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

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

The spellbinding tale of hustler Edgar Laplanteâ€”the king of Jazz Age con artistsâ€”who becomes the victim of his own dangerous game.
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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 leaderâ€”and total fraud.
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Under the pretenses of raising money for struggling Native American reservations, Laplante dressed in buckskins and a feathered headdress andÂ 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, Laplanteâ€™s overreaching threatened to destroy himâ€¦
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InÂ King Con, Paul Willetts bringsÂ 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 allâ€”and proving that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Country USA
Manufacturer Crown
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2018-08-07
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Crown
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2018-08-07
Format	Kindle eBook

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

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