David Tolly reconstructs smuggling, treason, and fraud from the founding-era record — and lets the reader render the verdict.
WINDSOR, Conn., July 10, 2026 — Amid the wave of America 250 books, one stands apart: it was written not by a historian but by a forensic CFO, and it puts the Founding Fathers on trial. In Founding Crimes: How Smuggling, Fraud, and Treason Built the United States, David Tolly — a turnaround CFO brought into nearly fifty companies to read the records and find the deep causes of financial distress, fraud among them — reads the founding the way he reads any suspect set of books: following the money, paper, and motive.
Founding Crimes argues the United States was built on acts that were crimes under the law of their day, committed by men now revered in statues and paintings. Structured as a forensic case file of twenty-seven Exhibits and ten Witnesses drawn from the documentary record, it reconstructs real founding-era crimes —seizure of John Hancock’s smuggling sloop Liberty; the Declaration of Independence, a signed confession of treason; and the 1795 Yazoo land fraud the Supreme Court refused to undo — and turns the same lens on the Constitution itself. The reader is seated as the jury.
“The founding of this country is full of numbers that lie and words that deceive,” said Tolly. “Aim that lens at 1776, and the evidence is right there in the documents.”
What sets Founding Crimes apart is where it lands. It is a trial, not an attack — provocative but rigorous, and pointedly even-handed, crediting the genius as honestly as it charges the crime. The evidence, honestly considered, delivers a surprisingly hopeful verdict: a founding generation more fractious than we are today, that nonetheless forged a nation whose words would come to mean more than even they knew. As Tolly puts it: “The whole file says that despair, today, is a luxury the record does not justify.”
Founding Crimes arrives for the July 4, 2026 semiquincentennial and the opening of a multi-year anniversary window — the Revolution’s 250th milestones run through 2033. It is the first in a planned series that retries the American story one case file at a time, and is available now on Amazon.com.
About the Author
David Tolly is a turnaround CFO with four decades of forensic financial consulting. He is also the author of the Gus Rourke crime-novel series beginning with Clean Hands and the five-book Hidden Series, written for owners, CEOs, CFOs, private-equity sponsors, and lenders — showing how to find and release hidden profit and cash, and make the right call when the stakes are highest. Available on Amazon.com. He writes in Windsor, Connecticut.
Media Contact: David Tolly, Calder County Press • [email protected] • 860-863-9356 • Review copies, interviews, and cover/author images available on request. https://corporatesolutionsgroupinc.com/
SOURCE Calder County Press
