From 1924 to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market adoption empire that took thousands of children from vulnerable families and sold them to wealthy couples. One of the babies adopted through her agency grew up to become wrestling legend Ric Flair. Tann ran the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. She targeted poor and unmarried mothers, sometimes taking children without permission, telling parents their babies had died, or using courts to falsely declare them abandoned. Birth certificates and adoption records were then altered or fabricated, making it incredibly difficult for families to ever find each other again. More than 5,000 children were placed through Tann’s operation. Adoptive families were charged huge fees, while Tann secretly accumulated a fortune. Conditions inside facilities connected to her operation were also horrific. Historians estimate hundreds of children may have died while in her care, and 19 children were later discovered to have been buried without individual headstones in a single Memphis cemetery plot. Among the children processed through Tann’s agency was a baby originally known as Fred Phillips. He was adopted by Richard and Kathleen Fliehr. The world would eventually know him as Ric Flair. Flair opened his 2004 autobiography with a chapter titled: “Black Market Baby.” Tann died in 1950, just as authorities were closing in on her operation. She was never prosecuted.