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Book Flim Flam Man

Download or read book Flim Flam Man written by Jennifer Vogel and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major motion picture Flag Day starring Sean Penn and his daughter Dylan Penn is based on this father-daughter story of a charming criminal—told by the daughter who loved him. One frosty winter morning in 1995, Jennifer Vogel opened the newspaper and read that her father had gone on the run. John Vogel, fifty-two, had been arrested for single-handedly counterfeiting nearly $20 million in U.S. currency—the fourth-largest sum ever seized by federal agents—and then released pending trial. Though Jennifer hadn't spoken to her father in more than four years, the police suspected he might turn up at her Minneapolis apartment. She examined the shadows outside her building, thought she spotted him at the grocery store and the bus stop. He had simply vanished. Framed around the six months her father eluded authorities, Jennifer's memoir documents the police chase—stakeouts, lie detector tests, even a segment on Unsolved Mysteries—and vividly chronicles her tumultuous childhood while examining her father's legacy. A lifelong criminal who robbed banks, burned down buildings, scammed investors, and even plotted murder, John Vogel was also a hapless dreamer who wrote a novel, baked lemon meringue pies, and took his ten-year-old daughter to see Rocky in an empty theater on Christmas Eve. When it came time to pass his counterfeit bills, he spent them at Wal-Mart for political reasons. Culling from memories, photo albums, public documents, and interviews with the handful of people who knew the real John Vogel, this is an intimate and intensely moving psychological portrait of a charismatic, larger-than-life figure—as told by the daughter who nearly followed in his footsteps.

Book The Flimflam Man

    Book Details:
  • Author : Darleen Bailey Beard
  • Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
  • Release : 2003-09-08
  • ISBN : 9780374423452
  • Pages : 96 pages

Download or read book The Flimflam Man written by Darleen Bailey Beard and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2003-09-08 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a scorching July day in 1950, a fabulous fat man drives into Wetumka, Oklahoma. F. Bam Morrison is selling tickets to Bohn's United Circus Shows, and the townspeople are buying--all, that is, except ol' man Swank, who says F. Bam Morrison is a two-faced weasel. Smitten with Morrison, ten-year-old Bobbie Jo Hailey--and mean Clara Jean Knox, whom she befriends--unwittingly joins the effort to bamboozle Wetumka. When Bobbie Jo realizes her mistake, Morrison is on his way out of town, leaving her disappointed but intact--and greatly enriched by her relationship with the flimflam man. Lovingly illustrated by Eileen Christelow, Darleen Bailey Beard's delightful story is based on a real episode in Wetumka's history, still celebrated annually as Sucker Day!

Book Charlatan

Download or read book Charlatan written by Pope Brock and published by Crown. This book was released on 2008-02-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the 2016 Sundance Film Festival documentary, NUTS!. “An extraordinary saga of the most dangerous quack of all time...entrancing” –USA Today In 1917, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen con man–introduced an outlandish surgical method for restoring fading male virility. It was all nonsense, but thousands of eager customers quickly made “Dr.” Brinkley one of America’s richest men–and a national celebrity. The great quack buster Morris Fishbein vowed to put the country’ s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business, yet each effort seemed only to spur Brinkley to new heights of ingenuity, and the worlds of advertising, broadcasting, and politics soon proved to be equally fertile grounds for his potent brand of flimflam. Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America ripe for the bamboozling.

