My Adventures with Your Money

He started with $7.30 and a scheme. Within years, he'd made and lost millions, sparked riots on Wall Street, and become one of the most feared men in American finance. This is the memoir of George Graham Rice born Jacob Simon Herzig, a man who understood something fundamental about the American psyche: everyone thinks they can beat the system. Rice chronicles his rise from Goldfield, Nevada mining camps where he first learned to separate gamblers from their money, to the bucket shops of Manhattan where he perfected the art of legalised robbery. His weapon was not violence but psychology what he called "sucker psychology." He knew that the average investor didn't want truth; they wanted hope. And he gave it to them, for a price. The book pulls no punches about his own greed, ego, and the elaborate hoaxes that made him hated by J.P. Morgan and befriended by Arnold Rothstein. What makes this memoir endure is its unsettling relevance. Rice saw the 1929 crash coming decades early, because he'd watched the same greed play out a thousand times on a smaller scale. It's a practitioner's guide to fraud written by a man who regretted nothing and explained everything.