Stranger Than Fiction

February 2026

Shady Characters
by Dean Jobb

What do a high-flying art dealer, a peddler of a legendary, once-banned drink, and the would-be assassin of one of the world’s richest men have in common? They’re the central characters in three recent true crime books that shine a light on shadowy worlds filled with deception and fueled by greed or obsession—or both.

Orlando Whitfield thought of himself as a real-life Nick Caraway, the confidant and chronicler of a rich, enigmatic jet-setter as charming and mysterious as Jay Gatsby. Whitfield met Inigo Philbrick in 2006, when they were art school students in London, and they became an unlikely success story as art dealers. Philbrick was a hustler with an instinctive sense of what would sell and who was likely to buy. Whitfield was the younger brother in the relationship, eager to please and willing to do the heavy lifting as his friend hobnobbed, bought, and sold in the rarified world of the super-rich.

The Great Gatsby does not end well for its protagonist, and neither does Whitfield’s account of Philbrick’s fast-lane life and Icarus-like crash to earth. All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art (Pantheon Books) is part memoir, part biography and offers an insider’s view of the glitzy, trendy, and obscenely lucrative art world. The “lies, one-upmanship, trophy-touting and greed that the industry runs on,” he writes, is not a drug—it’s a form of poison. “It can exemplify everything bad about money and people and their avarice, as well as everything that is good about our capacity for beauty and curiosity and truth.”

Philbrick had a discerning eye for modern art and new talent but, for him, money was always more important than art for art’s sake. The friends tried to break into the business while still in school—they almost scored a couple of Banksy works when the legendary street artist was on the cusp of fame—and teamed up again when, in his early twenties, Philbrick was put in charge of his own gallery. Whitfield was hired to hold down the fort while Philbrick traveled the world to drum up business. It was a wild, exhilarating ride, filled with boozy gallery openings, encounters with the famous and soon-to-be famous, and the thrill of being surrounded by incredibly talented artists. “Back then, all I knew about was the fun,” Whitfield confesses. “I wanted to keep this most exciting of new friends close by me.”

All That Glitters sparkles with insights into the murky world of discovering new artists, making them stars, and reaping the rewards. Art can be a tough sell. “After all,” Whitfield notes, “you’re selling something that no one needs.” The art world is a largely unregulated, multi-million-dollar industry based on trust—it’s “one of the last bastions of the handshake agreement”—connections, and plenty of smoke and mirrors. What is a painting or sculpture likely to fetch at auction? “Artworks seldom have any intrinsic worth,” the author notes, so their value is often whatever a buyer is willing to pay. Works acquired for thousands can be flipped, to the right buyer, for millions.

It makes the art world a magnet for thieves, forgers, and fraudsters. Philbrick enjoyed a decade-long run and operated galleries in London and Miami before he was accused in 2019 of fleecing more than $20 million from collectors, lenders, and investors. He promptly dropped out of sight and fled as far from the ruins of his art empire as he could, to the remote Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.

Philbrick stayed in online contact with Whitfield, despite the risk of alerting the authorities to his hideout in this tropical paradise. Eager to tell his story, the fugitive art dealer provided a trove of spreadsheets, records, and archived emails that documented his activities, legit and otherwise. News media accounts and Whitfield’s memories flesh out the story. Philbrick emerges as “a man more desperate than I could have imaged,” the author admits, “a man more ruthless than I dared to believe.” Read this engaging and balanced account and discover just how desperate—and just how ruthless—this Gatsby of the art world became.

The man who forced his way into financier John Pierpont Morgan Jr.’s Long Island mansion at gunpoint in the summer of 1915 insisted he only wanted to talk. Morgan was one of the world’s richest men and the bank that bore his name was financing the French and British war efforts. The intruder, a German-American scholar who had just completed a doctorate at Cornell, wanted Morgan to stop supplying Germany’s enemies with money to buy weapons in the United States, which had not yet entered the war.

“My motive,” claimed the man, who called himself Frank Holt, “was to try to force Mr. Morgan to use his influence . . . to have an embargo put on the shipments of war munitions.” It would be better, he argued, for America’s millionaires to find other ways to make money, “without causing the slaughter of Europeans.”

His real aim, however, was to assassinate Morgan, who struggled with Holt and was shot twice before a butler smashed the gunman’s head with the only weapon he could find, a heavy lump of coal. Morgan was wounded in the leg and abdomen but survived. And as lawyer and academic Mary Noé reveals in The Man Who Shot J. P. Morgan: A Life of Arsenic, Anarchy, and Intrigue (Kent State University Press), the shooting was only one of Holt’s many crimes.

