King Con
The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age's Greatest Impostor
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Narrated by:
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Ray Porter
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By:
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Paul Willetts
About this listen
The spellbinding tale of hustler Edgar Laplante - the king of Jazz Age con artists - who becomes the victim of his own dangerous game.
Edgar Laplante was a small-time 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 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 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, Laplante’s overreaching threatened to destroy him....
In King Con, Paul Willetts brings 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 all - and proving that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
©2018 Paul Willetts (P)2018 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“This Jazz Age impostor’s life makes for quite the story, and in King Con, Paul Willetts knows just how to tell it.” (Michael Dirda, Washington Post)
“A real story about an absurd, fascistic fraud. (Can’t think why that resonated.)” (Sam Jordison, The Guardian)
“Willetts’s usual blend of deep research and lively storytelling sucks you straight into this picaresque tale of the conman Edgar Laplante, or Chief White Elk as the shameless would-be Native American styled himself while swindling his way across the USA in the Jazz Age. With every twist the story of Laplante’s life grows harder to believe but, unlike the tall tales he told his credulous victims, it is all true.” (Kieron Pim, Spectator USA, Books of the Year 2018)
“King Con is as engaging, ambitious, and colorful as its shady protagonist.... Willetts has dug deep into newspaper archives and investigative files to accomplish what the authorities on two continents failed to do almost a century ago - unravel Laplante’s trail of brazen fraud and deceit.” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)
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Story
My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln's death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes's older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln's assassin has never been told.
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Wonderful!
- By Tad Davis on 11-30-10
By: Nora Titone, and others
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Good Day!
- The Paul Harvey Story
- By: Paul J. Batura
- Narrated by: Paul J. Batura
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In Good Day!: The Paul Harvey Story, author Paul J. Batura follows the remarkable life of one of the founding fathers of the news media. Paul Harvey started his career during the Great Depression and narrated America's story day by day, through wars and peace, the threat of communism and the crumbling of old colonial powers, consumer booms and eventual busts.
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Should have been better
- By Royce Brown on 12-21-09
By: Paul J. Batura
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The Sugar King of Havana
- The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's Last Tycoon
- By: John Paul Rathbone
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifty years after the Cuban revolution, the legendary wealth of the sugar magnate Julio Lobo remains emblematic of a certain way of life that came to an abrupt end when Fidel Castro marched into Havana. Known in his day as the King of Sugar, Lobo was for decades the most powerful force in the world sugar market, controlling vast swaths of the island's sugar interests.
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VERY INFORMATIVE
- By Terry on 03-26-12
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50 Children
- One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany
- By: Steven Pressman
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In early 1939, few Americans were thinking about the darkening storm clouds over Europe. Nor did they have much sympathy for the growing number of Jewish families that were increasingly threatened and brutalized by Adolf Hitler's policies in Germany and Austria. But one ordinary American couple decided that something had to be done. Despite overwhelming obstacles - both in Europe and in the United States - Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus made a bold and unprecedented decision to travel into Nazi Germany in an effort to save a group of Jewish children.
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I didn't want it to end
- By David Shear on 05-07-14
By: Steven Pressman
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One Summer
- America, 1927
- By: Bill Bryson
- Narrated by: Bill Bryson
- Length: 17 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the most admired nonfiction writers of our time retells the story of one truly fabulous year in the life of his native country - a fascinating and gripping narrative featuring such outsized American heroes as Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and yes Herbert Hoover, and a gallery of criminals (Al Capone), eccentrics (Shipwreck Kelly), and close-mouthed politicians (Calvin Coolidge). It was the year Americans attempted and accomplished outsized things and came of age in a big, brawling manner. What a country. What a summer. And what a writer to bring it all so vividly alive.
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Why 1927?
