SWINDLER

A woman investigates her grandfather’s descent from successful businessman to white-collar criminal in this biography.

Dawson grew up thinking of her grandfather Alfred Ernest as a “slightly romantic figure, perhaps a Robin Hood sort of guy,” an audacious man who embraced adventure and landed in some kind of legal trouble. After his death, she came into possession of a trunk brimming with his personal papers, and the author set out to determine the truth her own father had refused to disclose. Ernest left his native England for Canada in 1905 with little more than a “restless, risk-taking spirit” in order to escape poverty, the hole left by an absentee father, and the neglect of a “wicked stepmother.” He found astonishing success as an insurance salesman and eventually became “one of Canada’s most prominent corporate leaders and financiers.” But he was wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929. He inexplicably turned to selling mining stock, peddling ownership in “worthless shell companies—fictitious companies that he had recently invented out of whole cloth.” Dawson sifts through the evidence with admirable diligence—it comes as no surprise that she is a journalist. She reconstructs not only the facts of the matter—Ernest was arrested in 1942 and spent years in prison while his relatives “told their friends and neighbours” that he was in the army—but also the complex psychology of a formerly upright citizen who ruined the lives of ordinary people for financial gain. The author offers no facile closure on this score but rather a series of impressions: Ernest was an ambitious man who loved to gamble and had a deep romantic streak that expressed itself in his literary aspirations. It does not at all seem a contradiction that Dawson concludes that Ernest died a “broken old man” who also “lived a full life, with generous measures of love, despair, art, and adventure.” This is a mesmerizing biography, full of drama and subtlety, and an intriguing slice of Canadian history.

A rigorously researched account that’s filled with keen insights about a financier and swindler.