Con Artists Memoir

Napoleon famously observed that "history is a set of lies agreed upon", and Edward Steers Jr. investigates six of the most amazing frauds ever to gain wide acceptance in this engrossing book. The controversies that Steers presents show that there are two major factors involved in the success of a hoax or forgery - greed and the desire to believe.

Are you afraid of things that go "bump" in the night? Don't look now, but some of the most gruesome serial murders occurred in your neighborhood. Fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy had a long history of terrorizing and brutalizing young boys around Boston, then his thoughts turned to murder. Meet America's youngest serial killer. When asked why he did it, all he could say was: "I don't know. I had to." Belle Gunness, the La Porte, Indiana, serial killer, lured men to her murder farm by advertising for a husband in Scandinavian matrimonial magazines.

There has never been a con-man trickster in American history as devious, or as likeable, as Randolph "Soapy" Smith. He was a sociopath with a smile that could melt the hardest heart. He was a man without a conscience, a natural criminal quite willing to steal from the hapless poor and the greedy rich with an equally shameless eagerness. Soapy’s only measure of man was the wallet he could empty from the day he learned how to cheat at cards, hide the pea in a shell game, or invent a scam.

Wie gelang dem "Ausbrecherkönig" Carl August Lorentzen seine legendäre Flucht aus dem Staatsgefängnis im dänischen Horsens kurz vor Weihnachten 1949? Mit dieser Frage beschäftigt sich Niels Ole Frederiksen, der als Dreijähriger als Sohn des damaligen Vize-Inspektors diese spektakulärste Flucht aller Zeiten aus einem dänischen Gefängnis quasi hautnah miterlebte. Ein hochspannender True Crime-Fall aus Dänemark!

Late-1970s Los Angeles was rampant with killers and shady characters, but all the go-getters at Space Matters saw was possibility. Richard Kasparov was handsome and charismatic; his younger associate, Jerry Schneiderman, brilliant and nerdy. When the pair hired a veteran contractor to oversee construction, the space planning firm they operated out of a hip mansion in LA's Miracle Mile district appeared poised to transform the boundless skyline into their jackpot. After the promising team imploded, however, the orderly lines on their blueprints succumbed to treachery and secrets.

Lorenza Mazzetti, regista, scrittrice, pittrice, personalità fra le più straordinarie e influenti del panorama culturale del Novecento, si racconta in un dialogo che ripercorre tutte le sfumature emotive di un'intera esistenza.

"Così era finita Gerda Taro, per non aver voluto abbandonare il fronte quando non c'era più nessuna speranza, ed era rimasta ferita a morte come tanti altri, in una strada polverosa; lasciò nelle sue foto testimonianza dell'enorme delitto che era stata la guerra. Aveva dedicato la sua splendida vita a un degno compito, a una giusta causa persa". Questo audiolibro racconta la vita di questa ragazza ribelle, l'amore con Robert Capa, l'avventura di fotografare e la gioia di vivere nella Parigi degli anni Trenta.

"Millionaire" had just entered the American lexicon and Cassie Chadwick was front page news, becoming a media sensation before mass media, even eclipsing President Roosevelt’s inauguration. Using these newspaper articles, Hazelgrove tells the story of one of the greatest cons in American history.

The conman and master chameleon thought of himself as a modern-day Frank Abagnale, the fraudster behind the book and movie Catch Me If You Can. It was a stark cry from how investigators saw him. To the feds chasing him, John Donald Cody was more like Jason Bourne - a fictional character on the silver screen who slips in and out of aliases and remains one step ahead.

Queen of the Con tells the true story of Cassie Chadwick, a successful swindler and “one of the top 10 imposters of all time”, according to TIME magazine. Born Betsy Bigley in 1857 in Canada, she first operated as Madame Devere, a European clairvoyant, and in 1890, was arrested for defrauding a Toledo bank of $20,000. In the mid-1890s, while working as a madam in Cleveland, Cassie met and married a widowed physician with a coveted Euclid Avenue address.

The Big Con: The Story of a Book to Film Scam, the Victims, Other Writer Scams, and How to Avoid Being a Victim is about the discovery of a scam and meeting the victims. The scammers created an elaborate fraud, in which authors with dreams of turning their books into films were duped into believing a company could pitch their projects to executives at top film companies.