Whale Man

Fiction. Avi Heyer's rollicking adventure begins when he returns to Elsbeth, North Carolina, to settle his mother's affairs. A student chef with the wrong girlfriend and a mud-loving dog, Avi soon finds himself dragged into a criminal conspiracy. His world is churned up, down and sideways by the diabolical Camel and her hired henchwomen; an unknown phone caller who somehow tracks his every move; an enticing hippie who may be trying to steal something from Avi; a plainspoken building contractor with a suspicious hearing aid; and a news reporter desperate for love. And then there's Avi's whale, with its graceful bulk and keening song, a whale that becomes more than an obsession.

Named a Best Book of 2018 by the Financial Times and Fortune, this "thrilling" (Bill Gates) New York Times bestseller exposes how a "modern Gatsby" swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs in "the heist of the century" (Axios). Now a #1 international bestseller, Billion Dollar Whale is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund--right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to finance Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street. By early 2019, with his yacht and private jet reportedly seized by authorities and facing criminal charges in Malaysia and in the United States, Low had become an international fugitive, even as the U.S. Department of Justice continued its investigation. Billion Dollar Whale has joined the ranks of Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Bad Blood as a classic harrowing parable of hubris and greed in the financial world.

Holmes tells the story second hand, having heard it from four of the seamen involved. The Citizen was wrecked on the Chukotsk Peninsula Siberia, and this account includes much on the Eskimo, and notes on a stop in Hilo on the voyage out.

The whaler Citizen left New Bedford, Massachusetts, on October 29, 1851, for what was to be a three- or four-year voyage to North Pacific. After rounding East Cape (today known as Cape Dezhnev), the northeastern-most point on the mainland of Asia, and entering the Arctic Ocean, the vessel was wrecked in a storm on September 25, 1852. Five members of the crew were lost in the gale. The other 33 men made it to shore, where they were kept alive for nine months by local people, Yupik Eskimos inhabiting this sparsely populated region of Chukotka, Siberia. The Arctic Whaleman; or, Winter in the Arctic Ocean is an account of the ordeal of the crew of the Citizen, written by Lewis Holmes, a clergyman from Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard, based mainly on an oral account of the voyage given to him by Thomas Howes Norton, also of Edgartown, captain of the Citizen. The book has 15 illustrations and includes notes on the native people of the region, including their methods of hunting whales, their huts, manner of preparing food, customs, language, and so forth. The surviving crewmembers of the Citizen finally were rescued by two New England whalers on July 4, 1853. The book concludes with a brief history of the whaling industry. The heyday of the American whaling industry was from 1820 to 1850, when American whalers accounted for 652 vessels in the worldwide whaling fleet of about 882 ships. New Bedford was the leading whaling port, followed by Fairhaven, Massachusetts, Nantucket, Massachusetts, and New London, Connecticut. Whaling in the Arctic Ocean began in 1848, when the bark Superior of Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, first passed through the Bering Strait to hunt the bowhead whale. Within three years, 250 ships, mostly from New England, had made whaling voyages to the seas north of Siberia and Alaska.