Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it on my Kindle. Later I turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

  • Ghanaians love their con men. It’s the national sport. There’s an appreciation for the con, for the sweetener, for getting one over on someone, for kalabule. There have been government crusades against kalabule. One military leader killed people accused of it. But Ghanaians delight in the kind of man who can talk himself out of a bind or into a fortune. (Less so when a woman does it.) In hard times, all you have is your wit, and Ghana has seen a lot of hard times.

  • Blay-Miezah was a precocious child. He noticed—and remembered—almost everything. People thought he had supernatural abilities and started asking him for advice. The young Blay-Miezah quickly learned that if you told people what they wanted to hear, they would give you anything. He grew into a charming young man who liked the high life and paid for it by scamming his way around West Africa and the United States. He left a trail of angry diplomats, hotel managers, and investigators in his wake. Each time he got caught, Blay-Miezah found a bigger story, a better con, and ever-more-powerful associates to bail him out. One day, he turned a combination of half-remembered news bulletins, CIA propaganda, and prison-yard gossip into the Oman Ghana Trust Fund.

  • Within a year, this had paid off: he won a scholarship to attend Fijai Secondary School, skipping the rest of middle school. At Fijai, while the other kids played football, Blay cultivated a reputation. He told everyone he was “gifted in more senses than five.” He could cure ailments with herbs and had dreams that let him glimpse the future. The headmaster at Fijai Secondary School, Timothy Ansah, heard about this and suggested an arrangement. After school, Blay held court at the house of one of his teachers. Soon, people—women, especially—were coming from far and wide for the teenager’s counsel. Whether he had spiritual abilities or was simply adept at noticing things most people did not, Blay had found a source of power. Soon he was making more money selling stories than kerosene.

  • The Union League was a venerable institution in a grand, redbrick building that took up a whole short block on South Broad Street near City Hall. In the early 1960s, it was one of the most exclusive places in the United States: a coven of old money and power brokers, where cigars were smoked and deals were done. It was a natural habitat for rich Republicans like John Mitchell, a lawyer who would become infamous as President Richard Nixon’s attorney general. Blay worked as a busboy, clearing tables, cleaning dishes, listening closely.

  • To everyone who met him, Blay looked like a regular teenager, a world away from home, learning to live in a new city for the first time. But Blay was not learning in university lecture halls. Instead, at dinner parties and at the Union League, he studied what money and power looked like. He was learning how to be the center of attention in any room he walked into. Later, Blay would put what he learned, and the people he met, to work in ways none of them could have dreamed of. Soon, he would have more money, and more power, than any of the students at the rooming house—and any of the old men at the Union League. Like Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah before him, Blay had found in Philadelphia what he had been missing: opportunity.

  • In Nsawam, Blay lived and ate with people whom he would not otherwise have got anywhere near. Blay heard their stories. He befriended them. Just like when he was a child, he picked up the details that no one else noticed: how a powerful man should sit, how he should nod his head, how he should take up space in a room—even if that room was a prison cell. Soon, Blay started to look like one of the big men. John Kolorah Blay walked into Nsawam prison a nobody. But day by day he was growing into a new role, one he would play for the rest of his life: he was no longer Kerosene Boy in Takoradi or the poor kid in Philadelphia. Within a few years, many of the big men in the prison, Nkrumah’s former ministers—and even the attorney general who sent him to prison, Kwaw-Swanzy—would be working for him. Our man was somebody special.

  • Nkrumah was back in the news in America—and this was especially true in Pennsylvania. “Many Philadelphians will remember the dead statesman, since he was a prominent figure in Philadelphia while a student at Lincoln University and at the University of Pennsylvania,” wrote a columnist at the Philadelphia Tribune. Blay-Miezah saw his opening. The last few months had been humbling. But his mistake had not been running a con. It had been running a small con. He had been aiming too low. He needed to be bigger, more ambitious. But he couldn’t do it alone. He needed allies: people who knew Philadelphia. He needed a crew.

