Stranger Than Fiction

April 2026

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
by Dean Jobb

A British general turned terrorist, a Scottish mercenary who tried to build his own fiefdom in the New World, and an American architect whose pursuit of youth and beauty culminated in murder. A roundup of recent books that explore the complex dance between good and evil.

One was the most renowned architect in New York, the rule-breaking genius behind Madison Square Garden and other iconic buildings that defined the city’s decadent Gilded Age. The other was an acclaimed artist and sculptor who designed lavish interiors and breathed life into bronze statues that commemorated some of America’s greatest heroes. Stanford White and Augustus Saint-Gaudens were friends and colleagues who devoted their professional lives to the pursuit of beauty. Scandal and ugliness, however, pervaded their private worlds—and ultimately cost one of them his life.

Acclaimed author and historian Henry Wiencek tells the interwoven stories of these brilliant but flawed giants of American art and architecture in Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Over the course of three decades of collaboration, Wiencek writes, they produced “some of the defining works of the era, reflecting the confluence of creative and destructive forces—cultural, financial, political, religious, racial—coursing through the times.”

They met by chance in 1876, when White was walking past Saint-Gaudens’s studio near Manhattan’s Union Square and heard the sculptor loudly singing snippets of Beethoven and Mozart as he worked. They were kindred spirits—and, the author reveals, lovers for a time—who shared an insatiable thirst to imagine and create great works of art in metal, brick, and stone.

White was an ideas man who mingled with New York’s elite and turned his contacts into lucrative commissions (Edith Wharton, the great chronicler of the age, remembered him as one of the literary and artistic types who “stirred the stagnant air of old New York”). Saint-Gaudens was a tortured soul who agonized over his creations and abandoned or destroyed mockups as he strove for perfection. White steered work his way and shielded him from disgruntled patrons when the inevitable happened and the sculptor failed to produce on time. Their most famous collaboration was on the Madison Square Garden entertainment complex, completed in 1891, with a theater, ballroom, rooftop café, and tower. White designed the building and Saint-Gaudens crowned the tower with a gigantic, gilded statue of Diana, the huntress of Roman mythology.

Wiencek marshals letters and other archival records to trace the men’s careers and interactions in remarkable detail, bringing their characters and worlds to life. Both men were married but lived double lives filled with debauchery and illicit sex. Saint-Gaudens had a mistress and son stashed away in Connecticut—she was one of his models and he had used her face to create the statue of Diana. White hid his true nature behind a façade as elaborate as any he designed for his buildings. He was a philanderer who preyed on the young women who flocked to New York with dreams of becoming actresses.

Among them was a sixteen-year-old ingenue and model, Evelyn Nesbit. White lured Nesbit to his studio and raped her. She later married Harry Thaw, the volatile scion of a wealthy family. In 1906, after he discovered what White had done, Thaw walked up to him in a restaurant—the one the architect had designed atop Madison Square Garden—and shot him dead.

Saint-Gaudens’s reputation survived his indiscretions. White, however, was doomed to be remembered not for his architectural legacy, but as a rapist and the victim of the most scandalous murder of New York’s Gilded Age. While both men “helped gild the great metropolis of New York and turn it into a dazzling international city,” Wiencek notes in this richly detailed, well-told dual biography, “they left human wreckage in their wake.”

Are villains such as Stanford White—respectable on the surface but harboring a dark side—born or made? That’s the question at the heart of bestselling Canadian author Linden MacIntyre’s biography of Sir Hugh Tudor, a British general handed the near-impossible task of keeping the peace in restless Ireland after World War One. Tudor’s friend Winston Churchill, who was then Britain’s secretary of state for war, sent him to Dublin in 1920 to put down an Irish Republican Army insurgency that threatened to topple British rule.

An Accidental Villain: A Soldier’s Tale of War, Deceit and Exile (Random House Canada) explores how a respectable and honorable soldier was transformed into a reviled chief of police who orchestrated a ruthless war of attrition against the IRA, matching the rebels murder-for-murder, outrage-for-outrage. Tudor, who had served in the Middle East and India, distinguished himself in the Great War as a field commander who protected his troops when fellow officers sent theirs into the fray as cannon fodder. Ireland, however, was his Waterloo.

