Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann review – family murder, oil and the FBI The Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma were the victims of racism but also the wealthiest people per capita in the world. Cue violence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is the third non-fiction book by American journalist David Grann.[1] The book was released on April 18, 2017 by Doubleday.
Time magazine listed Killers of the Flower Moon as one of its top ten non-fiction books of 2017.The book is currently planned for production as a film directed by Martin Scorsese.

Synopsis

The book investigates a series of murders of wealthy Osage people that took place in Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1920s—after big oil deposits were discovered beneath their land. After the Osage Native Americans are awarded rights in court to the profits made from oil deposits found on their land, the Osage people prepare for receiving the wealth to which they believe they are legally entitled from sales of their oil deposits.

However, a long and complex process of custodianship is imposed upon the distribution of the profits from the sales being made for very high profits and very few if any of the Osage people see any of this money. Still, they are the legal owners of the land and its profits, which is irksome to some of the administrators of the land who have a history of poor relations with the Osage people. Those elements hostile to the Osage people then decide that they could greatly simplify their profit mongering of the oil profits by eliminating those whom they consider to be operating as the "middle man" before they can abscond with the oil profits.
The Osage people themselves are seen as the "middle man" and a complex plot is hatched and put into place to eliminate the Osage people inheriting this wealth from oil profits on a one-by-one basis by any means possible. Officially, the count of the murdered full-blood wealthy Osage native Americans reaches at least 20, but Grann suspects that hundreds more may have been killed because of their ties to oil.[8] The book details the newly formed FBI's investigation of the murders, as well as the eventual trial and conviction of cattleman William Hale as the mastermind behind the plot.