Author Description

FINALIST for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-fiction * Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Nonfiction * Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award * Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction * Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing A Globe and Mail and National Post Best Book of the Year WINNER of the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Traditional Non-Fiction In the tradition of bestselling books such as The Devil in the White City and The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, Empire of Deception combines investigative journalism and spellbinding storytelling to examine one of the greatest con men of the twentieth century It was a time of unregulated madness. And nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. As Model Ts rumbled down Michigan Avenue, gang war shootings announced Al Capone's rise to underworld domination. Bedecked partygoers thronged to the Drake Hotel's opulent banquet rooms, corrupt politicians held court in thriving speakeasies, and the frenzy of stock market gambling was rampant. Enter a slick, smooth-talking, charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz, who enticed hundreds of people (who should have known better) 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, who only a few years earlier had been arrested for a pyramid scheme. Leo had a good run-his was perhaps the longest fraud in history-and when his enterprise finally collapsed in 1923, he vanished. The Cook County state's attorney, a man whose lust for power equaled Leo's own lust for money, began an international manhunt that lasted almost a year. When finally apprehended, Leo was living a life of luxury in Nova Scotia under the assumed identity of a book dealer and literary critic. A salacious court hearing followed, and his mysterious death in a Chicago pri