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Anansi's gold : the man who looted the west, outfoxed Washington, and swindled the world / Yepoka Yeebo.

by Yeebo, Yepoka, author.

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New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

Blay-Miezah, John Ackah, 1941-1992.

Swindlers and swindling.

9781635574739 (hardcover) :

1635574730 (hardcover)

xiii, 378 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Our man -- Kerosene boy -- Legends and lies -- One big cocktail party -- Crooks and heroes -- Three hotels -- The crew -- The longest con -- Girard Bank -- Multi, multi, multi -- Hubris -- Silk -- President Blay-Miezah -- House of cards -- Deal with the devil -- Our man in London -- Glory and folly -- Showboys all the way -- Fool's gold -- American grifter -- Soon parted -- The throne and the chain -- The ultimate con man -- Anansi's last tale -- Epilogue: The rest is history.

"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"--Provided by publisher.

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