True Con Artist

This is the story of an unforgivable con man. Vulnerable families were his prey. His promise was an impossible dream and a lie. Peter Candlewood understood the system. That’s how he could commute prison sentences and reunite hopeless families with incarcerated loved ones. For a price. Except there was no Candlewood. No hope. Just a lowly Texas con artist who bet on the desperate - and won. And he wasn’t working alone. The multimillion-dollar deception cost the betrayed more than their savings.

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.

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.

Spring 1983: it seemed that one of the most startling discoveries of the century had been made, and that one of the world's most sought after documents had finally come to light - the private diaries of Adolf Hitler. What followed was a fiasco of fakery, greed, the duping of experts, and the exchange of extraordinary sums of money for worldwide publishing rights. But that was just the beginning of the story....

When she was 15, Jennifer Mee developed an unrelenting case of the hiccups - hiccupping as many as 50 times a minute for months. Soon the Florida teen's strange story went viral. Dubbed the "Hiccup Girl" by the media, she gained international sympathy and appeared on a slew of popular TV shows. Eventually Jennifer's hiccups went away, and so did her fame.

Over the course of a year, the members of the now infamous Bling Ring allegedly burglarized some of the biggest names in young Hollywood. Driven by celebrity worship, vanity, and the desire to look and dress like the rich and famous, these seven teenagers made headlines for using Google maps, Facebook, and TMZ to track the comings and goings of their targets. Many of the houses were unlocked. Alarms disabled. A "perfect" crime - celebrities already had so much, why shouldn't the Bling Ring take their share?

On the 24th of February 1994, police knocked on the door of an aging house in the English town of Gloucester. They'd come to serve a search warrant in the case of a missing girl - the daughter of the house's inhabitants. What they uncovered would shock the world: decades of child abuse, an underground torture chamber, and a burial ground containing the bodies of the spent victims of the torture - including that of the missing daughter.

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.

"An engrossing microcosm of the internet’s Wild West years" (Kirkus Reviews), award-winning journalist David Kushner tells the incredible battle between the founder of Match.com and the con man who swindled him out of the website Sex.com, resulting in an all-out war for control for what still powers the internet today: love and sex.

In 1977, Vera 'Toddie' Hays and Florice 'Beezie' Bessire thought they were about to embark on the trip of a lifetime when Vera's nephew, Vern Todd, offered them a campervan to drive from Germany to India. Little did the women know that Vern and his accomplices would secretly pack two tonnes of hashish into the vehicle along the way. This shocking inside story chronicles Toddie and Beezie's wild ride across continents and oceans to our shores, their arrest by Australian Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents and all that the women faced in the aftermath.

In 2006 an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor - the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide - was set daily by a group of easily manipulated administrators, and they could reap huge profits by nudging it fractions of a percent to suit their trading portfolios. This group generated incredible riches - until it all unraveled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.

The Many Lives of Mama Love is the astonishing tale of Lara's descent from middle class soccer mum with an enviable lifestyle, beautiful home and family to an opiate addict and identity thief. Convicted of 32 felonies, her children are taken away and she is placed in a local jail. In this strange and frightening new world, she has to get grips with life behind bars. Lara becomes known in prison as Mama Love. She helps the women around her get to grips with their own troubles, writes letters for them, acts as an advocate, and comforts them in their darkest moments.

One after another, they appear by the sides of suburban roads and freeways - the naked, strangled bodies of women who have been raped, tortured, and left for dead. Police begin to suspect that their target is a rogue operator who has emerged from their own ranks. And then, all hell breaks loose in Los Angeles. An arrest in the strangling murders of two co-eds across state lines finally leads to a break in the case, but the suspect is someone, or something, the investigators could have ever expected.

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.

Who would want to steal the identity of a minimum-wage employee at a children’s museum? In this harrowing real-life detective story, a woman searches for the truth, clue after startling clue. Rachel hit the jackpot with her doting fiancé, Zach, who was starting a promising new political career at the Massachusetts State House. Then came money problems - Rachel’s was mysteriously disappearing, bank account by new bank account. She and Zach, her only lifeline, decided to play amateur sleuths. And they had to act fast. Because Rachel’s crippling paranoia was growing.

Charles Ponzi’s name is almost instantly recognizable thanks to the famous financial scandal named after him. This is somewhat ironic because, while his last name has become synonymous with financial scandal and many recognize how a Ponzi scheme works, some have argued that Ponzi really did not know what he was doing while it was taking place. Charles Ponzi and the Ponzi Scheme: The History and Legacy of 20th Century America’s Most Famous Con Artist looks at the elaborate fraud designed by one of America’s most notorious criminals.

Russia was not the first foreign power to influence American popular opinion from the inside. In the lead-up to America’s entry into the First World War, Germany spent the modern equivalent of one billion dollars to infiltrate American media, industry, and government in order to undermine the supply chain of the Allied forces. If not for the ceaseless activity of John Revelstoke Rathom, editor of the scrappy Providence Journal, America may have remained committed to its position of neutrality.

This novel take on the history of wine reveals that, whether by adding toxic sweeteners or passing off counterfeit bottles, wine fraud is abundant—and as old as wine itself. Vintage Crime will intrigue even the most sated of wine drinkers with its juicy tales of deception, raising interesting questions along the way: what counts as wine, why do we drink it, and what makes a wine truly authentic?

Chris Bathum was a respected therapist, addiction specialist, and founder of one of the fastest-growing rehabilitation chains in America. But Bathum was a total fraud: he was a homicidal meth-head with a history of sexually abusing his patients, scamming insurance companies, and eliminating whistle-blowers. Like Rose Stahl. But this intended victim would be his last. Stahl would risk her life to bring down the monster she and so many other people in need had once trusted for their salvation.

What triggers activate an all-out rage that leads people to commit mass murder? What is the motive behind some of the most shocking killing sprees in US history? Enter the chilling and murderous mind of a spree killer to find out. In Volume 4 of True Crime Stories, prepare for crimes like never before, as we examine what makes people snap and commit gruesome, calculated, and disturbing crimes that will have you questioning about humanity.