Con Artists Memoir

Art scams are today so numerous that the specter of a lawsuit arising from a mistaken attribution has scared a number of experts away from the business of authentication and forgery, and with good reason. Art scams are increasingly convincing and involve incredible sums of money. The cons perpetrated by unscrupulous art dealers and their accomplices are proportionately elaborate. Anthony M. Amore's The Art of the Con tells the stories of some of history's most notorious yet untold cons.

Groundbreaking scientific analysis that breaks the JFK assassination wide open! Did a shot from the "grassy knoll" kill President Kennedy? If so, was Oswald part of a conspiracy or an innocent patsy? Why have scientific experts who examined the evidence failed to put such questions to rest? In 2001, scientist Dr. Donald Byron Thomas published a peer-reviewed article that revived the debate over the finding by the House Select Committee on Assassinations that there had indeed been a shot from the grassy knoll, caught on a police dictabelt recording.

Hold Fast is the uncompromising story of Backpage.com, the world’s most scandalous website, and the rise and fall of alternative weekly newspapers nationwide.

At 5:02 p.m. on June 5, 1986, an emergency call came into the local sheriff’s office in the small town of Auburn, Washington State. A distressed housewife, Stella Nickell, said her husband, Bruce, was having a seizure. Officers rushed to the Nickells' mobile home to find Stella standing frozen at the door…. Bruce was on the floor fighting for his life.

The Missing JFK Assassination Film is not the typical JFK assassination book. This book does not attempt to answer the question of who killed John F. Kennedy; instead it addresses why we should question the actions of those involved and why the truth was withheld from the people. Though copies of Orville Nix's film exist, the original film is missing. Why? The FBI confiscated Orville's camera for several months, then returned it in pieces. Were these actions sinister, or were they just examples of governmental incompetence?

Now a number-one international best seller, Billion Dollar Whale is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude—one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system.

Arif Naqvi was charismatic, inspiring, and self-made—all the qualities of a successful business leader. The founder of Abraaj, a Dubai-based private-equity firm, Naqvi was the Key Man to the global elite searching for impact investments to make money and do good. In 2018, Simon Clark and Will Louch were contacted by an anonymous whistleblower who said Naqvi had swindled investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars and offered bribes to sustain his billionaire lifestyle. In April 2019—months after their exposé broke—Naqvi was arrested on charges of fraud and racketeering.

Con artists are everywhere—your new boyfriend or girlfriend, your new neighbor or coworker, your new friend—and they don’t outsmart you; they out-feel you to get their hands on your money. In Anatomy of a Con Artist, Walton lays out “the tells” based on hundreds of real-life cases he’s investigated.

On a spring day in 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson wandered into the Pacific Ocean and vanished. Weeks later she reappeared in the desert, claiming to have been kidnapped. A national media frenzy and months of investigation ensued. Who was this woman? America’s most famous evangelist, McPherson was a sophisticated marketer who used spectacle, storytelling, and the newest technology—including her own radio station—to bring God’s message to the masses.

Belle Gibson convinced the world she had healed herself from terminal brain cancer with a healthy diet. She built a global business based upon her claims. There was just one problem: she'd never had cancer. In 2015, journalists uncovered the truth: this hero of the wellness world, with over 200,000 followers, international book deals and a best-selling smartphone app, was a fraud.

Many have heard of NXIVM and its creator, Keith Raniere, the unassuming Albany man now prosecuted for ensnaring tens of thousands of people in the US, Mexico, Canada, and elsewhere to do his bidding and pay millions of dollars to participate in his self-improvement methodology. But where did Keith Raniere begin? Enter Toni Natalie, Keith's Patient Zero, the first one indoctrinated into Raniere's methodology and the first one to escape.

While investigating financial crimes for CNN Money, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken were intrigued by reports that elderly Americans were giving away thousands of dollars to mail-in schemes. With a little digging, they soon discovered a shocking true story. Victims received personalized letters from a woman who, claiming amazing psychic powers, convinced them to send money in return for riches, good health, and good fortune. The predatory scam has continued unabated for decades, raking in more than $200 million in the United States and Canada alone - with investigators from all over the world unable to stop it.

In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year globe-spanning quest.

Beginning in 2018, a powerful app for secure communications, called Anom, began to take root among drug dealers and other criminals. It had extraordinary safeguards to keep out prying eyes--the power to quickly wipe data, voice-masking technology, and more. It was better than other apps popular among organized crime syndicates, except for one thing: it was secretly run by law enforcement. Over the next few years, the FBI, along with law enforcement partners in Australia and parts of Europe, got a front row seat to the global criminal underworld.

Using newly declassified information, Dick Russell builds on three decades of painstaking research in On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, offering one of the most comprehensive and authoritative examinations of the assassination of our 35th president. Included are new revelations, such as the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was subjected to “mind control,” Russell’s personal encounters inside the KGB headquarters, and new information gleaned from an interview with Oswald’s widow.

In September 2010, at the beginning of the academic year at Sarah Lawrence College, a sophomore named Talia Ray asked her roommates if her father could stay with them for a while. No one objected. Her father, Larry Ray, was just released from prison, having spent three years behind bars after a conviction during a bitter custody dispute.

It was the trial that stunned America, the verdict that shocked us all. On July 5, 2011, nearly three years after her initial arrest, Casey Anthony walked away, virtually scot-free, from one of the most sensational murder trials of all time. She'd been accused of killing her daughter, Caylee, but the trial only left behind more questions: Was she actually innocent? What really happened to Caylee? Was this what justice really looked like?

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn - then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage - set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.

A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable 30-year run of a shape-shifting con man. The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany.

A compelling work of investigative journalism that explores the surprising origins and hidden ramifications of an epic late 1960s hoax, perpetrated by cultural luminaries, including Victor Navasky and E.L. Doctorow. For readers curious about the surprising connections between John F. Kennedy, Oliver Stone, Timothy McVeigh, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump.