"A shocking account of how Harvey Weinstein rose to become one of the most iconic figures in the world of movies, how he used that position to feed his monstrous sexual appetites, and how it all came crashing down, from the author who has covered the Hollywood power game for the New Yorker for three decades. Twenty years ago, Ken Auletta wrote one of the iconic New Yorker profiles for which he is famous, of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, then at the height of his powers. The profile created waves for exposing how volatile, even violent, Weinstein was to his employees and collaborators. But there was a much darker story that was just out of reach: rumors had long swirled that Weinstein was a sexual predator, but no one was willing to go on the record, and in the end he and the magazine concluded they couldn't close the case. But the story always nagged at him, and many years later, he was able to share his reporting notes and all that he knew with Ronan Farrow, and to cheer him along with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey as they broke their pioneering stories and wrote their bestselling books. But the story continued to nag at him. Farrow, Twohey, and Kantor did a brilliant job exposing the trail of assaults and their cover-up, but the larger questions remained: what explained Weinstein's monstrousness? Even more importantly, how and why was it never checked? How does a man run the day to day operations of a company with hundreds of employees and revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars and at the same time live a shadow life of sexual predation without ever being caught, for years and years? How much is this a story about Harvey Weinstein, and how much is this a story about Hollywood and power? To answer that question fully, Ken Auletta has spent the past three years constructing a full reckoning with a career in film that has no parallel in Hollywood's history in its combination of extraordinary business and creative success and a personal brutality and viciousness that left a trail of ruined lives in its wake. How did one thing relate to the other? Hollywood Ending is an unflinching examination of Weinstein's life and career in full. Not simply a prosecutor's litany of crimes, it embeds them in the context of his overall business, his failures but also his outsized successes. To understand how he could behave as he did, we have to understand the power he wielded. Iconic film stars, Miramax employees and board members, old friends and family, even the person who knew him best, Harvey's brother Bob, all talked to Auletta at length. The result is not simply the portrait of a predator, it is a portrait of the power that allowed Weinstein to operate with such impunity for so many years, the spider web in which his victims found themselves trapped. To understand Weinstein's web is to understand how many other spider webs no doubt still remain."--

"A biography of the spectacular rise and fall of Eddie Antar, better known as "Crazy Eddie," whose home electronics empire changed the world even as it turned out to be one of the biggest business scams of all time Back in the fall of 2016 we heard the news about the passing of Eddie Antar, "Crazy Eddie" as he was known to millions of people, the man behind the successful chain of electronic stores and one of the most iconic ad campaigns in history. Few things evoke the New York of a particular era the way "Crazy Eddie! His prices are insaaaaane!" does. The journalist Herb Greenberg called his death the "end of an era" and that couldn't be more true. What's insane is that his story has never been told. Before Enron, before Madoff, before The Wolf of Wall Street, Eddie Antar's corruption was second to none. The difference was that it was a street franchise, a local place that was in the blood stream of everyone's daily life in the 1970s and early '80s. And Eddie pulled it off with a certain style, an in your face blue collar chutzpah. Despite the fact that then U.S. Attorney Michael Chertoff called him "the Darth Vader of capitalism" after the extent of the fraud was revealed, one of the largest SEC frauds in American history after Crazy Eddie's stores went public in 1984, Eddie was talked about fondly by the people who worked for him. They still do--there are myriads of ex-Crazy Eddie employee web pages that still attract fans, and the Crazy Eddie fraud scheme is now taught in every business school across the United States. Many years have passed since the franchise went down in spectacular fashion but Crazy Eddie's moment has endured the way that iconic brands and characters do--one only need Google the media outpouring that accompanied his death. Maybe it's because it crystallized everything about 1970s New York almost perfectly, the merchandise and rise of consumer electronics (stereos!), the ads (cheesy!), the money (cash!). In Retail Gangster, investigative journalist Gary Weiss takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most unbelievable business scam stories of all time, a story spanning continents and generations, reaffirming the old adage that the truth is often stranger than fiction"--

"With vivid storytelling and access to insider accounts, Weiner sets out to trace the roots of Russian-American political warfare--conflict waged without weapons--over the last seven decades to understand how a president landed in the White House with the help of an expansive, covert Russian campaign. Russia's modern revival of Soviet-era intelligence operations constitutes one of the most significant threats to democracy in the United States and around the world, and yet the US has not engaged its own political warfare methods in defense, even as our own justice department has concluded unequivocally that Russia influenced the 2016 election. To get to the heart of what's at stake and find potential solutions, Weiner examines long-running twentieth century CIA operations, political machinations by the Soviet KGB around the world, the erosion of American political warfare after the Cold War, and why twenty-first century Russia has returned to the practice while the US has not. Weiner takes us behind closed doors and into the deliberation rooms of past and present Russian and American intelligence operations that directly led to-and help illuminate-the current administration and the future of American democracy"--

A scathing expos of the link between major U.S. corporations and the holocaust makes sobering indictments about such companies as IBM, General Motors, and the Rockefeller Foundation, revealing how some of their mid-twentieth-century agendas directly or indirectly supported Nazi activities.