- By Mark on 10-18-13
By: Bill Bryson
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Mark Twain: Man in White
- The Grand Adventure of His Final Years
- By: Michael Shelden
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Shelden illuminates Mark Twain’s twilight years in this brilliant account of the legendary author’s life. Drawing heavily on Twain’s own letters and journals, Mark Twain: Man in White recounts both Twain’s private family experiences and his larger-than-life public image.
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Fantastic book
- By Tad Davis on 08-23-10
By: Michael Shelden
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The Curse of Beauty
- The Scandalous & Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America's First Supermodel
- By: James Bone
- Narrated by: Marianne Fraulo
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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As America was stepping into the modern era, one great beauty became the artist's model of choice. Her perfect form became the emblem of the Gilded Age and appears on the greatest monuments of New York and the nation. Supermodel, actress, icon - her beauty paved the way for a life of glamour, passion, and ultimately tragedy. Her name is Audrey Munson.
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Fascinating
- By Аmazon Customer on 04-06-17
By: James Bone
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The Devil in the White City
- Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds.
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A Rich Read!
- By D on 09-18-03
By: Erik Larson
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Travelers in the Third Reich
- The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945
- By: Julia Boyd
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Travelers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating firsthand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, fascists, artists, tourists, and even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler - one so palpable that the listener will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere.
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Why must I write a review to have my rating count?
- By Saint Exupery on 03-04-23
By: Julia Boyd
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Rebel Souls
- Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians
- By: Justin Martin
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Rebel Souls is the first book ever written about the colorful group of artists - regulars at Pfaff's Saloon in Manhattan - rightly considered America's original Bohemians. Besides a young Whitman, the circle included actor Edwin Booth; trailblazing stand–up comic Artemus Ward; psychedelic drug pioneer and author Fitz Hugh Ludlow; and brazen performer Adah Menken, famous for her Naked Lady routine. Central to their times, the artists managed to forge connections with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and even Abraham Lincoln.
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A Wonderful Read with Vibrant Characters
- By A on 11-11-15
By: Justin Martin
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A Kim Jong-Il Production
- The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power
- By: Paul Fischer
- Narrated by: Stephen Park
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Before becoming the world's most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea's Ministry for Propaganda and its film studios. Conceiving every movie made, he acted as producer and screenwriter. Despite this control, he was underwhelmed by the available talent and took drastic steps, ordering the kidnapping of Choi Eun-Hee (Madam Choi) - South Korea's most famous actress - and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country's most famous filmmaker.
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Absolutely terrifying
- By Anonymous on 02-19-15
By: Paul Fischer
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In the Garden of Beasts
- Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another....
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I loved it ... and hated it ... simultaneously
- By History on 11-21-11
By: Erik Larson
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The Riviera Set
- Glitz, Glamour, and the Hidden World of High Society
- By: Mary S. Lovell
- Narrated by: Jill Rolls
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The Riviera Set reveals the story of the group of people who lived, partied, bed-hopped, and politicked at the Château de l'Horizon near Cannes, over the course of 40 years from the time when Coco Chanel made southern French tans fashionable in the twenties to the death of the playboy Prince Aly Khan in 1960. At the heart of dynamic group was the amazing Maxine Elliott, the daughter of a fisherman from Connecticut, who built the beautiful art deco Château.
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Riviera Set
- By Lois Kelly on 05-04-18
By: Mary S. Lovell
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Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination
- The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford's Theatre
- By: Thomas A. Bogar
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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April 14, 1865. A famous actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage, and escapes, as the president lies fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified people scatter in and around Ford's Theater as soldiers take up stations by the doors and the audience surges into the streets chanting, "Burn the place down!" This is the untold story of Lincoln's assassination: The forty-six stage hands, actors, and theater workers on hand for the bewildering events in the theater that night.
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Stars of an Unrehearsed Impromptu Drama
- By William G. Stuart on 08-17-15
By: Thomas A. Bogar
What listeners say about King Con
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- LG
- 02-04-23
Story drags at points
The story drags at points though it could be expected since it is a imaginative recollection of LaPlante’s life.
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