A Century of Swindles PDF Download

Author: Railey Jane Savage
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493053698
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
From the Gilded Age through WWII, America was rife with ne’er-do-wells on a never-ending search for the next big score. Between 1850 and 1950 lawlessness melded with ingenuity, fueled by optimism and ruthlessness: America was dangerous, buzzing, and where opportunity came to take flight. The perfect conditions for swindlers. The gall and gumption of their hustles strain credulity. Fake diamond fields? War with Canada? Sir Francis Drake’s unclaimed fortune? Apparently, all was fair in the quest for something-for-nothing. The scammers in this volume range from the undeniably unscrupulous, to the ill and ill-advised. Fans of clever schemes and schadenfreude alike will be entertained by these tales of the rise and fall of some of America’s greatest swindlers.

Author: Yingyu Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231178631
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The Book of Swindles, a seventeenth-century story collection, offers a panoramic guide to the art of deception. Ostensibly a manual for self-protection, it presents a tableau of criminal ingenuity in late Ming China. Each story comes with commentary by the author, who expounds a moral lesson while also speaking as a connoisseur of the swindle.

Author: Edward J. Balleisen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691183074
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
A comprehensive history of fraud in America, from the early nineteenth century to the subprime mortgage crisis In America, fraud has always been a key feature of business, and the national worship of entrepreneurial freedom complicates the task of distinguishing salesmanship from deceit. In this sweeping narrative, Edward Balleisen traces the history of fraud in America—and the evolving efforts to combat it—from the age of P. T. Barnum through the eras of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff. This unprecedented account describes the slow, piecemeal construction of modern institutions to protect consumers and investors—from the Gilded Age through the New Deal and the Great Society. It concludes with the more recent era of deregulation, which has brought with it a spate of costly frauds, including corporate accounting scandals and the mortgage-marketing debacle. By tracing how Americans have struggled to foster a vibrant economy without encouraging a corrosive level of cheating, Fraud reminds us that American capitalism rests on an uneasy foundation of social trust.

Author: Bee Wilson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214085
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Bad food has a history. Swindled tells it. Through a fascinating mixture of cultural and scientific history, food politics, and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson uncovers the many ways swindlers have cheapened, falsified, and even poisoned our food throughout history. In the hands of people and corporations who have prized profits above the health of consumers, food and drink have been tampered with in often horrifying ways--padded, diluted, contaminated, substituted, mislabeled, misnamed, or otherwise faked. Swindled gives a panoramic view of this history, from the leaded wine of the ancient Romans to today's food frauds--such as fake organics and the scandal of Chinese babies being fed bogus milk powder. Wilson pays special attention to nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and England and their roles in developing both industrial-scale food adulteration and the scientific ability to combat it. As Swindled reveals, modern science has both helped and hindered food fraudsters--increasing the sophistication of scams but also the means to detect them. The big breakthrough came in Victorian England when a scientist first put food under the microscope and found that much of what was sold as "genuine coffee" was anything but--and that you couldn't buy pure mustard in all of London. Arguing that industrialization, laissez-faire politics, and globalization have all hurt the quality of food, but also that food swindlers have always been helped by consumer ignorance, Swindled ultimately calls for both governments and individuals to be more vigilant. In fact, Wilson suggests, one of our best protections is simply to reeducate ourselves about the joys of food and cooking.

Author: Michael Powelson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527533654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In the wake of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, millions of hardworking Americans lost their jobs and their homes, their retirements, and their income. However, the corporations that caused the Great Recession lost nothing and were, in fact, given trillions of dollars by the government in an unprecedented financial bailout. While over 16 trillion dollars went missing, not a single Wall Street executive was punished or even charged with a crime. This book chronicles some of the government and business frauds carried out throughout US history. These swindles were carried out by such “Founders” as Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Corruption was also at the core of the Andrew Jackson administration and played a key role in perpetrating the Panic of 1837, and government and business fraud was rampant in the construction of both the transcontinental railroad and the Panama Canal. Court rulings granting corporations the status of “legal personage” were part of a broader scam that extended greater constitutional and legal protections to corporations while denying Blacks and workers their own constitutional and legal rights. Government and business frauds of the 1920s played a prominent role in spawning the Great Depression of 1929, while funding and provisioning the US military has always been inundated with a wide variety of scams. In the early 1990s, government and business scams resulted in the collapse of the savings and loan industry, while the frauds of the early 21st century resulted in the Great Recession of 2007-2008. Today, all of the factors are in place to lead to yet another depression/recession which will be followed inevitably by a massive government bailout of banks and corporations.

