Gold's Fools: A True Story of Lies, Obsession, and a Nazi Fortune

In 2019, a Montreal lawyer named Glenn Feldman claimed he'd uncovered the crime of the century: his best friend and business partner of fifty years, he said, was hiding billions of dollars of Nazi gold beneath his mansion.

It was the sort of story people want to believe.

Feldman launched an investigation of astonishing scope, hiring private investigators and handwriting experts, and taking his case to the RCMP, the FBI, Yad Vashem, and the President of Israel. People listened. Feldman's (now former) best friend filed a $16 million defamation suit.

Inevitably, the storytellers arrived: a television reporter, a tabloid newspaper, and then a veteran documentary filmmaker who saw the project of a lifetime. He enlisted Feldman's own daughter, for whom the film became the only way to get close to her father. And finally Menachem Kaiser, author of Plunder, a self-described expert in gold that may or may not exist, went to Montreal on assignment for the New York Times. He quickly found himself hopelessly, hilariously entangled.

Somewhere along the way, the story stopped being about whether the gold was real and became about why so many people needed it to be. And then, at the end of the trail, Kaiser did find Nazi gold. It just wasn't where anyone had been looking.

Gold's Fools is a portrait of a spectacular obsession and a reckoning with the enduring myth of Nazi gold. It is also a book about its own making: how a story gets built, piece by plausible piece, and sucks in everyone who touches it, the author included, and the damage a story this seductive can do. Wildly funny and quietly devastating, it is a true story about how a story becomes true.