Hello and welcome to Slate Money Criminals, a little mini-series on some of the most interesting

financial criminals of history.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, as ever I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios and Elizabeth

Spires of New York Times and elsewhere.

Today we are talking about John Acabley Miser, who single-handedly skipped around the world

UK, London, Ghana, Korea. Did he make it to Korea, you bokeh?

He did, yeah, it was a short trip.

And just swindled people out of millions of dollars and this is a wild story.

We are here with the woman who is quite undoubtedly the world's greatest expert on this guy.

Yippurka, you were welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Introduce yourself, who are you?

I'm a writer and my first book is called Anancy's Gold, which is the story of John Acabley Miser

and this remarkably strange card.

It's a great title too, anancy of course being this sort of central figure in Ghanaian folklore,

who's just this mischievous kind of like spidery type figure, right?

Yeah.

And Lamey's totally fits into that trope.

We are going to talk about his ability to swindle money out of people about those people's

ability to kid themselves that it's all real and to join forces with him, even when they know

it's all based on lies about the racism, the heart of this, about the way that he was basically

piggybacking on the CIA and the Cold War.

...