Non-Violent True Crime

"The true story of the world's most prolific art thief--a spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, from the bestselling author of The Stranger in the Woods. For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly ten years--in museums and cathedrals all over Europe--Breitwieser,...

Named a Best Book of 2018 by the Financial Times and Fortune, this "thrilling" (Bill Gates) New York Times bestseller exposes how a "modern Gatsby" swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs in "the heist of the century" (Axios).
Now a #1 international bestseller, Billion Dollar Whale is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social...

Before turning to her life of crime-running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI-Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West...

"Why do we love stories about scammers so much? Journalist Tori Telfer dives into the stories of historical female con women and explains why we are so enamored by their scams"-- The art of the con has a long and venerable tradition, and its female practitioners are some of the best-- or worst. Telfer introduces us to a host of lady swindlers whose scams ranged from the outrageous to the deadly. Among them: In 1700s Paris, Jeanne de Saint-Rémy scammed...

"On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian...

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter, Han van Meegeren, who dared to impersonate Vermeer centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.

Nobody can know them all, certainly not Rudy Kurniawan, who never set eyes on Burgundy. In the end, it was his imprecise knowledge of a particular domaine's history that tripped him up. It happened amid extreme merriment, one spring evening, in New York. The mistakes that he made, minuscule and highly arcane, upended his life. Also upended would be the practices and pleasures of seekers after rare old wine.

"The story of an infamous crime, a revered map dealer with an unsavory secret, and the ruthless subculture that consumed him Maps have long exerted a special fascination on viewers-both as beautiful works of art and as practical tools to navigate the world. But to those who collect them, the map trade can be a cutthroat business, inhabited by quirky and sometimes disreputable characters in search of a finite number of extremely rare objects. Once...

Vanity Fair photo editor Rachel DeLoache Williams's new friend Anna Delvey, a self-proclaimed German heiress, was worldly and ambitious. She was also generous-picking up the tab for lavish dinners at Le Coucou, infrared sauna sessions at HigherDOSE, drinks at the 11 Howard Library bar, and regular workout sessions with a celebrity personal trainer. When Anna proposed an all-expenses-paid trip to Marrakech at the five-star La Mamounia hotel, Rachel...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist takes us inside the world revealed by the Panama Papers, a landscape of illicit money, political corruption, and fraud on a global scale. Jake Bernstein offers a disturbing and sobering view of how the world really works and raises crucial questions about financial and legal institutions we may once have trusted.