A License To Steal

Stockbroker to young trainee: "Remember, when clients send in that money, it's not theirs anymore. It's ours...We're never giving it back to them." Welcome to Wall Street. The longest bull market in history has driven more people to invest in stocks than ever before--and has given rise to unprecedented levels of greed within the brokerage industry that "serves" those investors. In License to Steal, Timothy Harper and his Anonymous coauthor have succeeded in piercing the financial industry's code of silence. In a gripping and fast-paced narrative, they show readers how successful brokers on the "Street Without Shame" peddle worthless stocks, take questionable companies public, manipulate share prices, generate bogus commissions, and raid clients' accounts for their own use. Anonymous and Harper tell a wild, raucous, true story of outrageous acts committed by a handful of rogue brokers--as well as the off-hand, everyday deceptions that are routine in the securities business--and the high life as it is lived by the young and rich in the canyons of Wall Street. The book recounts the rise of a young, successful stockbroker, first as a smart, eager operator willing to do whatever it takes to make it. Always keeping just within the law, he watches his colleagues in the brokerage business cross over daily into unscrupulous conduct, lining their own pockets at the expense of their clients. Unwilling to join them, unable to endure the pressure of their corrupting influence, he eventually quits Wall Street. A mesmerizing story of personal redemption, License to Steal is also a searing indictment of a corrupt and brutalizing system and a warning to the millions of American investors who trust and rely on stockbrokers for guidance on their own investments.

Leonard Levy traces the development and implementation of forfeiture and contends that it is a questionable practice, which, because it is so often abused, serves only to undermine civil society. Arguing that civil forfeiture is unconstitutional, Levy provides examples of the victimization of innocent people and demonstrates that it has been used primarily against petty offienders rather than against its original targets, members of organized crime.

License to Steal -- an in-depth study of the criminal element of the Romani population, a highly organized, secretive empire known as the Gypsy Mafia -- is based on true stories taken from police records, historical data and heartbreaking interviews with victims of various scams. Gypsy Mafia games include burglary, home-improvement rip-offs, fortune-telling, shoplifting, pickpocketing and insurance and credit-card fraud.

Walter T. Shaw's Autobiography - As early as the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Walter L. Shaw was thinking of speaker phones, conference calls and call forwarding. Of the thirty-nine patents to his credit, those three telephonic breakthroughs were his biggest inventions, yet nobody knows his name. Ahead of the world by decades, Shaw was leading us into a high-tech future as part of the intellectual elite, but he was repeatedly cheated by shrewd businessmen and big corporations. His son, Walter T. Shaw, was enraged by the ill treatment of his father and embraced a personal mission to even the score. Shaw Jr. would become one of the most prolific jewel thieves in U.S. history. Shaw Sr. spent a lifetime inventing and patenting the many means of communication we take for granted today, but it was all for nothing.Tragically, only the Mafia rewarded him. Just to make ends meet for his family, he was persuaded to put his brilliance to work for the mob.

The world--famous former con artist and bestselling author of Catch Me if You Can now reveals the mind--boggling tricks of the scam trade--with advice that has made him one of America's most sought--after fraud--prevention experts. "I had as much knowledge as any man alive concerning the mechanics of forgery, check swindling, counterfeiting, and other similar crimes. Ever since I'd been released from prison, I'd often felt that if I directed this knowledge into the right channels, I could help people a great deal. Every time I went to the store and wrote a check, I would see two or three mistakes made on the part of the clerk or cashier, mistakes that a flimflam artist would take advantage of. . . . In a certain sense, I'm still a con artist. I'm just putting down a positive con these days, as opposed to the negative con I used in the past. I've merely redirected the talents I've always possessed. I've applied the same relentless attention to working on stopping fraud that I once applied to perpetuating fraud." In Catch Me if You Can, Frank W. Abagnale recounted his youthful career as a master imposter and forger. In The Art of the Steal, Abagnale tells the remarkable story of how he parlayed his knowledge of cons and scams into a successful career as a consultant on preventing financial foul play--while showing you how to identify and outsmart perpetrators of fraud. Technology may have made it easier to track down criminals, but cyberspace has spawned a skyrocketing number of ways to commit crime--much of it untraceable. Businesses are estimated to lose an unprecedented $400 billion a year from fraud of one sort or another. If we were able to do away with fraud for just two years, we'd erase the national debt and pay Social Security for the next one hundred years. However, Abagnale has discovered that punishment for committing fraud, much less recovery of stolen funds, seldom happens: Once you're a victim, you won't get your money back. Prevention is the best form of protection. Drawn from his twenty-five years of experience as an ingenious con artist (whose check scams alone mounted to more than $2 million in stolen funds), Abagnale's The Art of the Steal provides eye-opening stories of true scams, with tips on how they can be prevented. Abagnale takes you deep inside the world and mind of the con artist, showing you just how he pulled off his scams and what you can do to avoid becoming the next victim. You'll hear the stories of notorious swindles, like the mustard squirter trick and the "rock in the box" ploy, and meet the criminals like the famous Vickers Gang who perpetrated them. You'll find out why crooks wash checks and iron credit cards and why a thief brings glue with him to the ATM. And finally, you'll learn how to recognize a bogus check or a counterfeit bill, and why you shouldn't write your grocery list on a deposit slip. A revealing look inside the predatory criminal mind from a former master of the con, The Art of the Steal is the ultimate defense against even the craftiest crook.

'In March 2015, I was tasked by Pravin Gordhan, the minister responsible for local government, to root out corruption in the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality in the Eastern Cape. Over the following eighteen months, I led the investigations and orchestrated the crackdown as the "hatchet man" for the metro's new Mayor, Danny Jordaan. This is my account of kickbacks, rigged contracts and a political party at war with itself.' How to Steal a City is the gripping insider account of this intervention, which lays bare how Nelson Mandela Bay metro was bled dry by criminal syndicates, and how factional politics within the ruling party abetted that corruption. As a former senior state official and local government 'fixer', Crispian Olver was no stranger to dodgy politicians and broken organisations. Yet what he found in Nelson Mandela Bay went far beyond rigged contracts, blatant conflicts of interest and garden-variety kickbacks. The city's administration had evolved into a sophisticated web of front companies, criminal syndicates and compromised local politicians and officials. The metro was effectively controlled by a criminal network closely allied to a dominant local ANC faction. What Olver found was complete state capture – a microcosm of what has taken place in national government. Olver and his team initiated a clean-up of the administration, clearing out corrupt officials and rebuilding public trust. Then came the ANC's doomed campaign for the August 2016 local government elections. Having lost its way in factional battles and corruption, the divided party went down to a humiliating defeat in its traditional heartland. Olver paid a high price for his work in Nelson Mandela Bay. Intense political pressure and even threats to his personal safety took a toll on his mental and physical health. When his political support was withdrawn, he had to flee the city as the forces stacked against him took their revenge. This is his story.