Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery: Even More of the World’s Most Outrageous Scams, by Andreas Schroeder
Some history on Andreas Schroder that I picked up from Google: Since 1991, Andreas Schroeder has been a regular on the very popular national CBC-Radio show “Basic Black” with Arthur Black. Each month, Schroeder recounts, with wry understatement, yet another outrageous scam or particularly notable rip-off, leaving his listeners speechless with disbelief, amusement, and even grudging admiration.
Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery is his third collection of these stories, building on the popularity of his two previous books. It’s an interesting and decent enough book but not really that thrilling, or maybe just not my thing. There were a couple of stories that stood out as particularly entertaining.
The Picasso forger Elmyr de Hory becomes so infamous that people start to forge his own forgeries! He becomes so prolific over a “career” spanning several decades that it’s not only possible, but entirely likely, that his forgeries of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, and Braques hang in museums around the world, nobody being aware that they are not actually authentic. To me, this brings up an interesting question. If nobody can tell if something is a forgery, does it really matter? Are we going to museums to see grand works of art, or are we going because of who painted them? This is tricky question for me because on the one hand I have gone to museums specifically to see works painted by Leonardo Da Vinci and I would be exceedingly disappointed to discover they were forgeries. On the other hand, I have zero interest in the debate over “who was William Shakespeare” because I don’t really care. I love his plays, and we know they were written by someone going by the name of Shakespeare, but I don’t care if they were actually written by the specific person we’ve come to understand was him. I guess other than trying to identify a descendant, I’m not sure it really matters. Maybe this is a topic for an old-style “salon” discussion.
In another story, an ingenious and peculiar bomber going by the name of Dagobert Duck (German for Scrooge McDuck) held hostage one of Germany’s largest department stores for years. The is recent enough that I feel I should remember news about it, but unfortunately I don’t. However, the story is still intriguing for his ingenuity, understanding of police process and precise planning for all contingencies. In fact, the police failed on 30 separate attempts to capture Dagobert at various money-drop locations he proposed, but he always managed to elude them (although he also failed to pick up the money as well … hard to day who was more ridiculous). This is definitely worth your time to visit a Wikipedia page about it, or read about it here.
Rating: Maybe borrow it, if this type of thing interests you.