Anansi's Gold

"Catch Me if You Can meets Coming to America in this epic tale of one of the greatest scammers of all time."-NPR

Shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year * Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, Newsweek, The Economist, TIME, Slate, and WIRED 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.

After winning independence in 1957, Ghana instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and rapacious Western interests determined to snatch any assets that British colonialism hadn't already stripped. A CIA-funded military junta ousted the 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 around the world. 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 wild 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.