Podcasts... swindlers, big money and a convict on the lam
Swindlers and con artists have replaced serial killers and cult leaders as the go-to subject for podcasters, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. Fake Heiress, The Missing Cryptoqueen and Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen have all proved big hits, and can be enjoyed in the knowledge that “no blood was spilled”. The latest in this vein is Persona: The French Deception, about Gilbert Chikli, a Franco-Israeli conman who swindled at least €38m from staff at 20 companies over the course of 18 months. He then went on to plunder even more from billionaire businessmen, including the Aga Khan. Hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff, the series is “smartly scripted and sleekly produced”. It goes “deep into the methodology, showing how artfully constructed lies can create a skewed reality” for the so-called “mark”. It is also just “a hell of a story”.
Another terrific podcast about “charming con merchants and sweet-talking money-makers” is Swindler. Saviour. Mobster. Spy?, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. Its subject is the Italian-English fraudster Giovanni Di Stefano, an (unqualified) lawyer who got criminals such as Nicholas van Hoogstraten off on technicalities, while running a “sideline in swizzling lesser mortals out of their savings”. The podcast is “journalistically rigorous and excellently paced, with cute musical riffs”, and is eminently listenable; as is Londongrad, about the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, and his son, newspaper proprietor Evgeny, who was ennobled by his friend Boris Johnson in 2020. This is not a podcast about scammers: the Lebedevs “have long operated legitimately within the highest echelons of English society”. However, it offers a gripping account of their rise, and reveals much “about the state of the UK today”. Paul Caruana Galizia, son of the murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, brings “a sort of shock to his hosting, a disbelief that blatant, money-fuelled manoeuvring is allowed in Britain”.
The eight-part series Run Bambi Run, from the US, is one of the best podcasts of the year so far, said The Guardian. Laurie “Bambi” Bembenek was a 23-year-old former police officer living in Milwaukee when she was convicted, in 1982, of murdering her husband’s ex-wife. She launched multiple unsuccessful appeals, before breaking out of jail in 1990 and going on the run – garnering massive media attention in the process. The series is “less a did she?/didn’t she? procedural” than a sympathetic look at the life of a woman who became something of an icon in US. “Ultimately, it’s a sad tale of a wasted life, which holds up a mirror to the prejudice of the 1980s.”