With the officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary being picked off by the IRA or quitting in fear of their lives, Tudor replaced them with thousands of unemployed soldiers who had fought in the trenches. The “Black and Tans,” as they became known—their makeshift uniforms, a combination of army khaki and dark police tunics, were responsible for the nickname—avenged IRA assassinations of their comrades by gunning down suspected rebels and torching the shops and homes of sympathizers. These “reprisals” were not kneejerk reactions or emotional outbursts; they were state-sanctioned acts of arson and homicide. Tudor made it clear he would protect his men from prosecution for their crimes and Churchill and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George made it clear they had Tudor’s back.

MacIntyre, an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction and one of Canada’s finest investigative journalists, recreates what he terms “the darkest part of one of Ireland’s darkest stories” in meticulous detail, lifting the fog of an undeclared war to show how the British government met terrorism with terror tactics. The brutal campaign ultimately cost Tudor his career, his reputation, and whatever good was left in his soul after presiding over so much bloodshed. After doing the Empire’s dirty work in Ireland, Tudor was dispatched to Palestine to lead military forces and the local police in the British protectorate. It was a calm after the Irish storm, but when Churchill left the Colonial office in 1922, Tudor lost his benefactor and his job. He moved to Newfoundland, beyond the reach of any revenge-seeking IRA assassins who might have him in their sights.

Churchill, who emerged from the political wilderness to lead Britain and the free world to victory over Nazi Germany, stayed in touch with his old friend. When he met U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 aboard warships anchored off the Newfoundland coast in a historic meeting that cemented their alliance, Churchill took a break from saving the world to ask Tudor to meet him for lunch (the general, who was recovering from a heart attack, was forced to decline the invitation). Tudor carved out a new life in Newfoundland and died there in 1965, eight months after Churchill. MacIntyre’s painstaking research and penetrating insights make this a must-read that exposes the horrendous costs of misplaced loyalty, unchecked power, and political expediency.

Scottish mercenary-turned-colonial entrepreneur Gregor MacGregor had something in common with Leo Koretz, the Chicago lawyer-turned-con man at the heart of my true crime book Empire of Deception: mahogany. In the early 1920s Koretz claimed to control a vast chunk of the Bayano region of Panama and peddled shares in an imaginary mahogany-producing enterprise (a later claim to have struck oil on his land holdings triggered another rush of gullible investors). A century earlier, MacGregor sold bonds worth millions of dollars today to develop a region straddling the present-day borders of Honduras and Nicaragua known as Poyais, with export of the valuable timber as the main attraction for investors and settlers alike.

In Financing Sovereignty: The Poyais Scandal in the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press), Switzerland-based scholar Damian Clavel revisits the Poyais story with fresh eyes, unearthing a trove of overlooked records from archives in Britain, France, and Central and South America. While Koretz was selling an illusion, Poyais was grounded in fact. A leader of the indigenous Miskitu peoples of the region’s Caribbean shoreline—the origin of the term Mosquito Coast—granted MacGregor title to 13,000 square miles of territory in 1820. MacGregor sold bonds in London’s financial markets to pay for ships and supplies and delivered hundreds of settlers to his colony.

That’s when Poyais appeared to become more scam than scheme. Settlers who expected to join a thriving colony were left to fend for themselves in a tropical wilderness, with little food or support. Scores died, bond values plummeted, and MacGregor, who had presented himself to investors as the colony’s head of state to secure financing, was blamed for the debacle. The name Poyais became synonymous with fraud.

In Clavel’s account of the fiasco, MacGregor’s descent from promoter of colonization to reviled swindler mirrors General Tudor’s journey from honorable soldier to vengeful despot. Was MacGregor one of the most brazen swindlers in history, the “King of Con-Men,” as The Economist christened him more than a decade ago? Or was he a well-intentioned middleman who was trying to help an indigenous Central American leader to access the capital needed to kickstart development in a neglected corner of the crumbling Spanish empire?

The complexity of Central American geopolitics and the intricacies of the London financial markets in the early nineteenth century, plus the book’s target audience of scholars and specialists, could make this a tough slog for some readers. For those who persist, Clavel makes a convincing case that MacGregor honestly believed in his Poyais dream, and his methods of promoting and financing settlement were no different—and no less legitimate—than other transatlantic colonization schemes of the time. But he could not escape responsibility, and accusations of orchestrating a massive fraud, when his efforts ended in disaster and death.

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Dean Jobb’s latest true crime book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada) tells the incredible story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York while planning some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. It’s a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Canadian bestseller. Find him at deanjobb.com.