The assailant’s real name was Erich Muenter. A German-born professor of languages, he had immigrated to Chicago with his parents at age 18. He had changed his name to escape his past. In 1906, while he was teaching at Harvard, his wife Leone died soon after the birth of their second child. Muenter’s opposition to an autopsy and haste to have her body cremated raised suspicions, prompting the coroner to investigate. By the time tests confirmed that Leone had been poisoned with arsenic, Muenter had skipped town.

Noé faced a challenge: how to ferret out the truth about someone who lived more than a century ago and was clever enough to get away with murder? She succeeds admirably, showing how Muenter evaded detection for years and reinvented himself as Holt, a professor of languages, and married a woman whose first name, Leona, was almost identical to the name of the wife he had murdered.

When World War One broke out, Muenter found an obsession other than languages and hiding his murderous past. He became incensed that America, despite being neutral for the first three years of the war, was taking sides—extending loans and selling munitions to France and Britain, but not to his homeland. “World domination by Germany,” as Morgan put it, “would bring complete destruction of the liberties of the rest of the world.” American’s leading banker became a target in a twisted scheme. Muenter amassed a cache of dynamite, travelled to Washington, D.C. to plant a bomb that damaged the Capitol, attacked Morgan, and appears to have planted a time bomb that days later damaged a US ship carrying munitions to Europe.

Muenter’s past was exposed after his arrest but he committed suicide in jail before the authorities could determine whether he acted alone or was part of a fifth column of German saboteurs operating in the U.S. Police recovered a trunk filled with dynamite and bomb-making materials that Muenter stored in a New York warehouse, but he lacked both the money needed to amass the explosives and the expertise required to build bombs. While Noé offers no smoking guns that prove he had accomplices, her fast-paced and detailed account gives readers the evidence they need to decide for themselves.

“It has about it the seduction of strange sins,” said Oscar Wilde, and “brings out the subconscious self in man.” Ernest Hemingway was a fan of its “brain-warming … idea-shaping liquid alchemy.” Connoisseurs of this “most pernicious and treacherously fascinating of all alcoholic stimulants,” the New York Times warned in 1889, risked causing severe damage to their brains and nervous systems.

This mind-blowing, walk-on-the-wild side drink was a green-tinted spirit made from wormwood, anise, and other herbs, and laced with a neurotoxin called thujone, that was considered so potent and dangerous that France banned its production for almost a century. Absinthe had been the go-to drink in Paris cafés and cabarets during the country’s Belle Époque, the libation of choice for generations of artists and writers seeking inspiration in a glass (a high alcohol content—up to seventy-two percent—accounted for its kick). And as author Evan Rail discovered, absinthe’s bohemian cachet and the scarcity of bottles produced before it was banned in 1915 made it a tempting target for a clever and determined fraudster.

In The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit (Melville House), he reveals how a member of a tight-knit international network of absinthe aficionados and collectors created and sold fake bottles that looked and tasted like the vintage real deal. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what he’d done and how he’d done it, and how he’d been caught by a small group of amateur absinthe detectives,” writes Rail, an American-born, Prague-based journalist who writes about travel, food, and drink.

Rail identifies the forger only as Christian and, since his subject refused to be interviewed, the author can only speculate on how he planned and pulled off his forgeries. Tracking down empty antique bottles and vintage labels from online sellers was the easy part; he had to combine modern-day absinthe with additives and concoct a mixture that mimicked the faded color and the aged, slightly oxidized taste of the real thing. The scale of the fraud was modest—he peddled his counterfeits for less than $4,000 a bottle, and by one estimate sold no more than $60,000 worth—but his ingenuity and audacity catapulted him into the top ranks of con men and swindlers. While his methods were ingenious, he was a victim of his own success. Pre-ban absinthe is so scarce that Christian’s claim to have discovered so many bottles set off alarm bells.

Rail met Christian briefly, years ago, at an absinthe festival in France, and weaves his own experiences with the drink—he had his first sip of a cheap Czech version in the 1990s—into the narrative. The real stars of this entertaining journey into crime and obsession, however, are absinthe itself and the people who collect and savor vintage bottles. Rail traces the spirit’s shady history, its fame as a creative muse, the mental and physical risks that prompted the ban during World War One, absinthe’s rehabilitation and renaissance in recent decades, and the small but loyal fanbase it enjoys today. “Absinthe,” he writes, “showed us that one aspect of drinking is our intentional embrace of something very dangerous.” Embracing a myth and spending large sums to feed an obsession, this book reminds us, can be just as costly and dangerous.

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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), is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a national bestseller in Canada. It’s the story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York City while planning and executing some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. Find him at deanjobb.com.