Vaudeville manager, boxing promoter, stock swindler, card shark and u0026 self-proclaimed 'Jade King of China,' Freeman Bernstein was a master of exuberant excess and u0026 no stranger to the hard-hand of the law. But the charges he was arrested for on the evening of 2 18 37, outside a Hollywood starlet's home, were more serious than those he'd encountered before. The powerful and u0026 feared Adolf Hitler claimed that Bernstein had committed fraud against the German government. While living in Shanghai in '36, Bernstein had been asked to procure a large quantity of nickel for the Germans. Nickel was essential to make stainless steel for armaments and u0026 impossible at that time for Germany to openly buy on the international markets. When the shipments arrived from Canada, bearing Bernstein's stamp of approval, the Germans found only useless quantities of scrap metal and u0026 tin: a blow to their economy and u0026 war preparations. Journalist Walter Shapiro had assumed that the outlandish stories about his great uncle Freeman were exaggerated pieces of family lore; a cockamamie Jewish revenge fantasy dreamt up to entertain kids and u0026 venerate their larger-than-life relative. Recently, Shapiro decided to search for the truth. In this exploration of Bernstein's life, he investigates the possibility that a NY Jew - born to in 1874 to Polish immigrants - may have been responsible for a critical shortage of Nazi resources in WWII's early years. Shapiro's easy narrative naturally evokes Bernstein's colorful world: from the smell of the grease paint backstage in a seedy turn-of-the-century vaudeville house in Bayonne, to the roar from the ringside seats of a top-rated '23 middleweight bout in Mexico City, and u0026 the ominous sense of what it must have been like for an American Jew to be arranging shady business dealings in Germany in '36. A page-turning read, Hustling Hitler is the untold story of the larger-than-life, eternal hustler who changed history.