Keenan's Book Reviews: Search results for Bradley Hope

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Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

I’m feel stuck in trying to describe Billion Dollar Whale, by Wall Street Journal reporters Tom Wright and Bradley Hope. Part of what boggled my mind is the sheer size of the crime they describe, the theft of an estimated $5 billion dollars. That’s right, billion. The other is the number of corrupt people needed to pull it off. Some were neck deep in the scheme, but a lot of people had to look the other way or squelch concerns in order for this to occur and for it to go on for so long.

The true story focuses on a man name Jho Low. He grew up in Malaysia. His father made millions in business and sent a young low to be educated in the UK and US (the Wharton school at University of Pennsylvania), where he started making connections at the prestigious schools he attended. While the Lows were wealthy—even in the US, $15 million is a lot of money—he was rubbing elbows with scions of families that controlled orders of magnitude more wealth. He wanted to run in those circles.

I once read that you can’t con and honest man—traditional cons involved roping a mark into something that is morally dubious if not outright criminal. Low was fortunate to have found many dishonest people who were willing to help him, including the prime minister of Malaysia at the time, Najib Razak, the stepfather of one of Low’s Wharton friends. He also made contacts in the Middle East through Wharton and his British prep school. With the help of Razak and a Saudi ambassador, Low created a Malaysian sovereign fund. Instead of investing the billions of dollars the fund borrowed from investors—with the aid of American banks—Low and his conspirators siphoned of most of the money. He never intended to pay it back.

Low like to party. This is where the story gets really crazy. His partying led him to contact—and in some cases even friendship—with American celebrities. Low pulled money out of the Malaysian fund to finance the making of the film The Wolf of Wall Street, which is about the huge fraud committed by Jordan Belfort, who was played by Leonardo Dicaprio in the film. (Dicaprio was far from the only celebrity in Low’s circle, and part of the fascination of the book is seeing how he used his access to access these people.) Low’s theft and excesses almost makes Belfort seem like an amateur.

As the book was published, Low’s scheme had finally collapsed after seven years, though he and some of his conspirators were still at large and had access to at least some of their stolen money in spite of American, Swiss and Singaporean efforts to seize assets of those involved in the scam. It is frustrating to think that he may get away with it. It is also frustrating to realize that billions may never be repaid to investors, the people are Malaysia are stuck with enormous debts that will be a drag on their economy for decades and the truly beneficial investments that might have been made with that money will never occur.

Wright, Tom & Bradley Hope. Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World. New York: Hachette, 2018.

New Stuff June 3, 2020

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi

The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman

The Instinct to Heal by David Servan-Schreiber

Living Low Carb by Johnny Bowden

Lost Connections by Hari Johnson

The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions by Andrew Hacker

New Stuff May 27, 2020

Range by David Epstein

You are a Badass Every Day by Jen Sincero

Friday, April 23, 2021

The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.