Memoirs of a Scam Man: The Life and Deals of Patsy Anthony Lepera,

by Patsy Anthony Lepera, Walter Goodman (Other Contributor)

265 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Arthur Tashiro]

This old book resonates now. Patsy Lapera was a swindler who, with neither fear nor scruples, spent the 50s and 60s using bluff and sleight-of-hand to get money out of banks, brokerage houses, governments, and various slightly bent citizens.

Think of him as an intelligent, independent version of the hustlers cultivated by Donald Trump.

Ghostwriter Walter Goodman describes Lapera as “a subversive without an ideology” using the system against the system. Lapera succeeded because of insider crooks and insider-wannabes whose ethics were always negotiable. Posing as a winner himself, he helped others with their scheming for riches; cohorts in the banks certified balance sheets based on fantasy; the printers trusted on Wall Street would run off extra copies of a stock certificate. “You hear a shipment of securities is stolen at Kennedy Airport? It wasn’t stole…it was sold.”

Goodman puts much of the book in the first person with a good deal of underworld argot. He has Lapera speaking largely in the streetwise present tense that Damon Runyon relied on—“I am sitting in Mindy’s when who walks in but…” Whether Lapera spoke this way or not, it allows for a pleasant narrative rhythm. Repeatedly, Lapera begins a story with a picture of himself in the moment it begins—“I meet this guy…”—before telling the tale in the conventional past tense.

Lapera has many tales to tell. Apart from their entertainment value, they give readers a sense of how the well-known connections among business, politics, and organized crime worked out day to day: “It was Jack who handled the 900 shares of IBM that was stole right out the vaults at E.F. Hutton…in 1968 and wound up in Bebe Rebozo’s bank in Key Biscayne….”

One of his stories shows that finagling around Presidential campaigns is nothing new. In 1968, “Mac”— Lapera’s partner in various offshore swindles—became an official in Nixon’s 1968 inaugural committee. From him, Lapera got invitations to the inaugural ball, which he sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars to characters who thought they’d gain respectability by being photographed with the President.

It would be interesting to know who this Mac really was: kin of a former First Lady, one of the Nixon administration’s contacts for various African governments, with a sideline in dealing stolen NATO weapons.

The book was published just a few years after Puzo’s THE GODFATHER and presents quite a different picture of organized crime. Mafiosi often cut in on Lapera’s deals or forced him into schemes that were utterly stupid. He found no men of honor in the families, just smug extortionists and doublecrossers who could barely understand the hustles he came up with.

[Olga Vannucci]

Who knew that stealing money
Could be told to sound so funny.