USING FORGERIES and bogus identities, Matthew B. Cox-one of the most ingenious con men in history-bilked America's biggest banks out of millions. Despite numerous encounters with bank security, state and federal authorities, Cox narrowly, and quite luckily, avoided capture for years. Eventually, he topped the U.S. Secret Service's most wanted list, and led the U.S. Marshals, FBI, and the Secret Service on a three year chase, while jet-setting around the world with his attractive female accomplices.Cox has been declared "one of the most prolific mortgage fraud con artists of all time," by CNBC's American Greed. Bloomberg Businessweek called him "the mortgage industry's worst nightmare," while Dateline NBC described Cox as "a gifted forger and silver tongued liar." Playboy magazine proclaimed, "His scam was real estate fraud, and he was the best."Shark in the Housing Pool is Cox's exhilarating, first-person account, of his stranger-than-fiction story.

MATTHEW B. COX IS A CON MAN, incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons for a variety of bank fraud related scams. Despite not having a drug problem, Cox, inexplicably, ends up in the prison's Residential Drug Abuse Program (known as "RDAP"). A drug program in name only, RDAP, is an invasive behavior modification therapy, specifically, designed to correct the cognitive thinking errors associates with criminal behavior. The Program is a nonfiction dark-comedy which chronicles Cox's sidesplitting journey. This first-person account is a fascinating glimpse at the Survivor-like atmosphere inside of the government sponsored rehabilitation unit. While navigating the treachery of his backstabbing peers, Cox simultaneously manipulates prison policies and the bumbling staff every step of the way

“Michael Gross’s new book…packs [in] almost as many stories as there are apartments in the building. The Jackie Collins of real estate likes to map expressions of power, money and ego… Even more crammed with billionaires and their exploits than 740 Park” (Penelope Green, The New York Times). With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, penthouses that cost almost $100 million, and a tenant roster that’s a roll call of business page heroes and villains, Fifteen Central Park West is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. In this “stunning” (CNN) and “deliciously detailed” (Booklist, starred review) New York Times bestseller, journalist Michael Gross turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that’s sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross “takes another gossip-laden bite out of the upper crust” (Sam Roberts, The New York Times), whichincludes Denzel Washington, Sting, Norman Lear, top executives, and Russian and Chinese oligarchs, to name a few. And he recounts the legendary building’s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially déclassé Manhattan neighborhood. More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New York’s rich and famous—and is a bellwether of the city’s changing social and financial landscape.

In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was twenty-one, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet. But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit. McBride had been unwittingly recruited into a band of smugglers--middlemen between a Colombian marijuana cartel and their distributors in Miami. His elaborate team comprised fishermen, drivers, stock houses, security--seemingly all of Chokoloskee Island was in on the operation. As McBride came to accept his new role, tons upon tons of marijuana would pass through his hands. Then the federal government intervened in 1984, leaving the crew without a boss and most of its key players. McBride, now a veteran smuggler, was somehow spared. So when the Colombians came looking for a new middle-man, they turned to him. McBride became the boss of an operation that was ultimately responsible for smuggling 30 million pounds of marijuana. A self-proclaimed "Saltwater Cowboy," he would evade the Coast Guard for years, facing volatile Colombian drug lords and risking betrayal by romantic partners until his luck finally ran out. A tale of crime and excess, Saltwater Cowboy is the gripping memoir of one of the biggest pot smugglers in American history.

PIERRE RAUSINI--in the 1990's--was a twenty-something-year-old Los Angeles-based drug trafficker of ecstasy and ice. He and his associates drove luxury European supercars, lived in Beverly Hills' penthouses, and dated Playboy models while dodging federal indictments. Then, two FBI officers with the San Francisco Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force entered the picture. Dirty agents willing to fix cases and identify informants. Suddenly, two of Rausini's associates--confidential informants working with federal law enforcement--were murdered. Everyone pointed to Rausini. As his co-defendants prepared for trial, U.S. Attorney Robert Mueller sat down to debrief Rausini at Leavenworth Penitentiary, and another story emerged. A tale of FBI corruption and complicity in murder. You see, Pierre Rausini knew something that no one else knew . . . the truth. And Robert Mueller and the federal government have been covering it up to this very day. The Abridgment to DEVIL EXPOSED is supported by over 120 exhibits--nearly 750 pages of documentation conclusively proving Mueller's extraordinary efforts to obstruct justice.MATTHEW B. COX is the author of Bent, Once a Gun Runner, and Generation Oxy. He is a graduate of the University of South Florida, he lives in Central Florida.

