A highly readable, entertaining story offering a solid education for anyone lacking scruples and wanting to make money....
The granddaddy of all con men, Leo Koretz (1881-1925), gives Jobb (Journalism/Univ. of King’s Coll., Halifax; The Cajuns: A People’s Story of Exile and Triumph, 2005) the opportunity to exhibit his impressive research and storytelling skills.
The original Ponzi scheme lasted less than a year, but Koretz had already laid the groundwork for the greatest fraud ever. Bored with his life as a lawyer, he discovered an easy way to make money from people who already had plenty, but selling false mortgages to acquaintances didn’t begin to support his extravagant lifestyle. Eventually, a merchant named David Nieto drew Koretz in, claiming to have acreage in the Bayano Valley in Panama that had a limitless supply of timber. After investing $1,000, Koretz convinced friends to add another $9,000. When he went to Panama to inspect the land, he knew he’d been played for a sucker. He may have lost money, but it showed him the means to get others to invest in his “big idea” to profit from “timberland” in Panama. Throughout his fraudulent “career,” he was clever in choosing investors, never asking outright for money. Instead, he hinted at the great wealth he was making, and he flaunted it, insisting he was fully backed. Nothing drives up demand like short supply, and the wealthy friends he lavishly entertained were begging to give him money. As often as not, he turned them down, but they invariably came back with still larger checks. Koretz used the new income to pay out dividends to the investors, many of whom were his own extended family. In a stroke of evil genius, he convinced most of them to reinvest the dividends, most never taking a dime of profit. The author keeps readers on edge following the scam’s collapse and the worldwide manhunt, as they wait to see if Koretz might just get away with it.
A highly readable, entertaining story offering a solid education for anyone lacking scruples and wanting to make money. Surely Bernie Madoff studied Koretz’s methods.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61620-175-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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