Filmmaker Joel Gilbert’s new book The Trayvon Hoax brilliantly exposes one of the most fraudulent and shameful trials in the history of the United States. The story of the attempted legal lynching of George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy with numerous casualties including Zimmerman, young black Americans and race relations in the United States.

The story is a first class detective story, a genuine page-turner with intriguing subplots. It’s a masterpiece of reporting -- the kind of reporting that American media does very little of any more, particularly when the real story doesn’t fit a leftist narrative. The book parallels a documentary film that Gilbert has simultaneously released.

Gilbert describes his story about the trial of Zimmerman charged with killing Trayvon as a “conspiracy to corrupt justice . . . . the most flagrant witness fraud in modern times.”

It’s also a fascinating and unprecedented look into the lives of African-American/Haitian teenagers in urban Miami as well as the mendacious and incompetent reporting of the American news media, the political corruption of Florida’s legal system and, above all, how the leftwing produced a false but tragic exploitation of racial grievances. Directly encouraged by President Obama, race relations in America were severely set back resulting in riots, deaths and fresh hardships for some of America’s most needy.

Gilbert’s investigative odyssey began with the idea of producing a documentary about the rise of Florida politico Andrew Gillum who ran for governor of Florida selling fear based on the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a Hispanic Democrat who voted for Obama.

Zimmerman had been a mentor of young black men. He previously had come to the public defense of a homeless black man named Sherman Ware after Ware was assaulted by a police lieutenant’s son. For the left, that counted for nothing. The left and Gillum did their best to keep Zimmerman’s real past out of the public eye. They portrayed Zimmerman as a white racist who had murdered an “innocent (black) child.” With the support of corrupt media, Trayvon’s growing criminal history that included excessive use of drugs, an expanding police record and multiple suspensions from high school for fighting were cleverly papered over.

“The more I looked into Gillum’s success, the more need I saw to investigate the unanswered questions of the . . . case upon which Gillum built his career. I had followed the 2012 shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin and the subsequent trial of George Zimmerman from afar and, like many others, I had grave concerns about the lynch mob mentality that drove the case.”

Also Gilbert wanted to know whether the individuals who exploited Trayvon’s death – Andrew Gillum, Barack Obama, Obama’s ‘wing-man’ Eric Holder, Florida State prosecutors, and others “knew about the fraud at the heart of the case.”

In his race for governor, Gillum “ran a shockingly race-based campaign that accused his opponent (Ron DeSantis) of being a racist at every turn. He knew the socialist playbook called for making black voters angry and fearful. “We don’t have to let another parent lose their (black) child to a bullet, a badge or a dollar sign,” said Gillum.

At the heart of the case was a mysterious witness, a young black woman known only as Diamond or Witness # 8. She was on the phone with Trayvon immediately before he was shot and killed by Zimmerman who, while yelling for help, acted in desperate self-defense after being sucker punched by the larger and stronger Trayvon who broke his nose and was dangerously pounding his head into the concrete pavement.

Diamond’s true identity before, during and after the trial (which ultimately exonerated Zimmerman) was carefully hidden by the Trayvon team and Florida prosecutors who knew the accusations against Zimmerman had nothing to do with justice -- they were about politics and money. Only if Zimmerman was brought to trial, could there be lawsuits and possible financial gain.

At the trial, Diamond was called as a key witness to convince the jury that Zimmerman had been stalking an innocent young Trayvon because he was black. The witness who came to the stand as Diamond and Witness #8 was Rachel Jeantel, a Haitian/American teenager who had been enrolled in a school program for students with intellectual disabilities. She badly perjured herself. “Those who countenanced Rachel’s participation by allowing her to testify are guilty of cruelly exploiting someone with disabilities to get an arrest.” Her perjury “changed the course of race relations in the United States. Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder. There would have been no charge of murder and no arrest without Rachel’s lies being entered as sworn testimony.”

With extensive and highly biased coverage of the trial by ABC reporter Matt Gutman and other irresponsible media, those in the legal system ignored available evidence, which Gilbert subsequently uncovered, showing Rachel Jeantel was not Diamond, the girl who had been on the phone with Trayvon just before he was killed.  She was fraudulently substituted long before the trial for the real Diamond. But why?  Who arranged it? How did they get away with it?

Gilbert spent hundred of hours going through thousands of public documents including phone records and Twitter accounts to dissect the case. And thus began his search for the real Diamond. She “had the power to do the right thing. She could have come forward, told the truth, and spared the nation both trial and trauma. Instead she participated on several levels in a hoax whose toxic residue spread like the Ebola virus.”

I don’t want to spoil the specifics of the ending of this really terrific book.  But suffice it to say that Gilbert ultimately found and spoke with the real Diamond. He shows conclusively how Gillum, Obama, Team Trayvon (including Trayvon’s biological father and mother), race-baiting attorney Benjamin Crump, activist Al Sharpton, rapper Jay-Z and others shamelessly exploited the case for their own gains.

Why is it that more than six years later it took a curious California-based filmmaker to do the job that no one in the major media would do? Gilbert cites multiple instances when NBC, ABC, CNN, The New York Times, The Miami Herald, People Magazine and the Orlando Sentinel changed or ignored facts to fit their narrative. “The answer was really simple. American journalists did not want to know anything that might disturb the . . . scenario they had imagined . . The news was fake, dangerously so, more often than not. The media had no more interest in the truth than the prosecutors . . . . The left likes nothing more than the story of an innocent black boy being murdered by someone who was white.” The case was a blatant case of media fraud as well as legal fraud.

Conviction of Zimmerman, an innocent man whose life was ruined by the whole affair, was never the point. “An arrest was what mattered. For Crump an arrest opened the door for a civil suit. For the State of Florida, an arrest kept the mob at bay. For Barack Obama’s Justice Department, an arrest meant getting out the black vote for Obama in 2012 in Florida and hopefully nationwide. For Al Sharpton and his crowd of leftists, an arrest and trial advanced their racially charged agenda.” But as Gilbert points out, there were “lethal long-term consequences for the black community. (The trial) set America on the road to division and needless strife for years to come.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken after the trial showed that only 52% of whites and 38% of blacks held a favorable view of race relations in America. This was down from 79% favorable for whites and 63% favorable for blacks in 2008 when America and primarily white voters elected a black president.

Gilbert sums it up. “It was an evil plan indeed to use a troubled black teen’s tragic death to imprison an innocent Hispanic man, for no greater good than to control black voters. But this is the way the Left has sought power for a century, sowing discord among brothers. With the Trayvon Hoax, they did just that.”

Frank Hawkins is a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, Associated Press foreign correspondent, international businessman, senior newspaper company executive, founder and owner of several marketing companies, and published novelist.