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Title details for King Con by Paul Willetts - Available

King Con

by Paul Willetts
Ray Porter
Audiobook
Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
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 Hungarian 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.
Expand title description text
Publisher: Books on Tape Edition: Unabridged

OverDrive Listen audiobook

  • ISBN: 9780525635499
  • File size: 330456 KB
  • Release date: August 7, 2018
  • Duration: 11:28:26

MP3 audiobook

  • ISBN: 9780525635499
  • File size: 330491 KB
  • Release date: August 7, 2018
  • Duration: 11:32:25
  • Number of parts: 10
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Formats

OverDrive Listen audiobook
MP3 audiobook

subjects

Biography & Autobiography History True Crime Nonfiction

Languages

English

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 Hungarian 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.
Expand title description text
Biography & Autobiography History True Crime Nonfiction
  • Details

    Publisher:
    Books on Tape
    Edition:
    Unabridged

    OverDrive Listen audiobook
    ISBN: 9780525635499
    File size: 330456 KB
    Release date: August 7, 2018
    Duration: 11:28:26

    MP3 audiobook
    ISBN: 9780525635499
    File size: 330491 KB
    Release date: August 7, 2018
    Duration: 11:32:25
    Number of parts: 10

  • Creators
  • Formats
    OverDrive Listen audiobook
    MP3 audiobook
  • Languages
    English
  • Reviews
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