Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai - Paperback

by Ben Mezrich (Author)

From the author who brought you the massive New York Times bestseller Bringing Down The House, Rigged is the startling, rags-to-riches true story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the New York Mercantile 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 of Wall Street oil trading, a world 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 volatile business of high-stakes finance is run and what happened when a man with solid gold cajones decided to flip a business--and an entire Exchange--on its head.

• Business Memoir: Follow Johnny Castino's adrenaline-fueled journey from a blue-collar background to the heights of international finance.
• Commodities Trading: Go behind the scenes of the oil exchange, a place where fortunes are made and lost in seconds and the pressure is relentless.
• Financial Thriller: A gripping, fast-paced narrative filled with exotic locales from Dubai to Monte Carlo, high-stakes deals, and life-threatening danger.
• Ivy League Underdog: Discover how a Harvard grad with street smarts navigated a cutthroat world of insiders to take on the entire system from within.

Back Jacket

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.