Author: Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479897639
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Uncovering the professional secrets of con artists and swindlers in the medieval Middle East The Book of Charlatans is a comprehensive guide to trickery and scams as practiced in the thirteenth century in the cities of the Middle East, especially in Syria and Egypt. The author, al-Jawbarī, was well versed in the practices he describes and may well have been a reformed charlatan himself. Divided into thirty chapters, his book reveals the secrets of everyone from “Those Who Claim to be Prophets” to “Those Who Claim to Have Leprosy” and “Those Who Dye Horses.” The material is informed in part by the author’s own experience with alchemy, astrology, and geomancy, and in part by his extensive research. The work is unique in its systematic, detailed, and inclusive approach to a subject that is by nature arcane and that has relevance not only for social history but also for the history of science. Covering everything from invisible writing to doctoring gemstones and quack medicine, The Book of Charlatans opens a fascinating window into a subculture of beggars’ guilds and professional con artists in the medieval Arab world. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Author: Dean Jobb
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616204966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
“A rollicking tale that is one part The Sting, one part The Great Gatsby, and one part The Devil in the White City.” —Karen Abbott, author of Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy In a time of unregulated madness, nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. It was the perfect place for a slick, smooth-talking, charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz to entice hundreds of people to invest as much as $30 million--upwards of $400 million today--in phantom timberland and nonexistent oil wells in Panama. It was an ingenious deceit, one that out-Ponzied Charles Ponzi himself. In this rip-roaring tale of greed, financial corruption, dirty politics, over-the-top and under-the-radar deceit, illicit sex, and a brilliant and wildly charming con man on the town and then on the lam, Empire of Deception proves that the American dream of easy wealth is truly a timeless commodity. “Captivating . . . Dean Jobb tells the story of Leo Koretz, a legendary con artist of Madoffian audacity, with terrific energy and narrative brio.” —Gary Krist, author of Empire of Sin “A brilliantly researched tale of greed, ambition, and our desperate need to believe in magic, it’s history that captures America as it really was--and always will be. A great read.” —Douglas Perry, author of Eliot Ness “Reads like a Gatsby-Ponzi mashup . . . Kudos to Jobb for unearthing this overlooked story and bringing to life a charming, witty, naughty, iconic American crook.” —Neal Thompson, author of A Curious Man “The granddaddy of all con men, Leo Koretz gives Jobb the opportunity to exhibit his impressive research and storytelling skills . . . A highly readable, entertaining story.” —Kirkus Reviews

Author: Russell Cobb
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149623040X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Russell Cobb’s The Great Oklahoma Swindle is a rousing and incisive examination of the regional culture and history of “Flyover Country” that demystifies the political conditions of the American Heartland.

Author: Mitchell Zuckoff
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812968360
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
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. At the peak of his success, Ponzi was raking in more than $2 million a week at his office in downtown Boston. Then his house of cards came crashing down–thanks in large part to the relentless investigative reporting of Richard Grozier’s Boston Post. A classic American tale of immigrant life and the dream of success, Ponzi’s Scheme is the amazing story of the magnetic scoundrel who launched the most successful scheme of financial alchemy in modern history.

Author: T. D. Thornton
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466886978
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Today, we talk about Bernard Madoff, but in the early 20th century, they talked about George Graham Rice. Born Jacob Simon Herzig in 1870, he later changed his name - just as he would frequently change his swindles to make himself into one of the most colorfully successful villains in American history. T.D. Thornton now tells the story of Rice's life as it unfolded against the dark rise of American greed in the early 20th century. In the early 1900s, Rice made market-manipulation killings valued at billions in today's dollars by inventing fictitious boom towns in Death Valley and flagrantly exaggerating worthless mining claims throughout the West. As a shameless racetrack tipster, Rice cultivated a national following of 100,000 daily subscribers who paid for the privilege of being tipped to bet on hopeless nags. Vilified by securities regulators as the "Jackal of Wall Street," Rice sparked riots in Manhattan's financial district by perfecting the art of "bucket shop" trading with the sole purpose of bilking the public blind. He was capable of pulling off everything from street corner rip-offs for pocket change to elaborately scripted gambling hoaxes, all while being vilified by old-guard profiteers like J.P. Morgan and befriended by gangsters like Arnold Rothstein. In My Adventures With Your Money, T.D. Thornton has given us a real-life version of The Sting with one of America's most colorful con men at it's center.