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Jeff Maysh on the McDonald's Monopoly Scam
Maysh discusses the investigation behind his reporting on one of the strangest fraud cases in American corporate history.
Quick facts
True Crime · Kindle SingleOn my shelf
Handsome Devil
Maysh’s first Kindle Single tells the story of Count Victor Lustig, the con man who sold the Eiffel Tower to scrap dealers — twice — and ran counterfeiting operations that threatened to destabilize the American economy during the Jazz Age. Built from archival research and FBI records, it follows Lustig from petty European thief to America’s most wanted man, hunted personally by J. Edgar Hoover.
Handsome Devil was named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2016 and set the template for everything Maysh has done since: take a criminal so audacious he sounds invented, and prove with documents and detail that he wasn’t. It’s short, fast, and exactly as entertaining as the premise promises.
Espionage · Kindle Single
The Spy With No Name
The true story of Erwin van Haarlem, a Cold War Communist agent who stole the identity of a Dutch woman’s long-lost son and spent eleven years in London maintaining the deception while running espionage operations for Czechoslovak intelligence. Maysh tracked the former spy down in Prague to reconstruct one of the stranger identity-theft cases in Cold War history.
This is Maysh’s specialty distilled: a case so bizarre it reads like fiction, reported down to the level of secret codes and invisible ink. The emotional core — a mother who spent years believing she’d found her son, only for him to have been someone else entirely — gives the spy-thriller mechanics real weight.
Frequently asked questions about Jeff Maysh’s books
From the bookshelf
“He evaded the law like a figure from fiction, slipping into disguise, leaping from jail cell windows, and leaving sneering letters for his enemies at the Secret Service.”
— Jeff Maysh, Handsome Devil
For more true crime reporting built from documents rather than legend, browse the full shelf.
