Yepoka Yeebo on the Ghanaian Con Man Who Swindled the World

[Admin_99]

Yepoka Yeebo’s rigorously researched, beautifully written first book takes its title from a folk story familiar to generations of Ghanaian children. The fictional Anansi, she writes, “is a trickster” who “uses stories to deceive.” In Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World, the title role goes to a voluble con man named John Ackah Blay-Miezah. Even as he was served prison time in the U.S. and Ghana, Blay-Miezah carried out “one of the largest frauds of the twentieth century.” 

Blay-Miezah’s Oman Ghana Trust Fund—Oman, in this case, means “our nation,” not the Middle Eastern country—was founded on a lie. From the 1970s until his death in 1992, the unsuccessful Ghanaian presidential candidate trumpeted his supposed access to vast riches held in a Swiss bank. He’d be getting ahold of the money any day, he told backers, but in the meantime, he needed money to travel frequently, overcome bureaucratic snags and stay in posh hotels alongside other power players. Promising twentyfold returns to private investors and big public works projects in Ghana, Blay-Miezah, with help from accomplices in America and Europe, extracted countless millions from American and Ghanaian “businessmen and lawyers,” Yeebo writes. And “accountants, insurance salesmen, at least one cop, and a lady who sold tickets from a shop in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel” in Philadelphia, where he lived for part of the 1960s. Also among the duped: ex-U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, who served federal time for his role in the Watergate scandal.

Mitchell isn’t the book’s only prominent figure. Shirley Temple Black, among the biggest-ever child film stars, was by the 1970s America’s ambassador to Ghana, and in diplomatic cables sent to Washington, she described some of Blay-Miezah’s exploits. Ed Bradley, the 60 Minutes correspondent, plays an important role, too. His reporting helped expose Blay-Miezah. Yeebo, who lives in Accra, Ghana and London, spoke to me from the latter recently.

Kevin Canfield: Your book covers events that occurred in the 20th century, but you first heard of your subject in a very 21st century way. 

Yepoka Yeebo: My mom sent me a WhatsApp message. It was 2016—it was an election year in Ghana, and the government had just thrown a whole bunch of new small parties off the ballot for not meeting all the requirements to register properly, so people were talking about the precedent for that. The biggest example anyone could think of was when Blay-Miezah was running for president (in the late 1970s, when his party was barred). So they aired the 60 Minutes segment a bunch of times in Ghana, and the clips of that were going around. 

KC: So you started looking into it.

YY: Yeah, I think the first batch of information I found was the diplomatic cables, and the fact that it was Shirley Temple Black—it was just utterly absurd. 

KC: At that point, you were just personally curious? Did you think you’d write a book?

YY: I was personally curious. I started digging around. The cables helped because that meant there was a trail to some other places. I went to the British Library and just started looking through these papers from around the same years as the cables. One of the newspapers from Ghana had a front page story, and there was John Blay-Miezah, looking really poised, like he was not in any way shape or form under arrest (which he was). That’s the point where I realized that there’s something here. He had this élan. He just looks so unfazed by the proceedings. 

KC: What was it about his way of carrying himself that enabled him to pull this off for so long? 

YY: I have been trying to figure this out for the longest time. I think it helped that he was an immensely charming person. He played everything cool. He hid aspects of his personality or his intelligence, so people would not necessarily underestimate him, but not quite know that they were dealing with somebody that tricky and complex.

KC: A guy who can really read a room. 

YY: Perfectly. Just trying to play everybody. I talked to people who personally knew him. He just remembered details that other people forgot. He remembered for ages that one woman was wearing a very expensive men’s watch when they first met. 

KC: This is in the book—he brought it up months later, just dropped it into a conversation. 

YY: Yeah, just casually. It would come off as almost supernatural, and that helps with selling the mystique and the secret money and the gold.

KC: This seems like an important skill to have when you’re lying all the time.

YY: Yes, and also to be able to keep what is happening straight. And to just have a tiny bit more information than the person that you’re speaking to. 

KC: Your reporting goes into detail about how he refined this part of his personality. Whether he was working as a busboy at a swanky club in Philadelphia or doing prison time, he was learning what “power looked like,” is how you put it. 

YY: He was like a chameleon. Wherever he went, he’d throw on a new personality like a cloak. He would be absolutely fine getting suits made on Savile Row, but also absolutely fine in prison in Accra. 

KC: When I was reading the book, I kept thinking: OK, this is the part where if I were him, I’d just throw up from sheer nervousness about all the lies. 

YY: Right? I think eventually it started getting to him, especially when the ‘80s kicked in and he was sort of dealing with increasingly dangerous people (leaders of a military junta in Ghana). His health started to suffer. He also started to believe his own lies. He was absolutely sure that some way, somehow, he would find enough money to placate everyone. But towards the end, he was sort of anxious and cut off from his family and friends.

KC: During the colonial period, until Ghana secured its independence in 1957, Britain, as you write, “siphoned off” tens of millions of dollars from Ghana. Did this pave the way for a lie like Blay-Miezah’s?

YY: Absolutely, because you have to destroy every institution to successfully colonize a country, and if your primary reason for being there is to take stuff out, you can’t really create new institutions. Everything that used to work as a power structure in Ghana had been attenuated or entirely destroyed. It warped people’s sense of Ghana, and the way people there viewed themselves. And so there was just this immense vacuum, and there’s only so much that could be done to fill it. And we just will never know how much was truly siphoned off by the British.

KC: So the vastness of it all—the impossibility of quantifying the crimes of colonialism—makes lies like Blay-Miezah’s seem plausible. 

YY: Completely plausible. 

KC: Why did people fall for this, and how did he keep it going for so long? You write about an academic study of cult members who’ve given so much mentally that, as one of them says, they “can’t afford to doubt.” So is that it: a lot of Blay-Miezah’s marks were just in too deep financially or emotionally? 

YY: I think everybody has something that they cling to, a belief that’s quite clearly not correct. I think that’s actually pretty common. It’s hard to overestimate the extent to which this took over people’s lives. They would be running around in Oman Ghana Trust Fund t-shirts, they would be organizing meetups and investors’ meetings, they would be planning their entire lives around the windfall.  

One of the most fascinating things I found out—I was talking to Barry Rider, who was the chief commercial fraud officer at the Commonwealth Commercial Crime Unit in London. He said people looking for quick money would invest in something shaky because enough of the time the money came through.

KC: Giving people hope in a case like this. Toward the end of the book, you write that he was selling a racist caricature of “darkest Africa,” with its “untold wealth” there for the taking. So he’s working with the tools that colonialists used. 

YY: He was saying exactly what people would assume about a country like Ghana if they had seen a Time magazine piece about it. He told investors: There’s all this secret wealth, and people will just hand it to you. You come from a more developed country and it’s yours for the taking. 

KC: I just want to close by mentioning your impressive reporting. You spent tons of time in archives, libraries, doing interviews on three continents. Am I missing anything?

YY: Archives, libraries, courthouses. Meeting with people whose byline I’d found. There was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose office was just basically gigantic filing cabinets. He had literally everything from his work on Blay-Miezah—his actual notes from (Blay-Miezah’s criminal) trial on like yellow legal pad. There was a lawyer in Accra who had a copy of one of Blay-Miezah’s passports. People keep spectacular amounts of information.

View the full article