* On Dec. 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff, the founder and chairman of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, was arrested and subsequently convicted of fraud for the multi-billiondollar Ponzi scheme that fleeced investors around the world for decades.
* On Dec. 12, 1968, American actress Tallulah Bankhead died at the age of 66 from double pneumonia. A flamboyant personality with a huskily seductive voice and a flair for exhibitionism, her greatest success was as a stage actress (she was the inspiration for Blanche Dubois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”), though she also appeared in several prominent films and on TV and radio.
* On Dec. 13, 1642, Abel Tasman, a Dutch explorer and merchant, reached the coast of South Island in New Zealand and named it Staten Landt. The first European in recorded history to land on the Australian island state of Tasmania, he claimed it for the Dutch crown, and it was named for him as well.
* On Dec. 14, 1974, disaster film “The Towering Inferno,” starring professional rivals Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, was released. The film was shot in sequence so all the actors looked authentically haggard and dirty as it progressed.
* On Dec. 15, 1840, Napoleon Bonaparte received a French state funeral in Paris more than two decades after his death on the island of St. Helena, when his remains were exhumed and transferred to the Hotel des Invalides on the initiative of the French prime minister and King Louis-Philippe.
* On Dec. 16, 1907, in order to demonstrate America’s new presence as a world power, President Theodore Roosevelt embarked on a round-the-world cruise in a group of U.S. Navy battleships, making friendly courtesy visits to a number of international ports.
* On Dec. 17, 1986, Special Agent Polifrone went undercover to lure out American mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski. Polifrone gave Kuklinski some fake cyanide to use for a murder. Kuklinski found out later that it was fake and decided not to go through with the hit but was arrested at a roadblock on his way home.
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