★ 05/22/2023
Journalist Johnson pieces together a thrilling true crime narrative from interviews with victims and investigators of the titular Con Queen, an Indonesian man born Hargobind Tahilramanis who from about 2015 to 2020 impersonated studio executives, talent agents, and other Hollywood A-listers to manipulate film industry gig workers. Harnessing his innate acting skills, Tahilramanis coerced his victims, who included screenwriters, actors, and makeup artists, into traveling to Jakarta on their own dimes, dangling work that never materialized—once they’d arrived and paid for luxury transportation services (with promises of reimbursement), Tahilramanis would abruptly inform them their projects were canceled and leave them stranded. He fleeced some targets for cash, but Johnson contends that Tahilramanis mainly reveled in the emotional manipulation of his schemes, watching people’s hopes inflate only to pop them like balloons. On the back of work by a private investigator, whom Johnson interviewed, the FBI arrested Tahilramanis in late 2020, and he’s currently awaiting trial. Even when his tale tips toward the unbelievable, Johnson makes it clear he’s done his homework. This portrait of one of the most creative criminal minds of the last decade is a jaw-dropping must-read. Agent: Will Lippincott, Aevitas Creative. (June)
Fascinating . . . . Finding out just how this scheme transpired is the big fun of Mr. Johnson’s book, which folds the official investigation of “The Con Queen of Hollywood” into Mr. Johnson’s own deep reporting for the Hollywood Reporter.” — Wall Street Journal
“If The Con Queen of Hollywood were merely a rip-roaring international caper, it would already be deeply satisfying. But it's so much more than that: a probing of the nature of evil, in its banality and its flamboyance, as well as the moral quandaries of investigative journalism, from one of the best practitioners in the game.” — Julian Sancton, New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth
"In a twist-filled new book, writer Scott C Johnson tears back the layers of deception in a story of a scammer who wreaked havoc in the film industry . . . . Riveting." — The Guardian
"Scott C. Johnson’s book is a shape-shifter, morphing from true crime investigation to memoir to travelogue to an examination of mythology and linguistics and journalistic ethics . . . . And despite the thematic depths it mines, it is a rocket of a book that can and should be consumed in a headlong dash for maximum effect.” — Los Angeles Times
"This portrait of one of the most creative criminal minds of the last decade is a jaw-dropping must-read." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Although Johnson’s obsessive investigation results in a penetrating picture of a sad, sick man, it is his portrayals of Harvey’s vulnerable victims that prove more compelling. A grifter exposed in sordid detail." — Kirkus Reviews
“Gripping true-crime.” — Booklist
"A chilling study of deception and evil." — Library Journal
"The Con Queen of Hollywood is a propulsive journalistic chase tale that creates a vertiginous sensation; you feel your feet leaving the ground as you read." — Boston Globe
06/01/2023
Award-winning investigative journalist Johnson (The Wolf and the Watchman) expands on his Hollywood Reporter story about a manipulative and abusive con artist who impersonated women Hollywood executives in order to scam people in the entertainment industry out of millions of dollars. Central to the investigation is K2 Intelligence employee Nicoletta Kotsianas, who documented cases of mostly men lured into flying to Jakarta for phony film-related jobs, only to be bilked out of the money they paid for transportation. Kotsianas discovered that the mastermind was not a con "queen," as many thought, but an Indonesian man named Hargobind Tahilramani. The author tracked him down in an English hotel and interviewed him at length before he was arrested in 2020. The book adeptly discusses the psychological trauma that Tahilramani inflicted on his sisters and his victims, some of whom lost their life savings or were enticed into phone sex. While the cast of characters and events can be confusing at times, readers looking for a unique international true crime story likely won't be disappointed. VERDICT A chilling study of deception and evil.—Denise Miller
2023-03-21
Tracking an elusive con artist.
Beginning in 2018, investigative journalist Johnson, author of The Wolf and the Watchman, wrote several articles for the Hollywood Reporter about a criminal known as the Con Queen who had impersonated famous individuals in the entertainment industry in order to extort money from hundreds of victims. Johnson reported on the dogged efforts of a New Jersey private investigator to document the widespread scam, which eventually involved the FBI in pursuing the con man who posed as “a Netflix producer, a writer, the scion of a dynasty, the son of a movie mogul, a self-made man, a wealthy investor, a Warner Bros. executive, a real estate magnate, friend to the illustrious and the blessed.” However, as the author discovered when he embarked on his own search, “he was none of these things. He inhabited avatars when they suited him.” Johnson’s tense page-turner begins with a focus on some of the Con Queen’s victims: men eager for recognition, affirmation, and, not least, money. Each shelled out tens of thousands of dollars on trips to Indonesia, where they were sent on assignments by someone they thought was a big-name film or TV executive. All were the creations of Hargobind “Harvey” Tahilramani, described by some as a psychopath and by others as the embodiment of evil. Johnson, who admits “the allure that the dark holds” for him, was determined to track him down. In 2020, the author was able to meet with him, and after Johnson returned home to Seattle, they talked daily, sometimes for hours. “Harvey,” he writes, “was a room of voices, lucid or raving, frantic somehow to escape or hold me hostage or both.” Harvey’s strange seductiveness entrapped him: “I had begun to feel as though he had found a way to inhabit me.” Although Johnson’s obsessive investigation results in a penetrating picture of a sad, sick man, it is his portrayals of Harvey’s vulnerable victims that prove more compelling.
A grifter exposed in sordid detail.