Though most of the bad guys are deeply unappetizing, true crime buffs will enjoy the cat-and-mouse game of catching them.
A twisty tale of a forgotten scam and the devoted FBI agents who brought it down.
Documentary filmmakers Hernandez and Lazarte, who created the titular HBO series, recount the strange story of con artistry taken to the stratosphere. The chief con, known as “Uncle Jerry,” was a blowhard former cop who talked his way into heading security for an ad agency with an unusual account: handling McDonald’s Monopoly game, which readers may remember from a few decades past. For many years, thanks to Uncle Jerry’s machinations, “all of the winners who walked into various McDonald’s restaurants across the country, waving a winning game piece and claiming a victory over the gods of chance, were cogs in a skillfully crafted conspiracy of fraud.” For a time, Uncle Jerry’s chief lieutenant was a near-stereotypical gangster from the Colombo Mafia family. The setup involved finding a mark to take a winning ticket and then kick back half, plus pay taxes on the whole shebang. Millions of McDonald’s dollars later, the perpetrators had burned a few people in their con. Enter an informant, whose surprising identity the authors reveal at the end, and a forensic accountant from an FBI field office who figured out how to milk confessions from the minions by pretending to be a promotional filmmaker working for McDonald’s. The enterprise fell apart thanks to that oldest of destructive forces, greed. “Most of the ‘criminals’ in this story were merely good people who made a bad choice,” the authors write sympathetically; oddly, some paid a higher price for their greed than did the real criminals. In any event, though heavily covered by the media, the scam went into immediate obscurity, overshadowed by the catastrophic attacks of 9/11.
Though most of the bad guys are deeply unappetizing, true crime buffs will enjoy the cat-and-mouse game of catching them.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781538720110
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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