Most of Yeebo's research seems to have been good, gumshoe detective work. She did the hard work of getting first-hand interviews and pulling out wonderful primary sources. I enjoy stories about fraudsters and swindlers. I had read news articles or passing information about the case of Ghana's "missing" gold, but I knew little about it. In summary, John Blay-Miezah was a bright Ghanaian who studied overseas and bounced around a bit before he came up with a wild scam: upon his death President Nkrumah had put Blay-Miezah in charge of trust fund worth billions of dollars. Blay-Miezah worked his way through London, Philadelphia, Conkary, Geneva, New York, Accra, and Seoul getting people to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to help him get the trust fund released. Along the way, Blay-Miezah works must peddle around coups, expulsions, and diplomatic entanglements. Investigators on three continents were looking into Blay-Miezah and his American business partner Robert Ellis. And investors were increasingly willing to talk to them. In a courtroom in Philadelphia, those investigations would come together and reveal the true scale of the Oman Ghana Trust Fund. It would be so deeply damaging that by the time the court hearing was over, Blay-Miezah would disavow Ellis. Years earlier, Ellis had gotten Blay-Miezah out of jail, and their friendship had powered one of the largest frauds of the twentieth century. Now, though, it was every con man for himself.

The astounding, never-before-told story of how an audacious Ghanaian con artist pulled off one of the 20th century's longest-running and most spectacular frauds. The scam was eventually exposed, however, and Blay-Miezah died of apparently natural causes in 1992, while under house arrest. (Only rarely outside of fiction do con artists commit suicide when unmasked.) He was, in his appalling way, an artist, and like all good biographies of artists, Yeebo’s book conveys the uniqueness of his personality while also showing how his art was forged in, and fed the requirements of, the times in which he lived. Blay-Miezah was born poor but made his way as a young man to America. There he got a taste for enterprise and sensed a golden opportunity. He buzzed around America, Europe and Asia—always staying in swanky hotels, always on someone else’s dime—peddling the story that he had been made custodian of Nkrumah’s trust fund for the gold. He promised that those who funded his efforts to retrieve the bounty would share handsomely in it. The gold, of course, never appeared. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. Blay-Miezah had flown in ahead of the investors and was situated in a suite at La Grande Mare, a relatively new hotel on the west coast. Mary Lou Valinote, Blay-Miezah’s secretary from Philadelphia, had also landed earlier. Now, she ushered new arrivals through a set of white double doors and into the reception room of Blay-Miezah’s suite, where they all settled in on overstuffed sofas. New Jersey businessman Walter Hajduk squabbled with Blay-Miezah’s “bagman” Peter Rigby. E.D.M. Stephens, the police officer sent by the Ghananian government to monitor Blay-Miezah’s overseas travels, drank milky tea. Athlete Kim Chung Han, part of Blay-Miezah’s entourage, translated for the South Korean investors.

"A non-fiction masterpiece"

Reading Anansi’s Gold is like watching a heist movie in agonising slow motion. It’s all about improvisation, unforced error, unlikely escape

This character study also functions as a key historical text on post-Nkrumah Ghana. We gain behind-the-scenes access to two coups and insight into the functioning of the state intelligence system that ruled before Ghana’s transition to democracy. (Blay-Miezah, in a side gig, was involved with supplying the regime with arms.) T or F? “Blay-Miezah’s funeral was held in 1993. It was a modest affair by Ghanaian standards, especially for a man known for his ostentatious displays of wealth. The wake keeping lasted five days.” But “…some people still refused to believe that he was dead.” Just after independence,” Yeebo explains, “there really was a plot to take Ghana’s gold reserves out of the country.” She details the colonial British administration’s hopeless mismanagements of funds. The depth of distress did raise the question of where all of the money had gone — leaving just enough room for suspicion that Blay-Miezah’s story could be true.

\"Riveting\"

TRUE OR FALSE? Pleading for government permission to be released from house arrest in Ghana—so he could finalize the funding of the Oman Ghana Trust Fund—Blay-Miezah offered this guarantee if he returned home empty-handed: “Captain, take me to the firing range…and have me shot. That is, if I fail.” THE GUY FROM GHANA: John Blay-Miezah, a cigar-smoking and charismatic young man from Ghana, had big ideas and big plans. He traveled to Philadelphia, New York, and London—and told an unbelievable tale. Many assumed that the story was so unbelievable that it must be true. Reading Anansi's Gold is like watching a heist movie ... all about improvisation, unforced error, unlikely escape. " -- Dan Piepenbring, Harper's The staff freaked out,” Stephens said. It was more aromatic than the food ordinarily found in a Channel Islands hotel kitchen. “They ended up opening all the windows,” he said. “They didn’t complain, though. Blay-Miezah was spending too much money. If they complained, there’d be trouble.”

Victims included heads of state, politicians and businessmen. “Those who believe Blay-Miezah a fraud,” the American ambassador to Ghana wrote to Henry Kissinger, “are worried he might just have the money and then they would look extremely foolish.” This compelling story of a charismatic conman who fooled thousands . . . This is a glorious tale of greed, exploited by an astonishingly brazen fraudster He was magnetic and charming and handsome,” Yeebo said. “He also seemed to charm even the people who would come to hate him.” T or F? In prison (once again), Blay-Miezah “quoted at length, a hymn he had admired from his childhood, by James Russell Lowell,

"As gripping as a heist movie"

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. In this absorbing true crime narrative, Yeebo details the fascinating story of this audacious con artist This astonishing book reveals some of the most important global events of the twentieth century' Afua Hirsch As Yepoka Yeebo makes clear in her richly entertaining account of [Blay-Miesah’s] rise and fall, he combined charisma and a silver tongue, attracting both the greedy and the idealistic . . . She has a sharp eye for droll detail and is especially successful in evoking the two decades that followed independence – a glitzy but sleazy world of nightclubs and casinos “where the champagne flowed, even when the electricity did not”