Book Flim Flam Man

    Book Details:
  • Author : M Allen Henderson
  • Publisher : Independently Published
  • Release : 2024-02-28
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book Flim Flam Man written by M Allen Henderson and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2024-02-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brace yourself for a crash course in the underbelly of deception! "Flim-Flam Man: How Con Games Work" is your passport to a world where fortunes are made and lost in the blink of an eye. This book isn't just about cons, it's a thrilling exposé, a roadmap to navigate the labyrinthine schemes of the criminal mind. Imagine being led down a dark alley, promised a chance at untold riches. It's all a carefully crafted illusion, and "Flim-Flam Man" rips the mask off, revealing the psychology behind the con. You'll learn how smooth-talking hustlers exploit your deepest desires and blind spots, turning everyday objects into weapons of deceit. But this book isn't just about understanding the enemy. It equips you with the knowledge to fight back. From classic street scams like the "shell game" to elaborate financial swindles, "Flim-Flam Man" dissects each con, exposing its inner workings like a magician revealing their secrets. With this knowledge, you become more than just a potential victim; you become a master of awareness, able to spot the telltale signs of deception before you fall prey to their tricks. So, are you ready to step into the shadows and learn the secrets of the con? "Flim-Flam Man: How Con Games Work" isn't just a book, it's a thrilling adventure into the world of deception, an empowering experience that equips you with the knowledge to protect yourself and outsmart the flim-flam artists lurking in the world around you.

Book The Conscience of a Liberal

Download or read book The Conscience of a Liberal written by Paul Krugman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-01-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The most consistent and courageous—and unapologetic—liberal partisan in American journalism." —Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books In this "clear, provocative" (Boston Globe) New York Times bestseller, Paul Krugman, today's most widely read economist, examines the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age and the 1920s to the unraveling of that achievement and the reemergence of immense economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Seeking to understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a "new New Deal," Krugman has created his finest book to date, a "stimulating manifesto" offering "a compelling historical defense of liberalism and a clarion call for Americans to retake control of their economic destiny" (Publishers Weekly). "As Democrats seek a rationale not merely for returning to power, but for fundamentally changing—or changing back—the relationship between America's government and its citizens, Mr. Krugman's arguments will prove vital in the months and years ahead." —Peter Beinart, New York Times

Book Matchstick Men

    Book Details:
  • Author : Eric Garcia
  • Publisher : Random House
  • Release : 2008-12-18
  • ISBN : 0307488039
  • Pages : 241 pages

Download or read book Matchstick Men written by Eric Garcia and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • A novel about grifters with issues, by the acclaimed cult author of Anonymous Rex and Casual Rex Roy and Frankie are matchstick men—con artists. Partners in elegant crimes for years, they know each other like brothers and have perfected the rules of the game. Roy is the careful one, saves every penny. Frankie is the adventurous one, hungry for a big score. He wants Roy to join him in running a tricky game, but Roy is distracted by the discovery that he is the father of a punky teenage daughter from a brief marriage that ended years ago. The kid wants to get to know her father. She also wants to learn the family business. Novelist Eric Garcia takes readers into the fast and funny world of grifters with issues. Matchstick Men is a dazzling literary con game that will keep readers guessing until the last page.

Book Insane Clown President

Download or read book Insane Clown President written by Matt Taibbi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Dispatches from the 2016 election that provide an eerily prescient take on our democracy’s uncertain future, by the country’s most perceptive and fearless political journalist. In twenty-five pieces from Rolling Stone—plus two original essays—Matt Taibbi tells the story of Western civilization’s very own train wreck, from its tragicomic beginnings to its apocalyptic conclusion. Years before the clown car of candidates was fully loaded, Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the story: the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth; the absence of a shared reality; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society. Taibbi captures, with dead-on, real-time analysis, the failures of the right and the left, from the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the flawed and aimless Hillary Clinton campaign; the rise of the “dangerously bright” alt-right with its wall-loving identity politics and its rapturous view of the “Racial Holy War” to come; and the giant fail of a flailing, reactive political media that fed a ravenous news cycle not with reporting on political ideology, but with undigested propaganda served straight from the campaign bubble. At the center of it all stands Donald J. Trump, leading a historic revolt against his own party, “bloviating and farting his way” through the campaign, “saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next.” For Taibbi, the stunning rise of Trump marks the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement. Taibbi frames the reporting with original essays that explore the seismic shift in how we perceive our national institutions, the democratic process, and the future of the country. Insane Clown President is not just a postmortem on the collapse and failure of American democracy. It offers the riveting, surreal, unique, and essential experience of seeing the future in hindsight. “Scathing . . . What keeps the pages turning in this so freshly familiar story line is the vivid observation and original turns of phrase.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Book AMORALMAN