With the release of hundreds of damaging documents, a dark side of Switzerland's democracy has been unveiled. Switzerland is now seen as a nation of greedy bankers, collaborators with the Nazis, and robbers of the wealth of the victims of the Holocaust. Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls is a powerfully enlightening account of how a small and determined group of people from divergent backgrounds humbled the legendary Swiss financial empire to achieve a measure of justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs, while shattering the myth of Swiss wartime neutrality. Rickman tells how a small group of people, none of them professional historians, pieced together a puzzle of unknown proportions and proceeded to dismantle the myth of Swiss innocence and victimization at the hands of the Nazis, and expose a fifty-year cover-up. Untold numbers of European Jews and others placed their funds in Swiss banks because they believed they offered a safe haven for funds which the Nazis were trying to control. What better place to put their money than in Switzerland? Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls discusses how investigative groups proved that Switzerland stole the money of the Jews and helped the Nazis to do the same. No one began with evidence and no one had a source of knowledge upon which to fall back. All they shared was a feeling that something was terribly wrong and that a great injustice had occurred. Propelled by this instinct, a U.S. Senator, the World Jewish Congress, a British Parliamentarian, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a handful of Holocaust survivors accomplished what the U.S., British, and French governments and a group of feuding Jewish organizations could not or would not do. As a result of this effort, how the world views Switzerland and how Switzerland views itself has been redefined. Most importantly, those who survived the Nazi horrors, only to be victimized again by the Swiss bankers, have now achieved some measure of justice, or at least financial compensation after more than fifty years.

Praise for Nazi Gold "A compelling book on one of the greatest robberies of all time." --Rabbi Marvin Heir, dean, Simon Wesenthal Center "Nazi Gold [is] a compelling, outraged, carefully researched book. . . Tom Bower, one of the finest investigative journalists in the English-speaking world over the past generation. . .is the ideal chronicler for this story. Over the past 20 years he has built up a track record second to none in documenting crimes and conspiracies that the Nazis and their collaborators were able to cover up or escape from in the decades after 1945. . .Riveting, outstanding." --Martin Sieff, Washington Times "Nazi Gold is an important book that uncovers much new material." --Saul Friendlunder, author of Nazi Germany and the Jews "Compelling reading." --Chicago Jewish Star "[A] sensational expose. . .Impressively revealing." --Dade Jewish Star Some Revelations form Nazi Gold In 1942 thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing a Nazi roundup of Jews in occupied France crossed the border into Switzerland seeking asylum but where forcibly pushed back to the waiting Gestapo by the Swiss police. Virtually all of them were immediately shipped to concentration camps. During the war thousands of Swiss willingly worked undercover for the German secret service and the Nazis. The Swiss accepted for deposit without question gold bullion looted by German from the treasuries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, and Holland'countries they had conquered. The Swedes and the Portuguese, also neutrals, refused to accept the looted gold.

"A history of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) from its founding in 1936 through 2016. Among the topics covered are the WJC's role during World War II; the WJC's contribution to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg; post-WWII attitudes to and relationships with Jews living in Germany; the WJC's relationship and interaction with the State of Israel; the WJc's role and impact at the United Nations; the WJC's diplomatic efforts on behalf of North African Jewry during the 1950's and 1960's; materialization of the Holocaust at Auschwitz-Birkenau; the WJC's role in launching the Jewish-Vatican dialogue; advocacy on behalf of Soviet Jewry; the WJC's role in the campaign to repeal the UN's "Zionism is Racism" resolution; forcing Swiss banks to disgorge Holocaust-era assets belonging to Jews; the Kurt Walheim Affair; the WJC's interaction with communist countries; the WJC's role regarding terrorist attacks on Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires; the World Jewish Congress today; and WJC President Ronald S. Lauder's vision of the Jewish future"--