About
It was a time of unregulated madness. And nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. Enter a slick, smooth-talking, charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz, who enticed hundreds of people to invest as much as $30 million-upward of $400 million today-in phantom timberland and nonexistent oil wells in Panama. This rip-roaring tale of greed, financial corruption, dirty politics, over-the-top and under-the-radar deceit, illicit sex, and a brilliant and wildly charming con man on the town, then on the lam, is not only a rich and detailed account of a man and an era; it's a fascinating look at the methods of swindlers throughout history.
As Model Ts rumbled down Michigan Avenue, gang-war shootings announced Al Capone's rise to underworld domination. As bedecked partygoers thronged to the Drake Hotel's opulent banquet rooms, corrupt politicians held court in thriving speakeasies and the frenzy of stock market gambling was rampant. Leo Koretz was the Bernie Madoff of his day, and Dean Jobb shows us that the American dream of easy wealth is a timeless commodity.
"Intoxicating and impressively researched, Jobb's immorality tale provides a sobering post-Madoff reminder that those who think everything is theirs for the taking are destined to be taken." -The New York Times Book Review
"Captivating . . . A story that seems to be as American as it can get, and it's told well." -The Christian Science Monitor
"A masterpiece of narrative set-up and vivid language . . . Jobb vividly . . . brings the Chicago of the 1880s and '90s to life." -Chicago Tribune
"This cautionary tale of 1920s greed and excess reads like it could happen today." -The Associated Press In Chicago in the Roaring Twenties, a charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz enticed hundreds of people to invest as much as $30 million in phantom timberland and oil wells in Panama. This tale of a brilliant con man, the Bernie Madoff of his day, is a fascinating account of a criminal and an era, and the methods of swindlers throughout history. Dean Jobb is an award-winning author and journalist and a professor at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program. He is the author of eight previous books, including Empire of Deception, which the New York Times Book Review called "intoxicating and impressively researched" and the Chicago Writers Association named the Nonfiction Book of the Year. Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune, Toronto's Globe and Mail, and the Irish Times. He writes a monthly true-crime column, "Stranger Than Fiction," for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. His work as an investigative reporter has been nominated for Canada's National Newspaper and National Magazine awards, and Jobb is a three-time winner of Atlantic Canada's top journalism award.
1
OUR PONZI
THEY WERE DESCENDING on Chicago's newest hotel to honor a financial wizard. The Oil King, some called him, with a mixture of reverence and gratitude. Others dubbed him the New Rockefeller, a nickname as grand and audacious as he was, one that celebrated his greatest financial triumph to date. Leo Koretz, the man of the hour, had thumbed his nose at John D. Rockefeller and his mighty Standard Oil Corporation and was making this select group of Chicagoans very, very rich.
The evening was billed, tongue in cheek, as "a testimonial banquet tendered to Mr. Leo Koretz by the friends and relatives whom he has dragged from the gutter." It was June 22, 1922. The setting was the Drake Hotel, fourteen stories of limestone-clad Italianate grandeur on the northern edge of downtown Chicago, with its broad back to Lake Michigan and a view from the front rooms of Michigan Avenue, the city's skyscraper-studded main drag. The "most spacious hotel in the U
As Model Ts rumbled down Michigan Avenue, gang-war shootings announced Al Capone's rise to underworld domination. As bedecked partygoers thronged to the Drake Hotel's opulent banquet rooms, corrupt politicians held court in thriving speakeasies and the frenzy of stock market gambling was rampant. Leo Koretz was the Bernie Madoff of his day, and Dean Jobb shows us that the American dream of easy wealth is a timeless commodity.
"Intoxicating and impressively researched, Jobb's immorality tale provides a sobering post-Madoff reminder that those who think everything is theirs for the taking are destined to be taken." -The New York Times Book Review
"Captivating . . . A story that seems to be as American as it can get, and it's told well." -The Christian Science Monitor
"A masterpiece of narrative set-up and vivid language . . . Jobb vividly . . . brings the Chicago of the 1880s and '90s to life." -Chicago Tribune
"This cautionary tale of 1920s greed and excess reads like it could happen today." -The Associated Press In Chicago in the Roaring Twenties, a charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz enticed hundreds of people to invest as much as $30 million in phantom timberland and oil wells in Panama. This tale of a brilliant con man, the Bernie Madoff of his day, is a fascinating account of a criminal and an era, and the methods of swindlers throughout history. Dean Jobb is an award-winning author and journalist and a professor at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program. He is the author of eight previous books, including Empire of Deception, which the New York Times Book Review called "intoxicating and impressively researched" and the Chicago Writers Association named the Nonfiction Book of the Year. Jobb has written for major newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune, Toronto's Globe and Mail, and the Irish Times. He writes a monthly true-crime column, "Stranger Than Fiction," for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. His work as an investigative reporter has been nominated for Canada's National Newspaper and National Magazine awards, and Jobb is a three-time winner of Atlantic Canada's top journalism award.
1
OUR PONZI
THEY WERE DESCENDING on Chicago's newest hotel to honor a financial wizard. The Oil King, some called him, with a mixture of reverence and gratitude. Others dubbed him the New Rockefeller, a nickname as grand and audacious as he was, one that celebrated his greatest financial triumph to date. Leo Koretz, the man of the hour, had thumbed his nose at John D. Rockefeller and his mighty Standard Oil Corporation and was making this select group of Chicagoans very, very rich.
The evening was billed, tongue in cheek, as "a testimonial banquet tendered to Mr. Leo Koretz by the friends and relatives whom he has dragged from the gutter." It was June 22, 1922. The setting was the Drake Hotel, fourteen stories of limestone-clad Italianate grandeur on the northern edge of downtown Chicago, with its broad back to Lake Michigan and a view from the front rooms of Michigan Avenue, the city's skyscraper-studded main drag. The "most spacious hotel in the U