Download or read book AMORALMAN written by Derek DelGaudio and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Truth and lies are two sides of the same coin. But who's flipping it? A thought-provoking and brilliantly entertaining work of nonfiction from one of the world's leading deceivers, the creator and star of the astonishing theater show and forthcoming film In & Of Itself. Derek DelGaudio believed he was a decent, honest man. But when irrefutable evidence to the contrary is found in an old journal, his memories are reawakened and Derek is forced to confront--and try to understand--his role in a significant act of deception from his past. Using his youthful notebook entries as a road map, Derek embarks on a soulful, often funny, sometimes dark journey, retracing the path that led him to a world populated by charlatans, card cheats, and con artists. As stories are peeled away and artifices are revealed, Derek examines the mystery behind his father's vanishing act, the secret he inherited from his mother, the obsession he developed with sleight-of-hand that shaped his future, and the affinity he felt for the professional swindlers who taught him how to deceive others. And once he finds himself working as a crooked dealer in a big-money Hollywood card game, Derek begins to question his own sense of morality, and discovers that even a master of deception can find himself trapped inside an illusion. A M O R A L M A N is a wildly engaging exploration of the fictions we live as truths. It is ultimately a book about the lies we tell ourselves and the realities we manufacture in others.

Book Last Best Hope

    Book Details:
  • Author : George Packer
  • Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Release : 2021-06-15
  • ISBN : 0374603677
  • Pages : 240 pages

Download or read book Last Best Hope written by George Packer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The New York Times's 100 notable books of 2021 "[George Packer's] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington Post Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy. In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.

Book American Follies

    Book Details:
  • Author : Norman Lock
  • Publisher : Bellevue Literary Press
  • Release : 2020-07-07
  • ISBN : 1942658494
  • Pages : 163 pages

Download or read book American Follies written by Norman Lock and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young woman joins Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Barnum’s circus to rescue her infant from the KKK In the seventh stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Ellen Finch, former stenographer to Henry James, recalls her time as an assistant to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, heroes of America’s woman suffrage movement, and her friendship with the diminutive Margaret, one of P. T. Barnum’s circus “eccentrics.” When her infant son is kidnapped by the Klan, Ellen, Margaret, and the two formidable suffragists travel aboard Barnum’s train from New York to Memphis to rescue the baby from certain death at the fiery cross. A savage yet farcical tale, American Follies explores the roots of the women’s rights movement, its relationship to the fight for racial justice, and its reverberations in the politics of today.

Book Moneyball  The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Download or read book Moneyball The Art of Winning an Unfair Game written by Michael Lewis and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-03-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This delightfully written, lesson-laden book deserves a place of its own in the Baseball Hall of Fame." —Forbes Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis follows the low-budget Oakland A's, visionary general manager Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge—insights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.

Book Cotton Comes to Harlem

    Book Details:
  • Author : Chester Himes
  • Publisher : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
  • Release : 2011-08-03
  • ISBN : 0307803244
  • Pages : 207 pages

Download or read book Cotton Comes to Harlem written by Chester Himes and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2011-08-03 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “the best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler” (San Francisco Chronicle) comes a hard-hitting, entertaining entry in the trailblazing Harlem Detectives series about two NYPD detectives who must piece together the clues of the scam of a lifetime. Flim-flam man Deke O’Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta’s state penitentiary than he’s back on the streets working a big scam. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement, he’s counting on a big Harlem rally to produce a massive collection—for his own private charity. But the take is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives “Coffin Ed” Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones face the complexity of the scheme, we are treated to Himes’s brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.

