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Anansi's Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World
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About This Book
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. When Ghana won its independence from Britain in 1957, it instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and rapacious Western interests determined to snatch any assets that colonialism hadn't already stripped. A CIA-funded military junta ousted the new nation's inspiring president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of hiding the country's gold overseas. Into this big lie stepped one of history's most charismatic scammers, a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty in Ghana and trained in the United States, John Ackah Blay-Miezah declared himself custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece--if only you would "invest" in Blay-Miezah's fictitious efforts to release the equally fictitious fund. Over the 1970s and '80s, he and his accomplices―including Ghanaian state officials and Nixon's former attorney general--scammed hundreds of millions of dollars out of thousands of believers. Blay-Miezah lived in luxury, deceiving Philadelphia lawyers, London financiers, and Seoul businessmen alike, all while eluding his FBI pursuers. American prosecutors called his scam "one of the most fascinating--and lucrative--in modern history." In Anansi's Gold , Yepoka Yeebo chases Blay-Miezah's ever-wilder trail and discovers, at long last, what really happened to Ghana's missing wealth. She unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements, international finance, and postcolonial betrayal, revealing how what we call "history" writes itself into being, one lie at a time.
Reviews
"The author, a freelance journalist, delves into archives across the Atlantic, digs up criminal proceedings and conducts interviews with victims and associates alike, in the process telling us not just about Blay-Miezah, but about the world that enabled him to thrive ..."
"As Yepoka Yeebo, a British-Ghanaian journalist, makes clear in her richly entertaining account of his rise and fall, he combined charisma and a silver tongue, attracting both the greedy and the idealistic – the latter seduced by the thought of using the missing billions to boost Ghana's infrastructure ..."
"The sprawling story of Blay-Miezah's outsize life and wayward career is told with mordant aplomb by first-time British-Ghanaian author Yepoka Yeebo ..."
"Reading Anansi's Gold is like watching a heist movie in agonizing slow motion."
"Readers who enjoy true crime and stories about cons will quickly be absorbed into Yeebo's first book.""
"Even as she catches readers up in what often reads like a breathless caper, the author takes care to ground them in what matters most: Ghana and its sadly 'fragile' history."
"Writing about a con as convoluted and extensive as Blay-Miezah's is no easy endeavor, but in Anansi's Gold...Yeebo does a phenomenal job explaining how one lie took on a life of its own, one that still hasn't ended."
"Journalist Yeebo brilliantly illuminates the stranger-than-fiction career of Ghanaian fraudster John Ackah Blay-Miezah (1941–1992) in this thrilling true-crime account ..."
"Biographers of con-artists are always at a disadvantage, in that it's nigh-impossible to convey the unique charisma that enables somebody like Blay-Miezah to persuade people to hand over their life savings."
"Readers will devour the gripping story of a lie that became a country's founding myth."
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