Bernie Madoff’s name is synonymous with swindle. Boston con man Charles Ponzi is infamous for the Ponzi scheme. But there are plenty of lesser-known con men who were as successful and audacious, if not quite as notorious. Dean Jobb, author of Empire of Deception,  presents five such con men — including Leo Koretz, the master swindler (right) whose story Dean tells in Empire of Deception:

Leo Koretz

The New York Times considered him “the most resourceful confidence man in the United States.” For more than a decade Koretz sold shares in a mysterious syndicate that supposedly owned timberland in the remote Bayano River region of Panama. He raked in millions of dollars from Chicago’s elite before his Ponzi scheme was exposed in 1923.

Victor Lustig 

Lustig’s boldest scam was offering to sell the Eiffel Tower. Twice.  His trademark con was selling a “money box” that victims were assured could mass produce hundred-dollar bills.

 “520 Percent” Miller

A New York bookkeeper named William Franklin Miller claimed to have a sure-fire system to beat the stock market. He promised to pay investors 10 percent interest a week, more than quintupling their investment within a year (thus the moniker “520 Percent” Miller). During 1889 Miller pulled in an average of $80,000 a week – about $1 million today.

Lord Gordon-GordonThis enterprising Scotsman conned an Edinburgh jeweler and used the seed money to escape to America, where he impersonated a nobleman eager to buy vast tracts of land in Minnesota. In the early 1870s when an American posse crossed the border into Manitoba to arrest him, the posse wound up in jail until diplomats negotiated their release. Gordon-Gordon went free.

 Joseph Weil, The Yellow Kid

A dapper showman who lived to be 100, Chicago’s Joseph Weil wrote the book on fraud – well, a book, at least, called Con Man, of course. He claimed to have swindled $8 million over the course of his long career. He was a master of “the wire,” the delayed-race-results swindle Hollywood popularized in the 1970s movie The Sting. When that ploy became too well known, he posed as a mining engineer, a banker or a financier and left a trail of suckers across the Midwest.