Book The King of Confidence

Download or read book The King of Confidence written by Miles Harvey and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "unputdownable" (Dave Eggers, National Book award finalist) story of the most infamous American con man you've never heard of: James Strang, self-proclaimed divine king of earth, heaven, and an island in Lake Michigan, "perfect for fans of The Devil in the White City" (Kirkus) A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for the Midland Authors Annual Literary Award A Michigan Notable Book A CrimeReads Best True Crime Book of the Year "A masterpiece." —Nathaniel Philbrick In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect's leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king. From this stronghold he controlled a fourth of the state of Michigan, establishing a pirate colony where he practiced plural marriage and perpetrated thefts, corruption, and frauds of all kinds. Eventually, having run afoul of powerful enemies, including the American president, Strang was assassinated, an event that was frontpage news across the country. The King of Confidence tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on this charlatan's turbulent twelve years in power, Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man. Full of adventure, bad behavior, and insight into a crucial period of antebellum history, The King of Confidence brings us a compulsively readable account of one of the country's boldest con men and the boisterous era that allowed him to thrive.

Book Barnum

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert Wilson
  • Publisher : Simon & Schuster
  • Release : 2020-08-11
  • ISBN : 1501118714
  • Pages : 368 pages

Download or read book Barnum written by Robert Wilson and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Robert Wilson’s Barnum, the first full-dress biography in twenty years, eschews clichés for a more nuanced story…It is a life for our times, and the biography Barnum deserves.” —The Wall Street Journal P.T. Barnum is the greatest showman the world has ever seen. As a creator of the Barnum & Baily Circus and a champion of wonder, joy, trickery, and “humbug,” he was the founding father of American entertainment—and as Robert Wilson argues, one of the most important figures in American history. Nearly 125 years after his death, the name P.T. Barnum still inspires wonder. Robert Wilson’s vivid new biography captures the full genius, infamy, and allure of the ebullient showman, who, from birth to death, repeatedly reinvented himself. He learned as a young man how to wow crowds, and built a fortune that placed him among the first millionaires in the United States. He also suffered tragedy, bankruptcy, and fires that destroyed his life’s work, yet willed himself to recover and succeed again. As an entertainer, Barnum courted controversy throughout his life—yet he was also a man of strong convictions, guided in his work not by a desire to deceive, but an eagerness to thrill and bring joy to his audiences. He almost certainly never uttered the infamous line, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” instead taking pride in giving crowds their money’s worth and more. Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, tells a gripping story in Barnum, one that’s imbued with the same buoyant spirit as the man himself. In this “engaging, insightful, and richly researched new biography” (New York Journal of Books), Wilson adeptly makes the case for P.T. Barnum’s place among the icons of American history, as a figure who represented, and indeed created, a distinctly American sense of optimism, industriousness, humor, and relentless energy.

Book The Modern Con Man

    Book Details:
  • Author : Todd Robbins
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
  • Release : 2008-04-08
  • ISBN : 159691453X
  • Pages : 242 pages

Download or read book The Modern Con Man written by Todd Robbins and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-04-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A whimsical resource for low-risk grifters provides a treasury of humorous tips and historical facts about the art of the con, in a volume that outlines easy-to-follow swindles that can be used to score free meals, good tickets, bar bets, and more.

Book The Babbs Switch Story

Download or read book The Babbs Switch Story written by Darleen Bailey Beard and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2002 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1924, twelve-year-old Ruthie finds her life in a small Oklahoma town complicated by the behavior of her older sister Daphne, an object of ridicule and dislike because of her limited mental abilities.

Book The Weight Loss Cure  they  Don t Want You to Know about

Download or read book The Weight Loss Cure they Don t Want You to Know about written by Kevin Trudeau and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work by a #1 New York Times-bestselling author presents a revolutionary plan that helps readers to reshape their body, get rid of abnormal fat, increase their metabolism, eliminate hunger and food cravings, and reveals why the food industry wants to keep the population fat.