There's a sucker born every minute," a quote once attributed to circus magnate P.T. Barnum, may very well have been the motto by which Colonel Tom Parker lived.

Parker conned many people throughout his life, but his biggest "sucker" was his chief management client—the King himself, Elvis Aaron Presley. Twenty-six years after his death, Presley continues to be the world's most revered cultural icon, yet it's doubtful he would have even approached his peaks of popularity without the guiding hand of the savvy Parker.

But as author Alanna Nash suggests in The Colonel, Presley may have unwittingly paid the ultimate price in securing the services of manager Parker. A man whose exploitation knew few bounds, Parker often treated Presley as an end to his own means, keeping his client at arm's length and turning a blind eye to his professional and personal needs. It was that neglect that may have led Presley to his destruction.

It seemed a simple arrangement: Elvis took care of the music, Colonel Tom took care of the business. Whereas most entertainment managers earn 10 to 20 percent commission, Parker took 50 percent—and sometimes that wasn't enough. Yet Nash suggests that greed might have been secondary in Parker's motivation to the thrill of the con. Parker kept testing limits, hunting for resistance. Often, he found none.

Thanks to exhaustive research, Presley expert Nash—also author of Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations from the Memphis Mafia and Elvis: From Memphis to Hollywood—exposes many of the secrets behind a complex, elusive character who lived an elaborate façade.

While the awareness that Colonel Tom Parker was neither a colonel by rank or profession, nor legally Tom Parker for that matter, is known by many, Nash implies that Andreas van Kuijk's motive to flee his native Holland and concoct a new identity may have been murder. She offers a convincing series of coincidences that place him in the vicinity of a fatal bludgeoning. The date of the crime is conspicuously the exact day van Kuijk disappeared, only to resurface in America as Parker.

Through interviews with his surviving Dutch relatives, Nash illustrates Parker's poverty-stricken existence, his gift for hustling at age 7, and the love of the carnival and the circus deep in his veins. Through Nash's meticulous research, she reveals some surprising facts. Among them, that Parker not only enlisted in the U.S. Army, but was eventually discharged due to his "Constitutional Psychopathic State."

By the time The Colonel met Presley in 1954, he had perfected his entrepreneurial spirit as the manager of singers Gene Austin, Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow. Buying Presley's contract from Sun Records for $35,000 in '55, Parker took all of a year to transform Elvis into the biggest-selling music artist in the world.

Exercising control over all contracts, Parker restricted Presley's access to the media—as well as RCA, his record company—and worked deals that benefited Parker over his client. When he helped establish a couple of Presley music publishing companies, he took 40 percent ownership and designated 15 percent to his client. Then he took a further 25 percent commission on Presley's 15 percent share. And then there's Parker's failure in looking out for the health and welfare of Presley, who fatally overdosed in 1977. Nash claims that Tennessee records show Presley's physician prescribing 1296 amphetamines, 1891 sedatives and 910 narcotics to his patient in 1975 alone. Did Parker willfully turn a blind eye?

Despite his shortcomings, Nash doesn't portray Parker as heartless, but even-handed, largely untangling his web of complexity. But even she acknowledges Parker took some secrets to his grave in 1997. There will never be another like him.