HUSTLING HITLER

Vaudeville manager, boxing promoter, stock swindler, card shark and self-proclaimed "Jade King of China," Freeman Bernstein was a master of exuberant excess and no stranger to the hard-hand of the law. But the charges he was arrested for on the evening of February 18, 1937, outside of a Hollywood starlet's home, were more serious than those he had ever encountered before. The most powerful and feared man in the world--Adolf Hitler--claimed that Bernstein had committed fraud against the German government. While living in Shanghai in 1936, Bernstein had been asked to procure a large quantity of nickel for the Germans. Nickel was essential to make stainless steel for armaments, and impossible at that time for Germany to openly buy on the international markets. When the shipments arrived from Canada, bearing Bernstein's stamp of approval, the Germans found only huge, useless quantities of scrap metal and tin: a huge blow to their economy and war preparations.

All his life, journalist Walter Shapiro assumed that the outlandish stories about his great uncle Freeman were exaggerated pieces of family lore; a cockamamie Jewish revenge fantasy dreamt up to entertain the kids and venerate their larger-than-life relative. But in recent years, Shapiro decided to search for the truth, and in this fascinating exploration of Bernstein's life, he investigates the incredible possibility that a New York Jew--born in 1874 to Polish immigrants--may have been responsible for a critical shortage of Nazi resources in the early years of World War II.

Award-winning political columnist Walter Shapiro is a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law and a lecturer in political science at Yale. Shapiro has been Washington bureau chief for Salon and on the staffs of Esquire, Time, Newsweek, and The Washington Post. For nine years, he was political columnist for USA Today. He covered the 2012 presidential race for Yahoo! News and the Columbia Journalism Review.