David Howard (12)Reseñas

This book reminded me of that old saying "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" I've read tons of books throughout the years but in Lost Rights David Howard introduced some of the most despicable and deceitful characters I've ever come across. And the frighting lesson to be learned from this book is that these characters weren't fictional. They were supposedly upstanding politicians and business men, who displayed sickening amounts of greed, and with nothing more than a few slaps on the hand for punishment, pretty much got away with their actions. Which reminds me of another old saying "Absolute power corrupts absolutely"

Chasing Phil is the story of the FBI’s first major white-collar undercover investigation. Jack Brennan and J. J. Wedick were two young F.B.I. agents, neither of whom had completed the training in undercover work, but when they followed a tip, met Phil Kitzer, a promoter (conman) who was part of a network of conmen, they felt like they had to go after him right away. So, not really knowing what they were doing, they just did it anyway.

Phil, the man they were investigating was a peripatetic grifter who took them around the globe, meeting with clients, setting up phone banking fronts, and conning people out of millions. His usual grift was to provide fake bank securities that people could use as surety for loans. The mark would pay for their services to help secure a loan, but the poor sap would not get the loan.

He routinely met up with other “promoters” which is what conmen prefer to call themselves, They called themselves The Fraternity. A fraternity of men who shared leads, collaborated on “deals”, and conned each other. No honor among thieves. One of the meetings in the course of this investigation began the most famous undercover operation in F.B.I. history, Abscam.

I struggled with this book. It is well-researched. The author takes care to write with good descriptions and an active prose. It is really not the book that I dislike, it is Phil Kitzer. He is presented as affable, smart, and charming. In the end, the F.B.I. agents cared deeply about his welfare. I get that, they spent nearly a year traversing the globe, chatting in hotel bars with the guy.

But there are two paragraphs in the book that speak to the consequences of Phil’s “deals”. Phil sold phony insurance to people, people abandoned when they needed insurance. He took people’s dreams and pocketed them. This fraternity bought companies with fake certificates, “busted them out”, stripping them of all their assets so folks lost jobs and futures. They conned farmers who lost the family farm, banks, insurance companies, and governments. When a bank collapses, taxpayers foot the bill, so these men grifted off everyone. I can’t find them charming.

So, everything about this book should work. It’s well-written, has an interesting angle, and involves a character perfect for a movie. Not for nothing, Robert Downey, Jr. is supposed to play Phil in the movie based on this book. For me, though, it lacked a moral center. The few paragraphs near the end mentioning the emotional cost of Phil Kitzer and the fraternity’s crimes seem perfunctory, without outrage.

Here’s the thing. White collar crime is perceived as nonviolent, almost charming. It’s a caper. They get light sentences, they get country club prisons, they get movies. This is not the first. But the idea that their crimes are nonviolent is false. We don’t know how many people killed themselves after Enron’s Ken Lay stole their pensions or died of untreated illnesses because they lost their health care. We don’t know how many kids got a poorer education because Phil ripped off their government with phony bonds. These “white-collar” criminals do violence to people’s future. They steal far more than muggers, millions more than muggers, but are treated so lightly because they do with paper and patter, but they wreak far more damage. I just can’t like a book that gives so little attention to the harm done.

I received a copy of Chasing Phil from the publisher through Blogging for Books.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/9781101907429/

Kind of like an episode of History Detectives. An enjoyable look into the sometimes dirty dealings going on in the back rooms of dealers in rare documents. The general public doesn't know much about what happens when stolen documents come to light and why they aren't simply returned to their rightful owners. I found the undercover detective work and the research to discover where the document had been stolen from to be interesting but one chapter was completely repetitive and should have been edited out.

Kind of like an episode of History Detectives. An enjoyable look into the sometimes dirty dealings going on in the back rooms of dealers in rare documents. The general public doesn't know much about what happens when stolen documents come to light and why they aren't simply returned to their rightful owners. I found the undercover detective work and the research to discover where the document had been stolen from to be interesting but one chapter was completely repetitive and should have been edited out.

David Howard's Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) chronicles the sordid story of North Carolina's original copy of the Bill of Rights, stolen from the state capital by a Union soldier in 1865 and later in the possession of an Indianapolis family for decades (most of which time it spent hanging on a living room wall).

Howard's story concentrates on the most recent chapters of the document's history (with occasional "flashback" segments highlighting its earlier travels). During the late 1990s, the Shotwell family began pursuing options to sell the Bill of Rights, including offering it for sale by a major auction house. Because of the serious provenance questions (no known copies of the document other than those sent to the states exist), Christie's and Sotheby's wanted nothing to do with the sale, so the family turned to others.

In 2000, the Bill of Rights was acquired by Connecticut antiques dealer Wayne Pratt and real estate broker Bob Matthews; Pratt and associates began negotiating the sale of the parchment to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. In the end, an FBI sting led to the Bill of Rights being returned to North Carolina, after which a five-year legal battle over ownership of the document ensued.

This is a complicated story, and Howard has done well in his recounting of it. He brings in many of the players, from documentary editors at the First Federal Congress project who authenticated the document, to rare book dealer Bill Reese and manuscript dealer Seth Kaller (who were involved at various stages of the negotiations) to Pratt (Howard was the only reporter Pratt gave interviews to about this subject) to FBI agent Bob Wittman (arranger of the sting) and numerous others. He tracks down some interesting historical context about the copy of the Bill of Rights (including previous attempts in the 1890s and 1920s that might have seen it return home sooner), and delves into the murky and turbulent waters of replevin cases and the different ways in which archives and repositories deal with such thorny issues.

Howard unravels some of the most intriguing threads of this case, including Pratt's own background (much embellished in his own telling), the not-always-quite-above-board career of his co-purchaser Bob Matthews, and the motives of those involved throughout the back-and-forth over the document. I particularly liked his treatment of the same event (meetings, &c.) from differing perspectives - a nice touch.

For the most part, Lost Rights reads like a good thriller. Howard paces out the narrative well, making many of his chapters end on the cliff's edge (and then following them with a background chapter before getting the reader back to the action; this was frustrating a few times when the background seemed a bit like filler, but generally I wasn't too bothered by the tactic). He "gets" the case quite well, and captures the complex nature of the replevin process, and how draining it can be for all concerned.

There were, particularly in the first section of the book, some places where I thought another pass by the copy-editor would have been helpful (I cringed at the sentence "The year was June 1789"). And there are a few minor errors in the text: the book collector Sir Thomas Phillipps' name is misspelled, for example, and I think J. Franklin Jameson would be surprised to hear himself described as "one of the nation's first historians" (I think Howard meant professionally-trained historians). Beyond these, I took issue with the author's characterization of the Bill of Rights and other historical documents as "sacred relics" - maybe I'm jaded, but I just don't find this a useful way of thinking about such things. Important, yes, but not in a religious sense.

Lost Rights is certainly a book that collectors, dealers, and librarians/archivists should read and pay attention to, and it also has much to offer for the reader with a casual interest in the field. I enjoyed it very much.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/08/book-review-lost-rights.html