True Con Artist

For decades, government pundits have dismissed these "coincidental" deaths, even regarding them as "myths" as "urban legends." Like most people, Richard and David were initially unsure about what to make of these 'coincidences'. After all, events don't "consult the odds" prior to happening; they simply happen. Then someone comes along later and figures out what the odds of it happening were. Some of the deaths seemed purely coincidental; heart attacks, hunting accidents.

The King of Con is the true story about a smart, streetwise Jersey boy who talked his way to the top and became richer and more successful than his wildest dreams. It offers an unforgettable look into the life of a man who became hooked on living life to thrilling and dangerous excess, rubbing elbows with celebrities and crime bosses, until he was humbled by the FBI, by the US Attorney, and by life itself. Now, Tom Giacomaro is back in his old neighborhood. His mob cronies are calling, his palms are itching to make billions again, and the US Attorney's office is watching.

The stories in this audiobook represent humanity at its absolute worst. Pure evil. In my audiobooks, however, I don’t leave out the details. In my audiobooks, I include details not to shock, but to give the listener a deeper look into the twisted mind of the killer. In the end, it’s unlikely any of us will understand the motives of the criminals in these audiobooks, but the level of depravity will at least keep you resisting the pause button. Volume six of True Crime Case Histories features 12 new stories from the past several decades.

For more than a century, some of the world’s most important thinkers and leaders—men like Arthur Conan Doyle and William Butler Yeats—gathered once a month and discussed the supernatural at The Ghost Club in London. In the early 1900s the club's chairman was Harry Price, the world’s most well-known ghost hunter. He and other members, like Harry Houdini, sought to debunk the charlatans who preyed on vulnerable people with fake seances, tarot readings, and spiritual encounters.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time, selling over 60 million copies worldwide to date. Yet very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was derived from a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner's full story for the very first time.

In this volume, you’ll hear some stories that take place as recently as a few years ago, while others date back as far as the 1930s. There’s the story of a young Russian immigrant who came to the United States seeking the exciting lifestyle he’d seen on television, only to be stabbed, set on fire, and left to die in the desert by his own friends. There’s also the story of a brawny railway worker who couldn’t control his steroid-fueled rage. There’s one of a brawny railway worker who couldn’t control his steroid-fueled rage. And more.

Some $65 billion evaporated during Bernie Madoff’s epic confidence game. Two people were driven to suicide in the wake of the Ponzi Scheme’s exposure. Others went to prison. But there has never been a satisfying accounting for how Bernie got away with so much, for so long. Until now. Shocking, infuriating, riveting (and at times absurdly funny), Madoff shows us how Bernie ensnared thousands of investors. As Behar’s dogged reporting over the last fifteen years makes clear, however, there aren’t many innocents left standing by the end of this tale.

Debra Newell is nothing if not a survivor. By the time she met John Michael Meehan online, she lived through a near-fatal childhood illness, an attempted rape in her 20s, the traumatic death of her sister at the hands of her brother-in-law, four failed marriages, and a litany of dating disasters. But despite those tragedies, she seemed to have it all: adoring children, a successful business, a fabulous penthouse apartment.

The case of D. B. Cooper is a modern legend that has obsessed and cursed his pursuers for generations with everything from bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now, with Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray obtains a first-ever look at the FBI’s confidential Cooper file, uncovering new leads in the infamous case.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn - then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage - set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.

The Missing JFK Assassination Film is not the typical JFK assassination book. This book does not attempt to answer the question of who killed John F. Kennedy; instead it addresses why we should question the actions of those involved and why the truth was withheld from the people. Though copies of Orville Nix's film exist, the original film is missing. Why? The FBI confiscated Orville's camera for several months, then returned it in pieces. Were these actions sinister, or were they just examples of governmental incompetence?

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.

In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star religion professor at Harvard, announced a breathtaking discovery just steps from the Vatican: she’d found an ancient scrap of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene “my wife”. The mysterious manuscript, which King provocatively titled “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”, had the power to topple the Roman Catholic Church. It threatened not just the all-male priesthood, but centuries of sacred teachings on marriage, sex, and women’s leadership, much of it premised on the hallowed tradition of a celibate Jesus.

Stolen valor occurs when a person lies about receiving military decorations that he or she has in fact never earned. It has become a major societal problem that has been discussed numerous times in the news and, most recently, by the US Supreme Court. According to The New York Times, the Department of Veterans Affairs paid disability benefits to more than six hundred people falsely claiming to have been POWs in the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars.

If you’re familiar with the previous books in the True Crime Case Histories series, you already know that I start each book with a brief warning. Real true crime is not for everyone. The stories in this book represent humanity at its absolute worst. Pure evil. Television crime shows and news articles often skip the gruesome parts of true crime stories. The real details are just too grisly for the average viewer or reader.

Chrissy was an attractive, recently divorced 40-year-old, living with her three children in their family home in Cheltenham, when in 2003, she met 44-year-old ‘Alex’ in a local coffee shop. He claimed to be an international financier, Alexander Marc d’Ariken de Rothschild-Hatton, the illegitimate son of multi-millionaire heir, Edmund de Rothschild. Charming and smooth-talking, it wasn’t long before he gained Chrissy’s love and trust, with marriage on the cards and a new baby on the way.

As with the two prior volumes of True Crime Case Histories, I want to start with a quick word of warning. Most news articles and television true crime shows skim over the sticky details of truly gruesome crimes. In my books I don't gloss over the facts, regardless of how horrible they may be. I try to give my listeners a clear and accurate description on just how demented the killers really were. I do my best not to leave anything out. The stories included in these books are not for the squeamish.

In 2016, on stage at Wembley Arena, Dr. Ruja Ignatova promised her followers a financial revolution. The future, she said, belonged to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And the Oxford-educated, self-styled cryptoqueen vowed that she had invented the Bitcoin Killer. OneCoin would not only earn its investors untold fortunes; it would change the world. By March 2017, more than $4 billion had been invested in OneCoin in countries all around the world. But by October 2017, Ruja Ignatova had disappeared, and it slowly became clear that her revolutionary cryptocurrency was not all it seemed.

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”

The horrific and disturbing nature of these stories often makes you question everything you thought or believed about humanity. Yet they are engaging and fascinating at the same time. We all had evil thoughts throughout our lives. What is it that makes us different from those who actually act upon it? Is it the act alone? These are questions that many ask themselves, and these stories will help dig into the elements and psychology behind some of the most terrifying killers in history.