King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age's Greatest Impostor

New York, NY: Crown Books , 2018 Crown Books, New York. 2018. Hardcover. Stated First Edition/First Printing by Line Number. Book is tight, square, and unmarked. Book Condition: Near Fine; light bumping to head and tail. DJ: Near Fine; NOT Price Clipped ($27.00); light bumping to head and tail. Cream paper over boards with tan overlay on the spine with bright black lettering on the spine. 349 pp 8vo. This book is the tale of hustler Edgar Laplante—the king of Jazz Age con artists—who becomes the victim of his own dangerous game. He was a smalltime grifter, an erstwhile vaudeville performer, and an unabashed charmer. 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, he 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 him 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, his overreaching threatened to destroy him…A clean very presentable copy.