Non Fiction November - Week 3

This weeks #nonficnov is hosted by plucked from the stacks and the topic is pretty self explanatory - Books you have read that are stranger than fiction.

This topic really got me thinking and the one book that came to mind from earlier in the year was a particular story from ‘true stories of grifters killers rebels and crooks’ by Patrick Radden Keefe. It’s a scam involving ‘the Jefferson bottles’, wine dating back to 1786 said to have belonged to the former president that ‘turned up’ in Paris. The billionaire Bill Koch pays $500,000 for them, before discovering they might be bogus, and paying twice that amount to a former FBI agent to investigate.

It introduced me to a world I’d never known about, that of international wine fraud, and perhaps the greatest conman in the business, the wonderfully named Hardy Rodenstock. It’s a riveting yarn that would make a cracking tv show.

The full story appeared in the New Yorker and can be found here.