Read Jason Kersten's posts on the Penguin Blog. The true story of a brilliant counterfeiter who "made" millions, outwitted the Secret Service, and was finally undone when he went in search of the one thing his forged money couldn't buy him: family. Art Williams spent his boyhood in a comfortable middle-class existence in 1970s Chicago, but his idyll was shattered when, in short order, his father abandoned the family, his bipolar mother lost her wits, and Williams found himself living in one of Chicago's worst housing projects. He took to crime almost immediately, starting with petty theft before graduating to robbing drug dealers. Eventually a man nicknamed "DaVinci" taught him the centuries-old art of counterfeiting. After a stint in jail, Williams emerged to discover that the Treasury Department had issued the most secure hundred-dollar bill ever created: the 1996 New Note. Williams spent months trying to defeat various security features before arriving at a bill so perfect that even law enforcement had difficulty distinguishing it from the real thing. Williams went on to print millions in counterfeit bills, selling them to criminal organizations and using them to fund cross-country spending sprees. Still unsatisfied, he went off in search of his long-lost father, setting in motion a chain of betrayals that would be his undoing. In The Art of Making Money, journalist Jason Kersten details how Williams painstakingly defeated the anti-forging features of the New Note, how Williams and his partner-in-crime wife converted fake bills into legitimate tender at shopping malls all over America, and how they stayed one step ahead of the Secret Service until trusting the wrong person brought them all down. A compulsively readable story of how having it all is never enough, The Art of Making Money is a stirring portrait of the rise and inevitable fall of a modern-day criminal mastermind. Watch a Video

A CATCH ME IF YOU CAN TALE FOR TODAY. Bent is the story of John J. Boseak's phenomenal life of crime. Inked from head to toe, with an addiction to strippers and fast Cadillacs, Boseak was not your typical computer geek. He was, however, one of the most cunning scammers, counterfeiters, identity thieves and escape artists alive-and a major thorn in the side of the U.S. Secret Service as they fought a war on cybercrime. With a savant-like ability to circumvent banking security and stay one step ahead of law enforcement, Boseak made millions of dollars in the international cyber underworld, with the help of the Chinese and the Russians. Then, leaving nothing but a John Doe warrant and a cleaned-out bank account in his wake, he vanished. Boseak's stranger-than-fiction tale of ingenious scams and impossible escapes, of brazen run-ins with the law and secret desires to straighten out and settle down, makes Bent a true crime con game that will keep you guessing.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A bestselling dystopian novel that tackles surveillance, privacy and the frightening intrusions of technology in our lives—a “compulsively readable parable for the 21st century” (Vanity Fair). When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

Generation Oxy is the story of a group of friends—clean cut, all-American high school kids—who stumbled into the Sunshine State’s murky underworld of illegal pill mills and corrupt doctors. This teenage criminal enterprise ultimately shipped hundreds of thousands of OxyContins and other prescription painkillers throughout the country, making millions in the process. This true crime memoir details the three-year-long rise and collapse of the Barabas Criminal Enterprise, an opiod-pill trafficking ring founded by Douglas Dodd and his best friend on the wrestling team, Lance Barabas. Raised by an alcoholic mother and surrounded by drug-abusing relatives, Dodd got involved in narcotics at an early age. Their scheme to sell the drugs he was already consuming coincided with the explosion of prescription addicts who were traveling the “Oxy Express” to Florida for easy access to the pills they dubbed “hillbilly heroin.” Soon they were shipping forty thousand pills a month, with tens of thousands of dollars returning in hollowed-out teddy bears. In Generation Oxy, Dodd recounts his time as a wannabe Scarface: bottle-service at clubs, an arsenal of weapons that would make Dillinger blush, narrow escapes from the law, hordes of young women, and as many pills as he could swallow. And this was all before he was legally able to drink a beer, while still living with his grandmother. The good times came to an end when the DEA closed in and the twenty-year-old Dodd faced life in federal prison.

"A ... new philosophy and ... guide to getting the most out of your money--and out of life--for those who value memorable experiences as much as their earnings"--