Gold's Fools: A True Story of Lies, Obsession, and a Nazi Fortune [9780063379404]

Overview

For readers of David Grann, Janet Malcolm, and Jon Ronson — a riveting work of narrative nonfiction about obsession, conspiracy, and the seductive power of a good story, following a Montreal lawyer's quixotic hunt for Nazi gold, the filmmaker who tried to capture his unraveling, and the journalist who investigated them all.

In 2019, Glenn Feldman, a flamboyant Montreal lawyer, became convinced that his best friend and business partner of fifty years was hiding a fortune in Nazi gold — and that a deceased relative in whose estate they had both been involved was in fact a vanished Hungarian war criminal, an officer responsible for the deportation of half a million Jews and the looting of their wealth, who had disappeared without a trace after the war and whose fate had remained one of the enduring unsolved mysteries of the Holocaust. Feldman threw himself into a sprawling, years-long investigation, amassing thousands of documents, hiring forensic analysts and private investigators, contacting the FBI, the RCMP, Yad Vashem, and the President of Israel. What he found was a tangle of the genuinely compelling and the plainly absurd. His fifty-year friendship detonated. His career, finances, and family relationships buckled under the weight of his conviction.

Then the storytellers arrived. A flamboyant documentary filmmaker — himself as outsized a character as Feldman — saw the material of a lifetime, secured nearly a million dollars in funding, and recruited Feldman's own daughter as the film's protagonist. A tabloid splashed Feldman's allegations across a two-page spread, complete with his former partner's home address. And Kaiser, initially reporting for the New York Times Magazine, found himself drawn into the orbit of a man whose charisma and certainty were matched only by the flimsiness of his core claim. As each layer of investigation piled onto the last, the question shifted: not whether the gold was real, but why so many people needed it to be.

Gold's Fools follows this story through courtrooms, hundreds of hours of documentary footage, and a relationship between father and daughter that is at once heartbreaking and impossible to look away from — Alex, drawn into her father's world not because she believes him but because his investigation is the only way to get close to him. And then, in a final, astonishing turn, Kaiser's own research — a direct consequence of pulling at the threads of Feldman's investigation — cracks a decades-old historical mystery that governments, historians, and war crimes investigators had failed to solve: he locates the missing officer, traces his descendants, and uncovers a family that has been quietly reckoning with a monstrous inheritance — their story an extraordinary counterpoint to the wreckage Feldman has made of his own. At once a mystery, a character study, and a deeply unsettling inquiry into how stories are built and whom they serve, Gold's Fools asks what happens when the machinery of narrative — journalism, film, investigation, even memory itself — is trained on a question it cannot answer.