Free Republic

A man in his mid-20s who graduated from Atlantic City High School is believed to be the first American member of the Islamic State terror group to be filmed beheading a prisoner, according to a report in The Atlantic magazine published Saturday. Zulfi Hoxha, whose family immigrated to the United States from Albania and formerly owned a pizzeria in Margate, is believed to have connected with another man, David Wright, through online video games possibly as early as 2010, the magazine reported. Wright put Hoxha in touch with others who then helped Hoxha travel to a part of Syria controlled...

In October of 2014, Steven Pratt was supposed to begin his life anew. He had served out a 30-year prison sentence and gone home to Atlantic City, N.J., where his family held a party to welcome him. But a violent history would repeat itself all too soon. Pratt was 15 when he got into an argument with his next-door neighbour, Michael Anderson. Court records show that Anderson was a father figure of sorts to Pratt. On Oct. 11, 1984, he asked Pratt and his friends to vacate a hallway in their apartment building where they were noisily hanging out and...

Thirty years ago, disgraced Atlantic City Mayor Michael Matthews stood in front of a federal judge and pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe from an FBI agent posing as a mobster. It was 1984. Atlantic City was a boomtown then, just six years into the casino gambling era that was going to remake the shabby resort town that I was assigned to cover as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Every day, I watched as buses from up and down the East Coast dumped thousands of slot machine mavens and roulette table hopefuls at the eight gambling palaces that had...