A man in a striped three-piece suit, yellow shirt and floral tie smokes a large cigar in front of a striped curtain. On his hand two large rings are visible.

NONFICTION

A Rich Stranger Wants to Give You All His Money. There’s a Catch.

In “Anansi’s Gold,” Yepoka Yeebo delves into the origins of a venerable scam — and the man who got away with it for decades.

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A man in a striped three-piece suit, yellow shirt and floral tie smokes a large cigar in front of a striped curtain. On his hand two large rings are visible.

Born into obscurity, John Ackah Blay-Miezah successfully impersonated a mogul for years, and created one of the most enduring confidence tricks of the modern age.

Credit...

via Yepoka Yeebo

By Anakwa Dwamena

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ANANSI’S GOLD: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World, by Yepoka Yeebo

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A stranger needs to retrieve money stuck in a bank. But in order to access these vast sums, he needs travel fare. And to meet this and other administrative costs necessary to unlocking this fortune, would you kindly help him with a little investment? You will be duly rewarded for your generosity.

This is known as the advance fee fraud, or “419.”

These days, the scams generally target the elderly and the net-illiterate. But once upon a time, one man, John Ackah Blay-Miezah, took a noteworthy number of sophisticated people for just such a crazy ride, at the end of which they fully expected to see 10 dollars for every one invested.

Victims included heads of state, politicians and businessmen. “Those who believe Blay-Miezah a fraud,” the American ambassador to Ghana wrote to Henry Kissinger, “are worried he might just have the money and then they would look extremely foolish.”

Yepoka Yeebo’s riveting “Anansi’s Gold” traces the outlines of Blay-Miezah’s life, shedding light on how he perpetrated his deceptions for years while living in incredible opulence. The author, a freelance journalist, delves into archives across the Atlantic, digs up criminal proceedings and conducts interviews with victims and associates alike, in the process telling us not just about Blay-Miezah, but about the world that enabled him to thrive. “They saw Blay-Miezah, in his chief’s finery, spinning a tale about darkest Africa, untold wealth and a corrupt leader,” Yeebo writes. “And because the story — and the man — fit their preconceptions like a dovetail joint, they made up the rest of the story for themselves.”

While there are several versions of the original scam’s setup, this is the most common: On his deathbed, so it goes, in 1972, Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, revealed he had hidden tens of thousands of gold bars and sums of cash amounting to untold millions in Swiss vaults. This was set up in a trust that could only be accessed by his close confidant — Blay-Miezah. Once the conditions of the trust were satisfied, the money would be released, the bulk for the development of Ghana. The rest would go to the faithful Blay-Miezah — and his investors.

“Just after independence,” Yeebo explains, “there really was a plot to take Ghana’s gold reserves out of the country.” She details the colonial British administration’s hopeless mismanagements of funds. The depth of distress did raise the question of where all of the money had gone — leaving just enough room for suspicion that Blay-Miezah’s story could be true.

Born in 1941 in a tiny coastal village, Blay-Miezah honed his ability to read people at an early age. This, along with a practiced charm, a phenomenal memory and an absolute lack of shame, would prove a lethal combination. First in service jobs at exclusive private clubs, later during his first stint in jail (for petty frauds), where he was imprisoned with elites who were out of favor with successive regimes, he’d learn “how a powerful man should sit, how he should nod his head, how he should take up space in a room.”

Prison is also where he would meet a radical chaplain and steal his language, framing his scheme as a Pan-African venture. In later years, Blay-Miezah and his partners “were selling liberation: a chance to repair the wounds of colonialism,” writes the author. “To everyone else, they were selling the chance to loot an African country’s ancestral wealth.”

For Blay-Miezah, it was crucial that he stay on good terms with the regime; in a time before scams were conducted without the easy mask of an email address, he needed a diplomatic passport to convince his investors he had access to the fund, was making the requisite travel to Switzerland and taking meetings with European bankers.

While important people may have considered him a useful stooge, their friendship lent priceless legitimacy for making contacts and talking them into investing. When some marks lost their nerve, “here was the former attorney general of the United States, saying that the money was coming.” But by the early 1970s, Blay-Miezah was wanted for fraud in Liberia. “He’s full of lies,” a Ghanaian diplomat informed U.S. prosecutors.

American victims were more credulous. Some considered it a speculative investment. Others accepted that it would inevitably be a yearslong process, given the large sums involved. Even after they became disillusioned, few were willing to publicly admit they had been duped.

Blay-Miezah was lucky. More than once, when he found himself backed into a corner, a coup would take place in Ghana — allowing him to get out of jail more quickly and use the excuse that all the money invested had been wasted. When there was no political upheaval to lean on, he would fake a heart attack, demanding more money to fund his hospital bills.

This character study also functions as a key historical text on post-Nkrumah Ghana. We gain behind-the-scenes access to two coups and insight into the functioning of the state intelligence system that ruled before Ghana’s transition to democracy. (Blay-Miezah, in a side gig, was involved with supplying the regime with arms.)

This is an era that is still hardly spoken about; perpetrators and victims live in an uneasy peace. Diving into the censored reports of the post-dictatorship National Reconciliation Commission, Yeebo portrays the scale of brutality ordinary Ghanaians endured at the regime’s hands. What’s more, under military rule, Ghana would see inflation reach 117 percent, and cocoa production plunge steeply. All of which left people desperate to see what lay in Blay-Miezah’s Swiss vaults — even after a decade without tangible results.

And, in a time when scams were conducted in person, he looked the part. He was fond of cigars and tailored suits, traveled in a white Rolls-Royce and was accompanied by a security team of former special forces soldiers. His residences were palatial.

But time was running out, and a “60 Minutes” segment would lay bare the contradictions of the story. Over the course of 15 years, Blay-Miezah’s American partner had scammed at least 300 people for a total of $15 million. An elderly widow had lost all her money. And one penniless investor had even flown to Accra, where he tried to personally choke Blay-Miezah.

Nothing added up: Blay-Miezah had been in prison in Pennsylvania (for posing as a diplomat and defrauding a Philadelphia hotel) when Kwame Nkrumah died, rendering it impossible for him to have been at the deathbed. A federal grand jury would eventually indict him on counts of wire fraud — and the Ghanaian government seemed willing to extradite him. But by the time he was indicted, Yeebo writes, Blay-Miezah was already dead. He had escaped yet again.

Astonishingly, there are still believers. Yeebo compares Blay-Miezah to Anansi, the cautionary trickster spider from Ghanaian folklore who well understood the power of a tale. Anansi often fell into his own traps and faced consequences. “But after that, Anansi’s stories wouldn’t go away,” Yeebo writes. “People would keep searching for the treasure. Anansi would still be remembered as a king.”

Anakwa Dwamena is a writer based in Accra. He is currently an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow reporting on young people’s participation in climate governance and democracy in West Africa.

ANANSI’S GOLD: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World | By Yepoka Yeebo | Illustrated | 378 pp. | Bloomsbury | $29.99