The Pretender How Martin Frankel Fooled the Financial World and Led the Feds on One of the Most Publicized Manhunts in History

This is the unbelievable-but-true account of Martin Frankel -- a timid, two-bit investor with a dark side who pulled off one of the greatest financial scams of the century and led the FBI on a four-month global chase before finally being caught.The Pretenderchronicles how a bumbling thirty-year-old Midwesterner, a lifelong gawky misfit, built an intricate, fraudulent moneymaking scheme that bilked insurance companies out of $200 million. Transforming himself from mama's boy to corporate mogul, Martin Frankel entered a world peopled with desperate businessmen, political power brokers, masterful con artists, vulnerable women, vindictive husbands, and charitable priests -- and spun his web of lies deep inside the power centers of Washington, D.C., New York, and the Vatican. But such success and excess aroused the suspicions of the authorities, and Frankel vanished from his opulent mansion-leaving behind a mysterious fire and some very confused law-enforcement officials-and ran for his life across Europe.

Ellen Joan Pollock is a senior special writer of page one features at The Wall Street Journal, where she has worked for more than twelve years. She has focused on personalities from George W. Bush to Michael Jackson to Ronald Perelman, and spent several years covering the Whitewater scandal. She is also the author of Turks and Brahmins. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter.