In the US, December 11 is “Indiana Day”, but really it’s only celebrated in Indiana itself. It commemorates Indiana becoming a state in 1816, but the date became an official observance only in 1925. Indiana was the 19th state, admitted a year before Mississippi, when it was transformed from the “Indiana Territory” to Indiana.
As the US expanded across North America, that was the typical process; a geographic area was invaded by European settlers and declared a “territory,” which takes an act of Congress. Territories were part of the nation at that point, although the process most resembles something that might happen on a playground. It wasn’t (usually) a negotiation, and no other entities (usually) had to agree; it was a unilateral declaration that “we own this now.” The settlers in US territories generally seemed to want their territories to become states because that would give them the official ability to establish their own regional governments. Moreover, since most of them were fully aware that the areas already had residents (for several thousand years), and the settlers themselves might not be entirely welcome, statehood would increase the resources they could rely on to defend their invasion of the area.
Indiana was no different; the place was even named in recognition that it was somebody else’s land. “Indiana” (which was also the name of the territory) simply means “Land of the Indians.” It was officially named in 1800, when everybody was well aware that India had nothing to do with it, but for some reason that term for the people living in North America had stuck ever since Columbus bumbled his way across the Atlantic and back, evidently thinking he’d been somewhere he never got close to.
By the way, the whole “Columbus proved the world was round” is just fairy-tale nonsense based on a Washington Irving story. Even in the 1400s nobody seriously believed the world was flat — that was a myth created in the 1600s by Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda. He did, though, (probably) keep believing that he’d reached India, or close to it, even well after it was pretty obvious he hadn’t. He was also, not incidentally, a religious fanatic. Later in life he wrote a book called the Book of Prophecies arguing that his voyages were actually fulfillment of Biblical prophecies.
Whether it stemmed from his religiosity or not, Columbus turned out to be too brutal and savage even for his contemporaries, who had very little regard for human lives other than their own. He had been made a colonial governor in Hispaniola for a time, but was arrested and shipped back to Spain because of excessive brutality. He then apparently spent much of his time complaining that Spain owed him 10% of all the profits from the New World. That had actually been written into a document called the Capitulations of Santa Fe, which also named him the governor. Spain argued that since he’d made such a mess of his governorship that he’d been removed and jailed, the whole arrangement had been voided.
The lawsuits between Columbus and Spain continued even after Columbus’ death in 1506. His son Diego had also been named a colonial governor and “admiral of the Indies” by King Ferdinand, but Diego sued the king because he thought his post should be for life instead of “for the time my mercy and will would have it,” as the king said. The lawsuits continued after Diago’s death too; his son Luis was named as the injured party even though at the time he was just a kid. The whole thing was partially settled in 1536 when Spain agreed to give the family land in Jamaica, and Hispaniola, and pay them 10,000 ducats per year. Ducats were gold coins of varying value, but 10,000 of them was a lot.
It wasn’t enough for the Columbus family, though. By then the family business was appearing in court. They continued to sue the government over this or that issue — all relatively minor — for the next 250 years. One incidental outcome of the testimony over the years, almost all of which still exists and is still studied by historians, is that Columbus himself might not even have been responsible for his 1492 voyage other than doing the fundraising. Someone named Martin Alonso Pinzón might have been the explorer instead. Pinzón was just not as good at grabbing attention.
Grabbing attention is exactly the opposite of what Jimmy Burke was good at. He was a gangster in the Lucchese crime family in New York — one of the infamous “Five Families” that dominated organized crime in the US from the 1920s (when organized crime was an unintended consequence of Prohibition) through at least the 1980s. Burke was known as “Jimmy the Gent,” and was probably the organizer of the great “Lufthansa heist” on December 11, 1978. It was the biggest robbery in the history of the US at the time. If you’ve seen the film Goodfellas, Robert de Niro’s character is based on Burke. Nearly everybody got away with the heist; the only person ever caught was the one who worked at the airport.
The Lufthansa heist netted over $5 million, but that’s barely a rounding error when you consider Bernard Madoff, who was arrested on December 11, 2008. His Ponzi scheme was the biggest fraud yet, worth somewhere near $65 billion overall. That’s a significant amount no matter how you consider it — in fact, it’s about 20% of the entire economy of Indiana.
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