Quotes from Dean Jobb

There is something quintessentially American about the confidence man, who reinvents himself to each new victim in the same way that America's early settlers reinvented themselves in a new land .... America was built on dreams and promises, and dreams and promises are what a con man sells.

Leo Koretz, the Bernie Madoff of the Roaring Twenties, operated his swindle for far longer and with more panache than his contemporary, Charles Ponzi. He was a better actor, a more adept liar, a shrewder salesman. He kept his scam alive – and his investors none the wiser – for almost two decades …. In terms of the scale of their frauds, staying power and sheer audacity, Leo Koretz and Bernie Madoff stand apart in the pantheon of pyramid-building swindlers.

indulged in excess in the flowing bowl"—a polite term, in those days, for drunkenness.

A "deadly cat and mouse game" began, the American science writer Deborah Blum has noted, as murderers deployed new poisons and scientists raced to find ways to catch them.

We can't hire gentlemen to serve as policemen," Williams acknowledged, "for $1.25 a day.

Each fake called for some more fakes to cover the first ones up,