Hollywood Con Queen

January 1, 2023

A professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, Hershfield illuminates an idea that's recently been in the news: to improve your life now, you need to work harder to imagine and connect meaningfully to Your Future Self (45,000-copy first printing). With The Con Queen of Hollywood, award-winning investigative journalist Johnson expands on his Hollywood Reporter story about the con artist who managed to rip off millions of dollars from people in the entertainment industry (100,000-copy first printing). With The Elissas, Leach presents a cautionary tale centering on best friend Elissa, who was thrown out of private school and sent to a $10,000-a-month boarding school for troubled teenagers, where she bonded with classmates named (eerily) Alissa and Alyssa; Elissa died of encephalitis shortly after graduating, and her two friends subsequently succumbed to drug use (60,000-copy first printing). As a girl in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Mahfouz was denied an education but still entertained Defiant Dreams, teaching herself mathematics at age 16 and sneaking into Pakistan to take the SATs; she eventually escaped to the United States and is now a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. Patterson's Chaos Kings focuses on the Universa fund to illuminate the activities of high-risk traders who go after so-called black swans--unforeseeable upheavals that can yield billions in profits. Having explained in the nearly million-copy best-selling The Color of Law how U.S. federal, state, and local governments have not just facilitated but actively created segregation, Richard Rothstein teams with housing policy expert (and daughter) Leah Rothstein in Just Action to explain how segregation can be dismantled, focusing on what local organizations can do about securing renters' rights, diversifying exclusively white areas, and more. President of the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, Waldman shows how the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative Supermajority has driven the Court's rulings far from what most people in the country want and what the implications will be.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2023
Tracking an elusive con artist. Beginning in 2018, investigative journalist Johnson, author of The Wolf and the Watchman, wrote several articles for the Hollywood Reporter about a criminal known as the Con Queen who had impersonated famous individuals in the entertainment industry in order to extort money from hundreds of victims. Johnson reported on the dogged efforts of a New Jersey private investigator to document the widespread scam, which eventually involved the FBI in pursuing the con man who posed as "a Netflix producer, a writer, the scion of a dynasty, the son of a movie mogul, a self-made man, a wealthy investor, a Warner Bros. executive, a real estate magnate, friend to the illustrious and the blessed." However, as the author discovered when he embarked on his own search, "he was none of these things. He inhabited avatars when they suited him." Johnson's tense page-turner begins with a focus on some of the Con Queen's victims: men eager for recognition, affirmation, and, not least, money. Each shelled out tens of thousands of dollars on trips to Indonesia, where they were sent on assignments by someone they thought was a big-name film or TV executive. All were the creations of Hargobind "Harvey" Tahilramani, described by some as a psychopath and by others as the embodiment of evil. Johnson, who admits "the allure that the dark holds" for him, was determined to track him down. In 2020, the author was able to meet with him, and after Johnson returned home to Seattle, they talked daily, sometimes for hours. "Harvey," he writes, "was a room of voices, lucid or raving, frantic somehow to escape or hold me hostage or both." Harvey's strange seductiveness entrapped him: "I had begun to feel as though he had found a way to inhabit me." Although Johnson's obsessive investigation results in a penetrating picture of a sad, sick man, it is his portrayals of Harvey's vulnerable victims that prove more compelling. A grifter exposed in sordid detail.

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May 1, 2023
Con games, by their very nature, are elaborate and hard to follow, created by tricksters who rely on retaining ultimate control of intricate and often illogical narratives by employing devious methods of impersonation, intimidation, and manipulation. One of the most diabolical of such intrigues can be attributed to the Con Queen of Hollywood, an impostor so adept at vocal impersonation that he convinced his victims he was anyone from a high-powered female Hollywood producer to a male terrorist launching international bomb threats from a prison cell. Johnson, a Hollywood Reporter journalist, weaves a gripping true-crime narrative of the multiple-personality fraudster Harvey, who bilked dozens of movie-industry adjacent workers out of their life savings with outlandish promises of lucrative employment on projects that turned out to be nonexistent. In consultation with a private security analyst equally determined to expose this one-person crime syndicate, Johnson deploys victim interviews, international travel, and even encounters with Harvey himself to reveal the details of the sociopathic behavior that enabled him to deceive his victims and avoid detection.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from May 22, 2023
Journalist Johnson pieces together a thrilling true crime narrative from interviews with victims and investigators of the titular Con Queen, an Indonesian man born Hargobind Tahilramanis who from about 2015 to 2020 impersonated studio executives, talent agents, and other Hollywood A-listers to manipulate film industry gig workers. Harnessing his innate acting skills, Tahilramanis coerced his victims, who included screenwriters, actors, and makeup artists, into traveling to Jakarta on their own dimes, dangling work that never materialized—once they’d arrived and paid for luxury transportation services (with promises of reimbursement), Tahilramanis would abruptly inform them their projects were canceled and leave them stranded. He fleeced some targets for cash, but Johnson contends that Tahilramanis mainly reveled in the emotional manipulation of his schemes, watching people’s hopes inflate only to pop them like balloons. On the back of work by a private investigator, whom Johnson interviewed, the FBI arrested Tahilramanis in late 2020, and he’s currently awaiting trial. Even when his tale tips toward the unbelievable, Johnson makes it clear he’s done his homework. This portrait of one of the most creative criminal minds of the last decade is a jaw-dropping must-read. Agent: Will Lippincott, Aevitas Creative.

June 1, 2023

Award-winning investigative journalist Johnson (The Wolf and the Watchman) expands on his Hollywood Reporter story about a manipulative and abusive con artist who impersonated women Hollywood executives in order to scam people in the entertainment industry out of millions of dollars. Central to the investigation is K2 Intelligence employee Nicoletta Kotsianas, who documented cases of mostly men lured into flying to Jakarta for phony film-related jobs, only to be bilked out of the money they paid for transportation. Kotsianas discovered that the mastermind was not a con "queen," as many thought, but an Indonesian man named Hargobind Tahilramani. The author tracked him down in an English hotel and interviewed him at length before he was arrested in 2020. The book adeptly discusses the psychological trauma that Tahilramani inflicted on his sisters and his victims, some of whom lost their life savings or were enticed into phone sex. While the cast of characters and events can be confusing at times, readers looking for a unique international true crime story likely won't be disappointed. VERDICT A chilling study of deception and evil.--Denise Miller

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.