"The inside story of Bernie Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, with surprising and shocking new details from Madoff himself"--from publisher description.

A Newsday alum and PEN/Hemingway honoree tells the full story of U.S. Representative George Santos, a charlatan and con-artist who has embedded himself in our nation's capital.

"In the fall of 1974, the Chicago Tribune found a woman its readers were sure to hate. Linda Taylor had reported a phony burglary, concocting a lie about stolen furs and jewelry. The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a scammer, a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. But nobody -- not the journalists who touted her story,...

"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 villians in American history. T.D. Thorton 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,...

"the author's great-uncle--a Jewish vaudeville impresario and exuberant con man--managed to cheat his Hitler's agents in the run-up to WWII. Vaudeville manager, boxing promoter, stock swindler, card shark and self-proclaimed 'Jade King of China, ' Freeman Bernstein was a master of exuberant excess and no stranger to the hard-hand of the law. But the charges he was arrested for on the evening of February 18, 1937, outside of a Hollywood starlet's home,...