The case files
The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower: Twice
In 1925 Paris couldn't afford to maintain its own monument. Victor Lustig read one newspaper article about it, printed fake government stati…
Deception & EvidenceThe Ledger That Caught Capone
Al Capone ordered murders in daylight and never saw the inside of a courtroom for any of them. What finally convicted him was arithmetic: a …
Deception & EvidenceThe Money Box
Lustig sold a mahogany box that 'printed' hundred-dollar bills for up to $46,000 a box. The machine worked perfectly for exactly two bills, …
Empire DecisionsThe Board That Fired Its Founder
In 1985 Apple's board sided with the professional CEO Steve Jobs had personally recruited, and stripped Jobs of all operating power. Twelve …
Empire DecisionsThe Quarter Enron Ran Out of Room
Enron's numbers worked for years because the losses lived in entities nobody consolidated and the profits were booked the day a deal was sig…
Empire DecisionsThe PayPal Decision
Confinity and X.com were burning millions a month trying to destroy each other in the same building on University Avenue. The decision that …
Empire DecisionsThe Night FTX Vanished
On November 2, 2022 a leaked balance sheet showed FTX's sister fund was built on FTX's own token. Nine days later the exchange, its $32 bill…
Power & GreedThe Ransom Room
A room 22 feet by 17, filled with gold as high as a man could reach. That was the price the Inca emperor offered for his life. The Spaniards…
Power & GreedThe Blind Doge
An army of crusaders arrived in Venice 34,000 silver marks short of their shipping bill. The city's doge, blind and by the chronicles around…
Art MysteriesThe Forger Who Fooled the Nazis
Charged with treason for selling a Vermeer to Hermann Göring, Han van Meegeren offered the only defense that could save him: the Vermeer was…
Money & MarketsFriday the 13th, 1307
The Knights Templar ran Europe's first international bank: deposit in London, withdraw in Jerusalem by letter of credit. Their biggest debto…
Money & MarketsThe Receipt
In 1519 the crown of the Holy Roman Empire went to auction between kings, and the winning bid came from a commoner. Four years later, with t…
Money & MarketsThe Match King
By 1929 Ivar Kreuger controlled two-thirds of the world's match production and was lending sovereign nations more money than J.P. Morgan. A …
Money & MarketsThe Locked Library
In the autumn of 1907, with banks failing and no central bank existing, one private citizen reportedly kept the heads of American finance in…
Money & MarketsNewton's Madness
Isaac Newton sold his South Sea Company shares in April 1720 at a solid profit. Then he watched the bubble triple without him, bought back i…
Money & MarketsTired of Fighting
Jesse Livermore shorted the 1929 crash and, by the widely reported figure, made around $100 million while the country broke. America blamed …
Money & MarketsAccount 88888
A 28-year-old trader ran both Barings' Singapore trading desk and the back office that checked it. His hidden error account, 88888, swallowe…
Money & MarketsNo Millionaires at the Reunion
When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 he was worth more than the US Treasury held. In 1973, one hundred twenty of his descendants gathered …
Money & MarketsThe Bridge and the Bricks
In June 1982 the chairman of Italy's largest private bank was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London, bricks and £10,000 in his po…
Money & MarketsThe Kidnap Market
There is a quiet market in London that effectively sets the price of a kidnapped human being, and by the academic account of it, almost all …
Power & GreedThe Unelected Emperor of New York
Robert Moses was never elected to anything. For over forty years he out-powered mayors and governors, and built 13 bridges, 658 playgrounds …
Money & MarketsThe Wearable Edge
In 1961 Ed Thorp and Claude Shannon built the world's first wearable computer, twelve transistors in a cigarette pack, to beat roulette in V…
Money & MarketsThe One-Syllable War
A Bell Labs physicist wrote a formula for how much to bet when you have an edge. Gamblers and quants adopted it. A Nobel economist hated it …
Money & MarketsThe President's Con Man
Wall Street called Ferdinand Ward 'the Young Napoleon of finance.' His partner was the son of Ulysses S. Grant, and the ex-president's name …
Power & GreedDestroyed By His Own Law
Shang Yang built the ancient world's most efficient police state: household registration, mutual surveillance, papers required to sleep anyw…
Power & GreedThe Classmate's Poison
Han Fei wrote the definitive manual on power: how rulers are deceived, how ministers scheme, how to survive advising a king. The future Firs…
Power & GreedInterview With the Conqueror
Ibn Khaldun had spent his life writing the theory of why empires rise and rot. In January 1401, with Damascus under siege, the seventy-year-…
Power & GreedThe Librarian's Find
The most ruthless statecraft manual of the ancient world, poisons, spy networks, staged assassinations as routine administration, was lost f…
Money & MarketsGod and Profit
A medieval merchant headed his ledgers 'In the name of God and of profit' and threw away nothing: 150,000 letters, every contract, every ins…
Money & MarketsThe Secret Books
The bank that financed the Renaissance kept two sets of books. The public ones satisfied the Church's usury laws. The libri segreti, the sec…
Money & MarketsThe First Meme Crash
After the crashes of 1720 wiped out speculators in Paris, London and Amsterdam, Dutch publishers produced something unprecedented: a giant c…
Money & MarketsConfusion of Confusions
The first book about a stock market ever written is a set of dialogues between a philosopher, a merchant and a shareholder. It describes opt…
Money & MarketsThe Forgotten $450 Million Day
On one spring day in 1970, Ross Perot lost about $450 million on paper, the largest one-day personal loss anyone had recorded. Almost nobody…
Deception & EvidenceThe Original Ponzi
In eight months of 1920, Charles Ponzi went from broke clerk to $15 million collected, on a scheme so simple and so doomed that his name rep…
Power & FlorenceThe Torture of Machiavelli
The Prince wasn't written by a cynic in power. It was written by a tortured, fired, exiled civil servant at a farmhouse table: a job applica…
Money & MarketsThe Gambler Who Owned France
A Scottish duelist who escaped a death sentence taught France to use paper money, took over its national debt, its colonial trade and its ta…
Money & MarketsThe Waterloo Legend
The legend says Nathan Rothschild's early news of Waterloo let him trick the London exchange and buy Britain for pennies. The archives say t…
Money & MarketsTen Sigma
Long-Term Capital Management had two Nobel laureates, returns of 40%, and models that priced its August 1998 losses as so unlikely the unive…
Money & MarketsWhen Money Dies
In 1923 Germans burned banknotes for heat because the notes were worth less than firewood. In 1946 Hungarian prices doubled every fifteen ho…
Empire DecisionsMusk's Christmas Eve
In the same week of December 2008, SpaceX was one failed launch from dead and Tesla was hours from missing payroll. The funding that saved b…
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