The countess bankrolled a lavish trip through Italy that made Laplante a darling of the Mussolini regime and a worldwide celebrity, soaring to unimaginable heights on the wings of his lies. Inside Man Utd star Marcus Rashford's 12-hour tequila bender: Downing shots and cocktails, feasting on sea. Bint once even sent expensive Dom Perignon champagne to Koo Stark's table after gate-crashing a party held by Viscount Linley. Had I not had access to this vast cache of raw material, I wouldn’t have been able to contemplate such a novelistic approach, since each potentially atmospheric detail needs to be supported by extensive archival sources.

Willetts has a gift for crafting detailed and dramatic descriptions of key events, a remarkable feat given that he had to rely heavily on newspaper accounts of the time and could neither interview participants (who are all dead) nor find biographical information in journals, memoirs, or letters (which for the most part don't exist). You might justifiably pick up King Con to travel back in time to the ultra-charming Jazz Age, but long after you’ve been pulled into the vortex of this riveting and deliciously strange tale, what will stick with you is the sheer, astonishing audacity of Edgar Laplante’s all-consuming, decade-plus-long grift.Laplante somehow managed to marry twice more, once in England and again to a countess in Italy -- all, of course, without benefit of a prior divorce.

I've got a couple of cover songs I need to finish up that got side tracked due to lockdown, and then I need to reassemble a band to go play live. Records that aren't in picture sleeves will either be in a company sleeve or a generic plain sleeve. Decades before Bianca Jagger’s celebrated horseback ride into Studio 54, Laplante rode into a costume party at a seafront hotel, complete with his feathered headdress and the rest of his Cherokee outfit.Special thanks to RED PETERS (Sirius/XM Radio Howard Stern Channel 101) for including our music in his Memorial Day Radio Show. One only became suspicious when after a falling-out the man who was supposedly one of the country's top lawyers spray-painted the word 'bitch' on the wall outside her house. For this book, Paul Willetts has crossed the Atlantic and relates the stranger-than-fiction tale of Edgar LaPlante, a vaudeville singer who morphed into a consummate con man.