  • Our man set to work. Blay-Miezah needed to look exactly like the wealthy businessman he had convinced Acheampong that he was. And he needed people to vouch for him: people like Krobo Edusei and his other old cellmates at Nsawam Prison, men who had known President Nkrumah but whose principles were for sale. Finally, Blay-Miezah needed friends in the Castle ready to tell him if the colonel got suspicious. So our man began plotting a truly byzantine scheme that would keep Acheampong happy and—with luck—make Blay-Miezah very rich. Our man needed to keep up the elaborate fictions of both the Oman Ghana Trust Fund and Dr. John Ackah Blay-Miezah. He needed to keep his American investors happy and bring in more investors. He had proved that he could con almost anyone into almost anything. He was starting to believe that he could actually deliver on even his most outlandish promises. With Acheampong on his side, he could sign timber deals, buy minerals, and sell earthmovers. He might be able to get government contracts for his investors. With access to the treasury, he could even pay them back and emerge as a legitimate businessman. All he needed was money and power.

  • In the years to come, investigators who posed as investors, investors who became informants, and police officers instructed to monitor their every move could not see through the fog. Consequently, it would take officials and investigators across the world an extraordinarily long time to put the pieces together on the Oman Ghana Trust Fund. Both Blay-Miezah and Ellis were so convincing that even people sent to investigate them genuinely didn’t know what to believe, apart from one thing: a huge number of people had staked everything they had on the conviction that the two men would make them very, very rich. Blay-Miezah and Ellis had recognized something important: their lie, the story of Nkrumah’s gold, had power. No matter what happened, many of their supporters refused to turn on them. Instead, they backed the Oman Ghana Trust Fund more fiercely than ever before, with an almost religious fervor. Blay-Miezah, to them, was not a confidence man. He was, like Nkrumah before him, a martyr to his country’s cause, and theirs.

  • During the first few months of their business relationship, Rigby later realized, Blay-Miezah was molding him. Some of the conditioning was fairly simple: “He was a stickler for punctuality and I was the world’s worst,” Rigby wrote. “If I turned up more than three minutes late, he would punish me, making me wait fruitlessly outside his suite for what seemed hours.” Then Rigby would be dismissed. It happened again and again “until I turned up exactly on time, day or night. I was totally aware of my predicament but became unwilling to resist. I wanted to be told.”

  • The Trust Fund had begun to attract interest in South Korea. Blay-Miezah flew to Seoul to meet with potential investors. They took him to Yonsei University to see a spring festival called Akaraka. The campus was a sea of royal-blue flags and T-shirts. Students packed the stands of an open-air amphitheater, chanting. Blay-Miezah, who always had an ear for a good fight song, fastened onto one cheer that sounded just like his name, Ackah: “Akaraka! Akaraka, Ching Akaraka Cho!” the Yonsei students shouted. “Akaraka, ChingChing Chochocho . . . Hey Yonsei Yeah!” Blay-Miezah was superstitious, and it seemed like a sign: loosely translated, akaraka also meant “destiny” in Igbo and was the subject of many a high-life song. Blay-Miezah’s trip was a success, with several South Korean investors making contributions to the Oman Ghana Trust Fund. Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, Robert Ellis was also hard at work scouting new prospects. He was a natural salesman. Business was booming. Word of the Trust Fund had spread through the Pennsylvania suburbs like a fever. In the back booths of restaurants, in law offices, and at parties, investors told their friends and families about the amazing opportunity they had stumbled onto. For most of the people handing over money, the “decision to invest was based on the reputation, financial status and the business successes of some of the other individuals involved in the Trust.” It helped that Ellis made the Oman Ghana Trust Fund sound like a sure thing, almost like a government bond. The “investment was to be fulfilled through the government of the Republic of Ghana, in West Africa,” one investor from New Jersey later told the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Whatever amount was invested was to be returned tenfold to the investor.” And, Ellis told everyone, the deal was about to close: if they wanted in, there was no time to waste.