Title: Counterfeit hero
First published: 1995
Description: Participation in the Zulu and Boer wars and two world wars didn't make Fritz Duquesne a hero. His heroics were as counterfeit as the medals he wore. But his incredibly colorful life was filled with drama, danger, and high adventure, and Art Ronnie captures them all on the pages of this book.

Friends called Duquesne "the best company in the world." Prison officials considered him "one of the most dangerous criminals in the United States." FBI agents hot on his trail found him "likable." At one time or another the South Africa-born soldier of fortune was a prisoner of war, explorer, African hunting adviser to Teddy Roosevelt, inventor, reporter, novelist, publicist for Joseph P. Kennedy's movie company, stockbroker, womanizer, spy, murderer, and certified lunatic.

Thanks to the classic 1945 movie The House on 92nd Street, he is best remembered as the central figure in a ring of thirty-three Nazi spies arrested in New York City in 1941. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called their arrest "the greatest spy roundup in U.S. history," and their trial was one of the nation's longest and most celebrated. For Duquesne, it was the end of a forty-year adventure.

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This meticulously researched biography offers the truest account possible of Duquesne, an obscure and illusory figure in the secretive world of spies. His story has been gathered from primary sources, including his friends, his prison records in South Africa, Bermuda, and America, his personal letters, documents in the National Archives, interviews with FBI agents who investigated him, and information from Bureau files, as well as accounts of his activities published at the time.

The wealth of illustrations accompanying the text show Duquesne from the age of twenty, when he was "the handsomest man and deadliest swordsman in Europe," to his last years in prison, ill and barely recognizable.
Subjects: Biography, Spies, Secret service, World War, 1939-1945
Places: Germany, United States
People: Fritz Joubert Duquesne (b. 1879)
LC classification: D810.S8 D857 1995