True Con Artist

In Los Angeles, a series of murders occurred during the summer of 1980 that left an indelible mark on countless individuals. This string of brutal and bloody crimes would make the already famous Sunset Boulevard aka the Sunset Strip infamous and a place forever synonymous with the word evil. This true story blends statements to law enforcement and trial testimony with personal accounts from those who experienced the events firsthand. The psychology behind these violent crimes is explored, along with a look at the psychological state and the possible motives of the individuals.

When Speaker Newt Gingrich greeted Dr. David Lewis in his office overlooking the National Mall, he looked at Dr. Lewis and said: "You know you’re going to be fired for this, don’t you?" "I know," Dr. Lewis replied, "I just hope to stay out of prison." Gingrich had just read Dr. Lewis' commentary in Nature, titled "EPA Science: Casualty of Election Politics".

Marilyn Sheppard, four months pregnant and mother of a toddler son, was bludgeoned to death in her Bay Village, Ohio, home in the early morning of July fourth, 1954. The cause of death was 27 blows to the head with a heavy instrument. Who took her life so brutally has been the subject of much controversy and debate for nearly half a century.

When Ghana declared independence from Britain in 1957, it immediately became a target for opportunists determined to lay hold of whatever assets colonialism hadn’t already stripped. The military ousted the new nation’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of stealing the country’s gold and hiding it overseas. Into this story stepped one of history’s most charismatic scammers, John Ackah Blay-Miezah – a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty, Blay-Miezah declared himself the custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions.

The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world—everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud.

King is the story of how Kirkland Gaynes rose to become "Top Pimp" in Chicago's seedy underworld. It's an unapologetic account of what is known as the "Pimp Game". King shows that dreams can come true. But the flip side to a dream is nightmarish.

Ann Rule presents another collection of fascinating and disturbing true-crime stories - drawn from her real-life personal files - in this seventeenth volume in the #1 New York Times bestselling Crime Files series.

Five true crime authors come together to present the fourth annual Serial Killers True Crime Anthology which depicts several horrific cases of serial homicide told in detail. Each case will take the listener from the background of the serial killer, to the crime scene, investigation, trial, and sentencing. Warning: This book contains graphic forensic statements that some may find very disturbing.

The Afterlife Confessional follows Bill's journey for answers as he looks through the dizzying kaleidoscope of his clients' lives - the widower who escaped an aged-care trap to take her husband's ashes on the road trip of a lifetime; the man who spent his life paying it forward to try to make up for one shameful act; the closet dominatrix who quietly confronts her husband's infidelity by comforting those truly in need; the devoted couple who insist on going hand-in-hand into the afterlife.

Coleen Greenwood was overjoyed to meet James Scott, a heroic firefighter and man of her dreams. Little would she know her dreams would soon become a nightmare as his web of lies started to unravel. The astonishing true story of one man’s lies and a family’s fight for justice.

Cannibal. Necrophiliac. Kidnapper. Killer. The stories of serial killers often begin with terrible upbringings and sad events of trauma, but not all have such unfortunate beginnings. Some simply develop their evil on their own and become tainted without anyone realizing it. Jeffrey Dahmer was a man described by his own father as the result of a child becoming lost in the maelstrom while nobody paid attention, a child who was strange and apathetic but whom nobody bothered to ask why.

London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, he is renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for unearthing the most stunning first editions and bringing them to market. Pompous and fearsome, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books. One night, two young booksellers - one a dishevelled former communist, the other a martini-swilling fan of detective stories - stumble upon a strange discrepancy. It will lead them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem.

After her father died in 2003, Susan Fensten turned to a genealogy message board to search for surviving relatives. Days later, she was delighted to receive an email from someone claiming to be a distant cousin. In fact, Susan had just been ensnared by a relentless sociopath. She soon became the target of an elaborate cyber-hoax involving dozens of frightening characters, including known sex offenders, who made threats of kidnapping, murder, rape, torture, and cannibalism. Remarkable in its complexity, this story of Internet stalking is also a harrowing tale of courage in the face of madness.

He was a cunning Berkeley Law grad who lost his job and hatched a con. Then he got rich and ran fast on an outlandish Adderall-fueled rush of stolen cash, multiple identities, and a euphoric fantasy of success. A Ponzi scheme was exposed, and a prominent Manhattan hedge fund imploded. Enterprising intern and financial wizard-in-training Gerti Muho saw it as an opportunity. He had insider knowledge and a knack for fraud, embezzlement, and identity theft. His steady supply of falsified prescriptions helped. Muho was on a luxury high. His luck seemed bottomless.

Nick Stapleton is the presenter on the BBC's Scam Interceptors and has become a guru in the ways of fraud, theft and con artistry. In this audiobook, the first of its kind, he has put together a fail-safe handbook covering all known scams, including advice on how to protect yourself or vulnerable loved ones, what to do if you think you've been scammed and how to go about reclaiming stolen money.

Gerard Lee Bevan was the black sheep of one of London's most respectable banking families. A high-living womanizer and upper-class shyster of almost pantomime proportions, he exploited a glittering range of social connections. After a long run of success in City dealings he perpetrated a massive fraud which ruined both the City Equitable Fire Insurance Company and his stockbroking firm, Ellis & Co. He fled the country and was eventually arrested, tried, and jailed.

The first of a trilogy, this collection features 16 of the world's most outrageous scams and hoaxes. They all really happened and were taken from firsthand accounts, newspaper reports, or historical documents found in public libraries. They date as far back as the late 1800s, but most are more recent. However, you won't find any defrauded widows or orphans in these stories. The victims are institutions or corporations quite capable of defending themselves, and the crooks who match wits with them are just as savvy. You could almost call it a fair fight!

Real-life murder. Real-life mystery. In some murder cases, the truth behind the most tragic of crimes crystallizes with relative ease. Not so with these fascinating accounts drawn from the personal files of Ann Rule, America's #1 bestselling true-crime writer. What happens when the case itself becomes an intractable puzzle, when clues are shrouded in smoke and mirrors, and when criminals skillfully evade law enforcement in a maddening cat-and-mouse chase?

Of the millions who go missing every year around the world, there are those who simply vanish and are never seen again. The sheer volume of people who disappear each and every year are, when examined in detail, terrifying. In this audiobook, we will touch upon some of the most terrifying, touching, strange, and worrying stories. In this audiobook, we hope to examine the sheer range of cases which have enthralled the interested, and distressed those involved for many years. Some of these cases became national stories, while others remain private tragedies.

For over half a century, Banco Popular was one of the most profitable banks in the world—until one day in 2017, when the Spanish bank suddenly collapsed overnight. When investigative journalist Gareth Gore was dispatched to report on the story, he expected to find yet another case of unbridled capitalist ambition gone wrong. Instead, he uncovered decades of deception that hid one of the most brazen cases of corporate pillaging in history, perpetrated by a group of men sworn to celibacy and self-flagellation who had secretly controlled Popular.