Rigged - by Ben Mezrich (Paperback)

About the Book

"Rigged" is the startling true story of David Russo, a rags-to-riches tale of a Brooklyn kid turned Harvard grad. He took on the old-world hierarchy and its powerful, monied kings, and set out to do the impossible--to build an energy exchange in the middle of the Arab world.

Book Synopsis

From the author who brought you the massive New York Times bestseller Bringing Down The House, Rigged is the startling, rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange.

Black Gold. Texas Tea. Everybody wants oil but only a rare few have truly made a killing mastering its intricacies. One of those lucky bastards is Johnny Castino, a ballsy Italian-American from Brooklyn with an ego and a keen intelligence to match his ambition. Rigged is his story: a startling rags-to-riches tale of an ordinary kid turned Harvard grad who found himself caught up in the ultimate high-stakes adventure filled with money, sex, exotic locales, life-threatening danger, and extraordinary international consequences.

Moving from the streets of Brooklyn to Dubai, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Jakarta, Moscow, and Shanghai, Rigged reveals how the business is run and what happened when a man with solid gold cajones decided to flip a business--and an entire Exchange--on its head.

From the Back Cover

After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn decides to take on the testosterone-fueled Merc Exchange in lower Manhattan--where billions of dollars in oil money trade hands every week and where fistfights are known to break out on the trading floor.

Soon our hero is living the good life in the gold-lined hotel palaces of Dubai and on private yachts in Monte Carlo, teeming with half-naked girls flown in by Saudi sheikhs, and making deals in the dangerous back alleys of Beijing. But that's only the beginning. Taken under the wing of another young gun and partnering with a mysterious young Muslim, the kid embarks on a dangerous adventure to revolutionize the oil trading industry--and, along with it, the world.

This is a true story.

Review Quotes

"Gripping and stylish, Rigged keeps the reader moving through its pages at the pace of its characters' Ferraris and luxury jets. Crafting a narrative with vivid energy and scope, Ben Mezrich records another flash point between tradition and transformation. This is living history." - -- Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow