"Kentucky Barracuda" by Joe Goodbody

What started as a routine genealogical search turned into a six-year research project for Joe Goodbody, a retired Army colonel and the author of Kentucky Barracuda. The book documents the 19th-century exploits of Parker Hardin French (1826-1878), an adventurer and one of the most extraordinary con men of his time. French began his career in an America where news generally traveled only as fast as a person, a horse, a steamboat, or a sailing ship. French was a gifted swindler who could defraud people in one state and be hundreds of miles away before word of the fraud arrived. In the genealogical search Goodbody conducted, the author learned that French swindled his great-grandfather by talking him into joining an expedition headed for the California Gold Rush. But that was only one of the many crooked projects that French engineered over the course of a lifetime. Over the years, French literally outran the truth; outrunning documented frauds totaling over $100 million in current value, estimated the author. Some of his efforts may actually have begun as legitimate endeavors, but they never finished that way, said Goodbody. French was a master of deception. He employed several aliases during his lifetime and was reported to have been killed no less than five times, said the author. Goodbody's research found that French had been involved in nefarious deals across the United States and beyond national borders. He traveled to Nicaragua, profiting from that country's civil war, while becoming the illegitimate ambassador to the U.S. from Nicaragua at one point. He also spent time in Mexico, where he portrayed a paramilitary hero. Some of the famous people he crossed along the way included financier Cornelius Vanderbilt and U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson, who later became President following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. "I think he could be called the foremost conman unknown to history," said Goodbody.