THE CON QUEEN OF HOLLYWOOD

Tracking an elusive con artist.

Beginning in 2018, investigative journalist Johnson, author of The Wolf and the Watchman, wrote several articles for the Hollywood Reporter about a criminal known as the Con Queen who had impersonated famous individuals in the entertainment industry in order to extort money from hundreds of victims. Johnson reported on the dogged efforts of a New Jersey private investigator to document the widespread scam, which eventually involved the FBI in pursuing the con man who posed as “a Netflix producer, a writer, the scion of a dynasty, the son of a movie mogul, a self-made man, a wealthy investor, a Warner Bros. executive, a real estate magnate, friend to the illustrious and the blessed.” However, as the author discovered when he embarked on his own search, “he was none of these things. He inhabited avatars when they suited him.” Johnson’s tense page-turner begins with a focus on some of the Con Queen’s victims: men eager for recognition, affirmation, and, not least, money. Each shelled out tens of thousands of dollars on trips to Indonesia, where they were sent on assignments by someone they thought was a big-name film or TV executive. All were the creations of Hargobind “Harvey” Tahilramani, described by some as a psychopath and by others as the embodiment of evil. Johnson, who admits “the allure that the dark holds” for him, was determined to track him down. In 2020, the author was able to meet with him, and after Johnson returned home to Seattle, they talked daily, sometimes for hours. “Harvey,” he writes, “was a room of voices, lucid or raving, frantic somehow to escape or hold me hostage or both.” Harvey’s strange seductiveness entrapped him: “I had begun to feel as though he had found a way to inhabit me.” Although Johnson’s obsessive investigation results in a penetrating picture of a sad, sick man, it is his portrayals of Harvey’s vulnerable victims that prove more compelling.

A grifter exposed in sordid detail.