Con men are, professionally, people who are good at talking, and this audiobook hands the microphone to one of them. Thomas Giacomaro is credited as both the author and the narrator of his own memoir, which means the instrument the book describes is also the instrument delivering it. Nearly nine hours of a man who, by his own account, could convince anyone of anything, telling you what he did and roughly why. Decide before you press play how you intend to hold that. I found it worked best treated as testimony rather than as confession, and the book never quite asks to be believed anyway.
Our Take on The King of Con
Tom Giacomaro started as a teenager in the mob-laden New Jersey trucking industry, and the copy's account of the climb is the part that reads least like a movie. A knack for numbers. A gift for making people trust him. An all-consuming hunger to be king of the business world. From there the story accelerates into relationships with New York and Philadelphia crime families, into drugs and violence, into a year on the lam in South Africa and Europe, and back home with millions of dollars' worth of diamonds stuffed in his underwear. The copy then says, accurately, that this is only the beginning.
Somebody built these sentences, and the listing declines to tell you who. The description states plainly that the book is cowritten by Natasha Stoynoff, and neither the author field nor the narrator field carries that name anywhere. On a memoir this is not a footnote. A career criminal with a documented gift for persuasion is exactly the sort of subject whose account a professional writer has to shape, curate and structure into something a stranger can follow, and the description says a professional writer did precisely that. The page credits one man with the talking and the writing both, and the copy underneath it contradicts the credit.
The second half is where this stops being a crime story and turns into something stranger. Giacomaro hashes out a deal with the FBI, becomes a special crime informant to stay out of prison, and then, by the description's own admission, somehow manages not to inform on anyone while continuing the shady high-finance dealings that put him in the room. Celebrities and other high-profile contacts get lured into new ventures. It collapses. He serves over a decade, still extracts what he wants from the warden, the doctors, the guards and his fellow inmates, and finds a way out early. A five-star response compares it to a Sopranos episode with the difference that it actually happened, and I take the comparison while pushing back on it: mob fiction has structure, and this has momentum.
Handing a con man a microphone produces exactly the object you would expect, and its value depends entirely on what you came for. Giacomaro reads himself across eight hours and fifty minutes. A subject narrating his own memoir does something a hired professional cannot, and costs something a hired professional would not, and on this particular subject that trade is the whole point, because the persuasion the book documents is the persuasion doing the reading. Play a few minutes before you buy. If the voice works on you, that is evidence about the book's central claim, and if it grates, this is a long stretch to spend disliking a delivery.
What to Watch For in The King of Con
The star column here is doing less work than the count suggests. One hundred eleven ratings sit behind a 4.3 badge, and among the five written responses is a three-star whose entire body repeats its own headline word for word, everything is a risk if it didn't cost too much buy it, followed by a letter grade. That entry evaluates nothing and still moves an average. A four-star response mentions many reviews commenting on the author's wanna-be-gangsta persona, which is a body of opinion no shopper on this page can actually see, and then lands on the sharper reading: a rogue businessman rather than a mobster, shrewd, on the wrong path, wanting the same respect regardless, with a lament running underneath the later chapters.
Persona is the axis this book keeps sliding along. The description closes on a question no memoir has any business asking, will he stay on the straight and narrow or steal back his crown of crime, which is a copywriter's cliffhanger bolted onto a 2018 account of a life still being lived. The genre fields make the same move, filing the recording under biographies and memoirs while simultaneously shelving it among mysteries and thrillers, with a True Crime tag over the top. Somewhere between those labels sits the actual object: a self-account by a man with an obvious interest in how he comes across, and the discounting is left entirely to the listener.
Who Should Listen to The King of Con
Pick it up if the mechanics of persuasion interest you more than the crimes do. The strongest material, on the description's own showing, is technical: how trust gets built, how a knack for numbers turns into millions, how a man keeps talking once federal agents are sitting at the table. True-crime listeners who prefer a first-person account with no journalist standing between them and the subject will get exactly what they came for. So will anyone who follows white-collar fraud, since the trucking and finance stretches sit closer to a case study than to a gangster picture.
Give it a pass if you need a narrator who is not also the defendant. Every fact here arrives pre-shaped by the person with the most to gain from how it lands, and the closing tease on the description shows a publisher leaning into that rather than counterbalancing it. The other group to warn off is anyone hoping to meet the victims. Millions of dollars came from somewhere, somebody lost them, and a memoir told from this particular seat is structurally incapable of dwelling there for long. Take the voice as the point and let the accounting be somebody else's book.
- Narration: both credit slots on this record hold one name, so the person reading is the person the FBI was watching.
- Themes: New Jersey mob-adjacent finance, an informant deal that informs on nobody, prison and self-mythology
- Mood: Fast, boastful, occasionally rueful
- Verdict: Gripping as testimony and worthless as accounting, which is roughly what a con man's memoir ought to be.
Who reads the audiobook?
Thomas Giacomaro, who also wrote it. One name occupies both credit slots across nearly nine hours, which makes this a first-person account in the fullest available sense. If you are choosing between formats, that is the entire argument for audio, and also the reason to try the sample before committing.
Does the audiobook cover what happened after prison?
The description ends with him back in his old New Jersey neighborhood, former associates calling, palms itching, and the US Attorney's office watching. That suggests the closing stretch handles the return rather than the sentence. How much running time it occupies is not something the page specifies anywhere.
How much of the story happens outside the United States?
One distinct stretch. The copy has him fleeing abroad for a year, to South Africa and then Europe, before a return trip carrying millions in diamonds. Everything else sits between New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia, so this is a local story with a single long detour rather than a roaming one.
