DEATH, TAXES, AND TURDUCKENS

Heycke relates the history of the biggest individual tax fraud case in history.

The author describes this book as a tribute to the “Sisyphean efforts” of the IRS investigators and Justice Department tax prosecutors who serve the country by “clawing back billions from tax cheats [while] earning a fraction of what their private sector counterparts make.” These efforts are made against overwhelming odds, as Heycke makes clear: one’s chances of getting convicted of tax fraud, he writes, are roughly the same as getting struck by lightning, which is “hardly a deterrent for major fraudsters who can afford armies of accountants and lawyers.” At the center of this narrative is one of those fraudsters: Robert Brockman, billionaire founder of Universal Computer Systems and one of the greatest tax cheats in American history. Brockman, with the help of his tax attorney, Carlos Kepke, hid over a billion dollars of Brockman’s wealth in various offshore trusts and via other subterfuges that are colloquially termed “Trust Turduckens.” Unraveling these schemes was the work of Ted Lair, special agent for the IRS Criminal Investigation task force, and prosecuting it all was the work of DOJ Tax Division prosecutor Corey Smith. In these pages, Heycke describes every step of the crime, the investigation, and the prosecution, and he wonderfully crafts the narrative as a terrific example of thrilling narrative nonfiction. His main characters (most especially the revolting Brockman himself) are vividly drawn, and the story’s action builds to a gripping climax in which Brockman kills himself (no spoiler: the author opens his book with that detail). The IRS still hasn’t recovered its full claims against Brockman’s frozen assets (the litigation is “a financial ghost haunting multiple jurisdictions”), but Heycke’s story remains a gripping and well-researched history.

The surprisingly involving story of an enormously audacious tax fraudster and the men who brought him down.