
WKenneth Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
WRobert Oscar Lenkiewicz was one of South West England's most celebrated artists of modern times. Perennially unfashionable in high art circles, his work was nevertheless popular with the public. Lenkiewicz is regarded by some as a great painter who is 'finally being recognised as such after all these years of neglect by the art establishment, particularly by London, who would never have him. He didn't really play the game as far as London commercial galleries were concerned. He did his own thing out in the provinces, which was looked down upon.'
WVincent Kennedy McMahon is an American professional wrestling promoter and executive, businessman, entrepreneur, and media proprietor. He is currently serving as the chairman and chief executive officer of WWE, the largest professional wrestling promotion in the world. He is also the founder and owner of Alpha Entertainment.
WNazario Moreno González, commonly referred to by his alias El Chayo and/or El Más Loco, was a Mexican drug lord who headed La Familia Michoacana before heading the Knights Templar Cartel, a drug cartel headquartered in the state of Michoacán. He was one of Mexico's most-wanted drug lords.
WGrace Oakeshott was a British activist for women's rights who faked her own death in 1907 and emigrated to New Zealand with her lover, Walter Reeve.
WJuan Pujol Garcia, also known as Joan Pujol Garcia, was a Catalan spy who acted as a double agent loyal to Great Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, when he relocated to Britain to carry out fictitious spying activities for the Germans. He was given the codename Garbo by the British; their German counterparts codenamed him Alaric and referred to his non-existent spy network as "Arabal".
WAlfred Arthur Rouse was a British murderer, known as the Blazing Car Murderer, who was convicted and subsequently hanged at Bedford Gaol for the November 1930 murder of an unknown man in Hardingstone, Northamptonshire. Rouse's crime became known as the "Blazing Car Murder" due to the fact Rouse, seeking to fabricate his own death, burned to death an unknown hitchhiker whom he had rendered unconscious inside his car.
WAbu Mohammed Abubakar bin Mohammad al-Sheikawi was a Kanuri man known as the leader of Boko Haram, a Nigerian Islamist militant group. He served as deputy leader to the group's founder, Mohammed Yusuf, until Yusuf was executed in 2009.
WJohn Thomson Stonehouse was a British Labour and Co-operative Party politician and cabinet minister under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Stonehouse is remembered for his unsuccessful attempt at faking his own death in 1974, a scheme uncovered after a claim that Stonehouse was recently-disappeared murder suspect Lord Lucan.
WAleksandr Ivanovich Uspensky was a senior officer of the Cheka, the GPU and the NKVD. Uspensky was both a perpetrator and a victim of the Great Purge.