Skip to main content
Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life

Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life

Current price: $16.95
Publication Date: September 5th, 2005
Publisher:
Scribner
ISBN:
9780743217088
Pages:
224

Description

Major motion picture Flag Day starring Sean Penn and his daughter Dylan Penn is based on this father-daughter story of a charming criminal—told by the daughter who loved him.

One frosty winter morning in 1995, Jennifer Vogel opened the newspaper and read that her father had gone on the run. John Vogel, fifty-two, had been arrested for single-handedly counterfeiting nearly $20 million in U.S. currency—the fourth-largest sum ever seized by federal agents—and then released pending trial. Though Jennifer hadn't spoken to her father in more than four years, the police suspected he might turn up at her Minneapolis apartment. She examined the shadows outside her building, thought she spotted him at the grocery store and the bus stop. He had simply vanished.

Framed around the six months her father eluded authorities, Jennifer's memoir documents the police chase—stakeouts, lie detector tests, even a segment on Unsolved Mysteries—and vividly chronicles her tumultuous childhood while examining her father's legacy. A lifelong criminal who robbed banks, burned down buildings, scammed investors, and even plotted murder, John Vogel was also a hapless dreamer who wrote a novel, baked lemon meringue pies, and took his ten-year-old daughter to see Rocky in an empty theater on Christmas Eve. When it came time to pass his counterfeit bills, he spent them at Wal-Mart for political reasons.

Culling from memories, photo albums, public documents, and interviews with the handful of people who knew the real John Vogel, this is an intimate and intensely moving psychological portrait of a charismatic, larger-than-life figure—as told by the daughter who nearly followed in his footsteps.

About the Author

Jennifer Vogel worked as a writer and reporter in Minneapolis for seven years before moving to Seattle, where she was editor in chief of The Stranger. She moved back to Minneapolis in 2003.

Praise for Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life

"Vogel evokes the dual nature of our intimate lives as well as the struggle between the straight and the criminal....[R]efreshingly well-paced."
-- San Francisco Chronicle

"[Vogel's] story, a dark eulogy, fascinates."
-- Newsday

"Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking."
-- Time Out New York

"Vogel's masterful account...[w]ill haunt readers for days."
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Original, tragic, and heartbreaking in the way only true life can be."
-- Entertainment Weekly