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Bluffing Texas Style - The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers of Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins (Hardcover, First Edition, New ed.)
Loot Price: R1,385
Discovery Miles 13 850
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Bluffing Texas Style - The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers of Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins (Hardcover, First Edition, New ed.)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In 1989 a woman fishing in Texas on a quiet stretch of the Colorado
River snagged a body. Her ""catch"" was the corpse of Johnny
Jenkins, shot in the head. His death was as dramatic as the rare
book dealer's life, which read, as the Austin American-Statesman
declared, ""like a bestseller."" In 1975 Jenkins had staged the
largest rare book coup of the twentieth century - the purchase, for
more than two million dollars, of the legendary Eberstadt inventory
of rare Americana, a feat noted in the New York Times and the Wall
Street Journal. His undercover work for the FBI, recovering rare
books stolen by mafia figures, had also earned him headlines coast
to coast, as had his exploits as ""Austin Squatty,"" playing high
stakes poker in Las Vegas. But beneath such public triumphs lay
darker secrets. At the time of his death, Jenkins was about to be
indicted by the ATF for the arson of his rare books, warehouse, and
offices. Another investigation implicated Jenkins in forgeries of
historical documents, including the Texas Declaration of
Independence. Rumors of million-dollar gambling debts at
mob-connected casinos circulated, along with the rumblings of irate
mafia figures he'd fingered and eccentric Texas collectors he'd
cheated. Had he been murdered? Or was his death a suicide, staged
to look like a murder? How Jenkins, a onetime president of the
Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, came to such an
unseemly end is one of the mysteries Michael Vinson pursues in this
spirited account of a tragic American life. Entrepreneur, con man,
connoisseur, forger, and self-made hero, Jenkins was a Texan who
knew how to bluff but not when to fold.
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