The Great Diamond Hoax

In 1872, two weathered prospectors walked into a San Francisco bank carrying a bag of uncut diamonds and a story about a secret field somewhere in the western desert. Within months, the scheme had swallowed Charles Tiffany, decorated Civil War generals, the founder of the Bank of California, and a who's-who of Gilded Age money. The field, it turned out, had been hand-seeded with cheap stones bought in London. A single government geologist, Clarence King, walked the site and unraveled the whole thing in an afternoon.

Asbury Harpending was in the room for nearly all of it: financier, adventurer, one-time Confederate privateer, and a man whose own role in the affair remains a matter of lively debate. Forty years later he wrote down exactly how the con worked, who believed what, and how the smartest men in America talked themselves into a diamond mine that never existed.

It is one of the great first-person fraud narratives ever put to paper. It is also the testimony of a professional charmer, which is precisely why this edition exists.