King Con by Paul Willetts

King Con by Paul Willetts

The spellbinding tale of hustler Edgar Laplante--the king of Jazz Age con artists--who becomes the victim of his own dangerous game.

Edgar Laplante was a smalltime grifter, an erstwhile vaudeville performer, and an unabashed charmer. But after years of playing thankless gigs and traveling with medicine shows, he decided to undertake the most demanding and bravura performance of his life. In the fall of 1917, Laplante reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, Cherokee nation leader--and total fraud.

Under the pretenses of raising money for struggling Native American reservations, Laplante dressed in buckskins and a feathered headdress and traveled throughout the American West, narrowly escaping exposure and arrest each time he left town. When the heat became too much, he embarked upon a lucrative continent-hopping tour that attracted even more enormous crowds, his cons growing in proportion to the adulation of his audience. As he moved through Europe, he spied his biggest mark on the Riviera: a prodigiously rich Austrian countess, who was instantly smitten with the con man. The countess bankrolled a lavish trip through Italy that made Laplante a darling of the Mussolini regime and a worldwide celebrity, soaring to unimaginable heights on the wings of his lies. But then, at the pinnacle of his improbable success, Laplante's overreaching threatened to destroy him.

In King Con, Paul Willetts brings this previously untold story to life in all its surprising absurdity, showing us how our tremendous capacity for belief and our longstanding obsession with celebrity can make fools of us all--and proving that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Paul Willetts made his literary debut in 2003 with Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, a biography of the bohemian writer and dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross. His second book was North Soho 999: A True Story of Gangs and Gun-crime in 1940s Soho, a narrative non-fiction police procedural. He is also the author of Members Only, a life of Paul Raymond, which was adapted into The Look of Love, starring Steve Coogan.

He has written for The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Spectator, History Today, and The TLS.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780451495815
ISBN 10	0451495810
Title	King Con
Author	Paul Willetts
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2018-08-07
Number of pages	352
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable