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    Fortune's Spear: A Forgotten Story of Genius, Fraud, and Finance in the Roaring Twenties
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Spear: A Forgotten Story of Genius, Fraud, and Finance in the Roaring Twenties
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Spear: A Forgotten Story of Genius, Fraud, and Finance in the Roaring Twenties
    Ebook442 pages6 hours

    Fortune's Spear: A Forgotten Story of Genius, Fraud, and Finance in the Roaring Twenties

    By Martin Vander Weyer

    5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Gerard Lee Bevan had it all—and lost it all: An epic true account of greed, deception, and one scoundrel’s rise and fall.
     
    Gerard Lee Bevan was the epitome of an old-school, well-moneyed character of the 1920s—arrogant, smooth, and highly cultured. Using a seemingly bottomless well of personal charm, he married into money and influence, and was to all appearances the very model of a self-made man.
     
    But in truth, he was a liar and manipulator of the highest order, exploiting a glittering range of social connections as the black sheep of one of London’s most respectable banking families, while lavishing gifts on his numerous adulterous conquests in a deluge of self-indulgence.
     
    Bevan could not uphold his many deceptions, however. He had a long run of success, but ended up perpetrating a massive fraud, which brought down the once-great City Equitable Insurance Company as well as his own stockbroking firm, Ellis & Co. In 1922, Bevan fled England in ruin, abandoning his family and business, and was eventually caught in Vienna, despite his desperate attempts at disguise. His sensational Old Bailey trial would shock all of England and the world.
     
    Fortune’s Spear is a parable of the how the prospect of easy money can draw risk-takers of every time period into a spiral of greed and deceit. In this richly detailed post-Edwardian tale of white-collar crime, Martin Vander Weyer shines a light on a fascinating bygone era, which mirrors our own contemporary financial debacles with disturbing similarity.

    “Fortune’s Spear is not exactly a century-old version of The Wolf of Wall Street but will have a familiar ring to followers of today’s financial chicaneries.” —The Wall Street Journal
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 4, 2014
    ISBN9781628739077
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Spear: A Forgotten Story of Genius, Fraud, and Finance in the Roaring Twenties
    Author

    Martin Vander Weyer

    Martin Vander Weyer is business editor and columnist of The Spectator and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph. He has been writing about business, entrepreneurship and social change throughout the national press since 1992, after a career in international banking. His previous books include Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank (2000); Closing Balances: Business Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph (2006); Fortune’s Spear (2011), the biography of 1920s fraudster Gerard Lee Bevan; and Any Other Business: Life In and Out of the City (2014), a semi-autobiographical collection of his journalism. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for Fortune's Spear

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    • 5/5
      An account of the crash of the City Equitable insurance firm in the 1921-1922 period, engineered by Gerard Bevan, a scion of a well-known banking family (he was related to some of the Barclays of Barclay's Bank). The author does a very good job of marching through Bevan's career, and the aftermath thereof, including some interesting sidelights on how the affair turns up in literature (one of Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga novels, White Monkey). The author seems quite interested in Bevan's poetry, even though little of it has a direct bearing on the case; it's extensively quoted. The only real complaint I have about the book is that the author does engage in a lot of speculation in certain situations as to how things might have occurred, which can get mildly annoying at times. Some of the speculation is pure spitballing. But in general, it's a good book on financial finagling, especially since it touches on some of the other celebrated cases of the 1890-1930 period, like Hatry and Bottomley.