In Minnesota’s roster of heirs gone bad, Duluth’s Alonzo J. Whiteman ranks high. He followed a youth of wealth, privilege, and education with a young adulthood of dazzling attainment, then decades of crime.

In 1904, Charles W. Malchow was a professor of medicine at Hamline University Medical School who had studied abroad in Germany and England. He had a happy marriage, a medical practice in downtown Minneapolis, and a house near Lake of the Isles. He was young, handsome, successful, and ambitious. Then he went to prison.

More than 1,000 left-wing protesters gathered at the Minnesota Capitol. on April 4, 1937, to support Governor Elmer Benson as he tried to persuade the legislature to pass a $17 million aid package for the unemployed. About 200 of the protesters stayed overnight in the senate chamber after someone jimmied open the doors with a knife, and two organizers were later convicted of the gross misdemeanor of preventing senators from assembling.