True White Collar Crime

The Suez Crisis of 1956 was the nadir of Britain's twentieth century, the moment when the once-superpower was bullied into retreat. "Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role," said Dean Acherson, a former US secretary of state. Acheson's line has entered into the canon of great quotations: but it was wrong. Britain had already found a role. The leaders of the world just hadn't noticed it yet. Butler to the World reveals how Britain came to assume its role as the center of the offshore economy.

By all accounts, Thomas Gilbert Jr. led a charmed life. The son of a wealthy hedge fund manager and a financier, he grew up surrounded by a loving family and all the luxury an Upper East Side childhood could provide: education at the elite Buckley School and Deerfield Academy, summers in a sprawling seaside mansion in the Hamptons. He was strikingly handsome, moving with ease through glittering social circles and following in his father's footsteps to Princeton. But Tommy always felt different, and the cracks in his façade began to show.

In the late 2000s, Molly Bloom, a twenty something petite brunette from Loveland Colorado, ran the highest stakes, most exclusive poker game Hollywood had ever seen - she was its mistress, its lion tamer, its agent, and its oxygen. Everyone wanted in, few were invited to play. Hundreds of millions of dollars were won and lost at her table. Molly's game became the game for those in the know - celebrities, business moguls, and millionaires.

It's the most shocking, unknown tale of our era: a defense contractor who bribed US Navy officers with cash, prostitutes, and luxury items in return for multimillion-dollar deals. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. With exclusive access to Leonard Glenn Francis himself, Fat Leonard reveals the true story of the misogynistic men at the heart of the navy and the brave women who brought them down.

Born into one of America's most illustrious trading families, Sam Israel was determined to strike out on his own. After apprenticing with one of the greatest traders of the 1980s, he founded his own fast-growing hedge fund, promising investors extraordinary returns. But it was all an elaborate charade.

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller is exactly what the title promises. This is more than another book about the Bernie Madoff scandal, this is a fast-paced, blow-by-blow, true-crime story that you have to hear to believe. In a true David and Goliath tale, the underdog number cruncher uncovers the largest financial fraud in history, and has to fight everything and everyone in the system to bring it down.

It was a time when anything seemed possible, instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury, and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors' money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam to an art form and raked in millions at his office in downtown Boston.

In Never Saw Me Coming, Tanya Smith shares her deeply personal and remarkable story of how she went from a precocious young girl to a money-grabbing, computer-savvy wiz. It starts out as a keen interest in technology and innocently acquiring phone numbers to Michael Jackson, as well as other celebrities, and moves to her successfully stealing and depositing $5,000 into her grandmother’s banking account. By the time she is 18, the risk taker has confiscated millions in cash.

This account describes how a 28-year-old from Watford, Nick Leeson, plunged Barings Bank into ruin. In 1994, Leeson seemed to be making the company millions of pounds a week, but he explains how the cover-up of a colleague's small error led to the crash of Britain's oldest merchant bank.

On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul Pringle thought should have taken, at most, a few weeks to check out: a drug overdose at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars—Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is the largest private employer in the city of L.A., and it casts a long shadow.

No name is more synonymous with the evils of Wall Street than Bernie Madoff. Arrested for fraud in 2008 - during the depths of the global financial crisis - the 70-year-old market maker, investment advisor, and former chairman of the NASDAQ had orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in world history, fleecing thousands of investors across the globe to the tune of $65 billion. To this day, questions remain: Why did he do it? How did he get away with it for so long? What did his family know? Who is the elusive Bernie Madoff?

In his intimate diary, Jerome Mayne personally shares his life-saving lessons of ethics, morality, trust, and humility, with wit and passion. He was an aspiring finance professional on his way to the top. With his new family and his sights set for success, the world was his oyster. Lured by the prospect of big business, his career derailed when he joined forces with his future co-conspirators in a real estate finance scandal. The nightmare begins with a hurricane of FBI investigations, criminal court, and prison.

Secrecy World offers a disturbing and sobering view of how the world really works and raises crucial questions about financial and legal institutions we may once have trusted. This audiobook discusses the fragile scaffolding upholding any tax haven, the flexible laws of banking, and the radiating impact of an international financial scandal.

When the federal government catches hotshot financial adviser Louis Martin “Marty” Blazer defrauding his NFL-player clients, it’s time to come clean. He has no reasonable defense. What he has is a bigger story to spill to the feds—that of a multibillion-dollar conspiracy that exploits the most talented college athletes and implicates one of the most popular entertainment industries in the nation. The DOJ is listening, and the truth could literally set Marty free. All he has to do is prove that the NCAA is a vast ongoing scam.

Steven Donziger, a self-styled social activist and Harvard educated lawyer, signed on to a budding class action lawsuit against multinational Texaco. The suit sought reparations for the Ecuadorian peasants and tribes people whose lives were affected by decades of oil production near their villages and fields. During twenty years of legal hostilities in federal courts in Manhattan and remote provincial tribunals in the Ecuadorian jungle, Donziger and Chevron's lawyers followed fierce no-holds-barred rules.

While tracking down his tormentor, the author encounters an improbable cast of characters that includes an elocution teacher with ill-fitting dentures, a gang of faux-royal swindlers, a crime investigator with "paper in his blood", and a monocled grand master of the Knights of Malta. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweil's riveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the "parallel lives" of a victim and his abuser.

Today's global economy has a dark underbelly. Using cutting-edge technology and age-old techniques of deceit and manipulation, corporate spies are the hidden puppeteers of globalized business. In his gripping, alarming exposé, Eamon Javers recounts the sordid history of this hidden world - from Allan Pinkerton, the nation's first "private eye" through Howard Hughes's private CIA, to the shocking realities of a vast modern-day spying network with tentacles reaching into virtually every corner of the globe.

It was the corporate collapse that appeared to come out of nowhere. In late 2001, the Enron Corporation—a darling of the financial world, a company whose executives were friends of presidents and the powerful—imploded virtually overnight, leaving vast wreckage in its wake and sparking a criminal investigation that would last for years. Kurt Eichenwald transforms the unbelievable story of the Enron scandal into a rip-roaring narrative of epic proportions.

From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes an outrageous story of greed, corruption, and conspiracy, which left the FBI and Justice Department counting on the cooperation of one man.

As Frank Amodeo met with President George W. Bush at the White House to discuss NATO operations in Afghanistan, no one knew that he’d already embezzled nearly $200 million from the federal government - money he intended to use to bankroll his plan to take over the world. The most disturbing part of it all is, had the US government not thwarted his plans, Amodeo might have just pulled it off.