The Swindler of Brooklyn Heights: The Family History of the Greatest Con Man of the Gilded Age

• Books & Literature
• History

There is a bad apple on the family tree of Emmy Award-winning writer and historian Geoffrey C. Ward: his great-grandfather was Ferdinand Ward, whose meteoric rise to become “the Young Napoleon of Wall Street” and sudden, shocking fall he chronicles in his book A Disposition to be Rich. Join Ward as he shares his nefarious ancestor’s story from his small-town boyhood, to his brief heyday in Brooklyn’s most exclusive neighborhood, to the crash that ruined U.S. Grant, took down Wall Street, and made him “the most hated man in America.”