In the 1990s and 2000s, a hustler in the northeastern United States exploited his ethnic roots and his winning style to bilk hundreds of people from his ethnic community out of millions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme. Ultimately the scheme collapsed around him and he was finally arrested, tried, and convicted. Some would see in this a moral tale, certainly one to warm the heart of Jonathan Swift.

A recent documentary, currently streaming on Netflix, presents this moral tale. The Man Who Would Be Polka King, a 2009 film by Joshua Brown and John Mikulak, tells the story of Polish emigrant Jan Lewan (nee Lewandowski), an entertainer who came to the United States and eventually wound up in the economically depressed small city of Hazleton, PA. Filled with self-confidence, he determined to make himself an international polka star; Hazleton, with its substantial Polish community, seemed the best place to begin. He started his own orchestra and, relying on his own charisma and energy, established himself as a major entertainment figure there, organizing overseas trips for his fans and opening a gift shop. Lewan hoped to fuel his dreams of success by selling promissory notes in his business and career at an astonishing 12% (later 20%) interest rate to his Hazleton fans, who invested substantial quantities and sometimes all of their life savings in his scheme. In the end, like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme (also a form of affinity fraud), it was doomed to collapse, and it does so — pathetically and violently.

The Man Who Would Be Polka King is a small gem of a documentary, telling the story through interviews with Lewan himself, his family, his friends, his victims, and federal prosecutors. The narcissistic Lewan also employed a videographer, so the film features a great deal of footage of both his performances and his overseas travels. The narration is provided by a fictional polka enthusiast, Stan Tadrowski (played by comedian Greg Korin with a three-day growth of beard and a wonderful northeast PA accent), who tells the story from a barstool in a Hazleton American Legion post. And the story is filled with anecdotes — most amusingly, one in which Lewan purchases a private audience with Pope John Paul II, dragging a suitcase-full of money to the Vatican.

Lewan’s ultimately sad career — which includes the death of two band members and the critical injury of his own son during an ill-fated Florida bus tour, and his own near-death at the hands of a fellow prisoner during his jail term — is an American Dream story writ small, where success meets failure and narcissistic celebrity attracts unthinking followers. Mark Twain would admire the craft with which Brown and Mikulak suggest that the victims’ gullibility was only matched and magnified by their greed; and the filmmakers’ sympathy extends to Lewan and his family as well, victims of their own narcissism though capable of recognizing their own failings, undercutting the occasional snarkiness of the film.

I grew up in Hazleton during the 1970s, and a few members of my family participated in the polka circuit — this was long before Lewan’s story begins, but I recognized the people and the atmosphere, which haven’t changed much. In those days I dreamed of New York, subscribing to the Village Voice and making occasional visits to the city, which seemed distant in both mind and place. As the story of Hazleton’s Bernie Madoff suggests, perhaps there is not much distance between a depressed coal-mining town and a cosmopolis like New York after all; and perhaps the differences between the people who live in both are fewer than we’d like to think.

The Man Who Would Be Polka King is available free online here; below is the trailer for the film. It’s worth your 67 minutes.