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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
"(Blay-Miezah once eluded police by dropping into a latrine-style toilet and shimmying through the small door used to empty it.) Yeebo compares his marks, aptly, to the members of a millenarian cult; every deferred payday, like every false apocalypse, strengthened their faith."
"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."
"Readers will devour the gripping story of a lie that became a country's founding myth."
"Yeebo's narrative is compelling, some of her postcolonial analysis is debatable."
"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."
"It's a wild tale indeed, brought to life by Yeebo's intricate research and compelling prose ..."
"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 ..."
"Well-researched and engaging, [Anansi's Gold] draws readers into the intricate web of lies about a trust-fund tall tale that spanned throughout the 1970s and '80s and across the globe."
"This is perfect for fans of Frank Abignale Jr.'s Catch Me If You Can."
"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."
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