The Salad Oil King

***** The Salad Oil King is a classic tale of American crime spun by a master storyteller. From the first chapters, you will be completely hooked. You are pulled into a world not only of domestic corruption, but of internationals politics, that sprang from the Great Depression to World War II and beyond. There you will meet an amoral 12-year old boy, Alfonso Fonso Gravenese, who delights in stealing hundreds of dollars from unwitting neighbors. You ll watch him grow into an unscrupulous adult who scams millions from the Federal Free Lunch Program for schoolchildren. Ultimately, he morphs into an insatiable entrepreneur who skims hundreds of millions from U.S. allies desperate for American foreign aid largess. Along the way he forces the NYSE and the Commodity Market to halt trading, and two venerable brokerage houses to close their doors. Personal betrayals and struggles only add to the book s power, as Fonso desperately struggles to keep himself on top of the business and close to his few remaining family and friends. Anybody even remotely interested in how crime and corruption can shape history should read this book. --San Francisco Literary Review

*****/2 The Salad Oil King is an extremely intriguing novel that illustrates the good the bad and the ugly side of business. Crisci's clever progression of one man s lust for money and power is at once intimate and epic. His elegantly-crafted, approachable style deeply involves the reader in both the story and the amazing cast of characters you meet along the way. Through much of the book you can actually picture what is happening while either laughing or shaking your head. In the end, we are left with a disturbing conundrum. How can an unpretentious and poorly educated man use street smarts, deceit and deception to amass hundreds of millions before anyone even starts to wonder how? --Manhattan Book Review