This book is about a con man, Edgar LaPlante, who roamed the United States back in 1918 to 1920 ’s using his skills of lying and scamming people to eke out a living. Since about the age of 13, he’s been everything including a vaudeville actor, snake oil salesman, and everything in between to make a dollar. He loves to get in front of a crowd and tell tall tales about himself, the bigger the lie, the better. He often went around dressing up as a native American, with full feather headdress, buckskins, and moccasins, calling himself Chief White Elk (among many aliases.) Just outlandish bullcrap. Or impersonating an athlete of some renown from earlier times named Tom Longboat, giving speeches and singing, a couple of times nearly being outed by people who knew the real Longboat, and having to move on during the middle of the night. Glib of tongue, he gets arrested here and there but manages to talk his way out of it more than once. He has a lot of nerve and uses it to pull off speeches in front of large crowds that other men would fail at.

Edgar even does a stint at selling Liberty War bonds, skimming from the profits for a time, shaming whites into buying by claiming to be a Native American who was injured fighting for America, and that they should be willing to at least buy bonds if they love their country. He did appear to sell a lot of them. At one point he took up with Burtha Thompson who claimed Klamath Indian ancestry through her mother, and a white father, with the title Princess, and the Native American name. Ah-Tra-Ah-Saun.which meant “Valley of the Mountain.” They made a stunt out of getting married, with the whole thing donated, and even a new car to use,

The second half is when Edgar later took his scams all over Europe, where he did more shows, and eventually did much better financially bilking people for money. Always on the verge of being busted. He does some really crazy things throughout the book to get attention, a real fame whore who is obsessed with getting his name in the papers all the time even though it brings him closer to being caught too. An interesting study. My thanks for the advance digital copy that was provided by Netgalley, author Paul Willets, and the publisher for my fair review.

Crown Publishing
Pub: August 7th, 2018

Edgar LaPlante was a career con artist who managed to pose generally as Native Americans and even well-known public figures in his vaudeville act. He traveled the US and Europe, pulling more and more people into his various cons.
The history is a bit jumbled and frequently punctuated with caveats - might've, could've, etc. The author was being honest at least, showing that he's trying to create the context of the era even without having solid information about LaPlante's doings. So I appreciated that, but was ultimately bothered by the lack of concrete information. It felt disorienting. Still, LaPlante's story itself is unbelievable in the most fascinating of ways - how he managed to perpetrate these kind of cons on so many people in so many places, truly making a career of it, is astounding.

King Con is a book about an imposter, but a very talented one! It's almost hard to believe that someone could pull off a stunt like this for YEARS! A gullible populace is a con man's best friend.