A rol­lick­ing sto­ry of greed, finan­cial cor­rup­tion, dirty pol­i­tics, over-the-top and under-the-radar deceit, illic­it sex, and a bril­liant and wild­ly charm­ing con man who kept a Ponzi scheme alive per­haps for longer than any­one else in history.

It was a time of unreg­u­lat­ed mad­ness. And nowhere was it mad­der than in Chica­go at the dawn of the Roar­ing Twen­ties. Speakeasies thrived, gang war shoot­ings announced Al Capone’s rise to under­world dom­i­na­tion, Chicago’s cor­rupt polit­i­cal lead­ers frat­er­nized with gang­sters, and the fren­zy of stock mar­ket gam­bling was ram­pant. Enter a slick, smooth-talk­ing, charis­mat­ic lawyer named Leo Koretz, who enticed hun­dreds of peo­ple (who should have known bet­ter) to invest as much as $30 mil­lion — upwards of $400 mil­lion today — in phan­tom tim­ber­land and nonex­is­tent oil wells in Pana­ma. When Leo’s scheme final­ly col­lapsed in 1923, he van­ished, and the Chica­go state’s attor­ney, a man whose lust for pow­er equaled Leo’s own lust for mon­ey, began an inter­na­tion­al man­hunt that last­ed almost a year. When final­ly appre­hend­ed, Leo was liv­ing a life of lux­u­ry in Nova Sco­tia under the assumed iden­ti­ty of a book deal­er and lit­er­ary crit­ic. His mys­te­ri­ous death in a Chica­go prison topped any­thing in his almost-too-bizarre-to-believe life.

Empire of Decep­tion is not only an incred­i­bly rich and detailed account of a man and an era; it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing look at the meth­ods of swindlers through­out his­to­ry. Leo Koretz was the Bernie Mad­off of his day, and Dean Jobb shows us that the dream of easy wealth is a time­less commodity.