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contemporary
conmen and compulsives
This page considers contemporary conmen and women, along
with some identity fraudsters who might be characterised
as compulsives or merely desperate.
It covers -
introduction
Media coverage of contemporary identity crime has
often centred on exploitation of the 'rich & famous'
and on the bizarre, for example imposters in dental and
medical practice or purported survivors of disasters such
as 9/11.
Most identity crime is more mundane. It is likely to happen
to you, or someone you know, rather than something that
only affects public figures. In aggregate the economic
value of thefts from non-celebrities is greater than looting
the stars. Arguably the day to day impact of identity
crime on ordinary people is greater: they are not cushioned
by wealth and have few of the comforts available to the
rich in dealing with a sense of violation and ongoing
disempowerment after an account has been drained or a
credit profile tarnished.
It is clear from looking at some high profile con jobs
that some scammers are there for the money. Some presumably
are gratified by a sense of power as they deceive their
victims. Some may enjoy the excitement of living on the
edge.
Other identity criminals appear to have put on a new profile
like a new set of clothes or a suit of armour. What we
have characterised as compulsives on occasion appear to
actually believe the lies that they told the people around
them - including their closest friends and families -
so that the lie becomes the person, the assumed identity
more real, more meaningful than the one they shed while
taking a bath.
Both groups of criminals demonstrate that questions of
'social engineering', exploitation of trust and willingness
to be deceived are central to much identity crime.
noted imposters
Christopher Rocancourt, active around 2000, swindled
the US rich and famous by variously pretending to a Rockefeller
heir, a movie producer, a global financier, the son of
Sophia Loren or the nephew of Dino De Laurentis.
He had earlier posed as 'Prince Galitzine Christo' and
dabbled in diamond smuggling, passport forgery and armed
robbery. The New York Times, with just a dash
of hyperbole, claimed that "Women threw themselves
at his feet; men threw cash". His Moi, Christophe
Rocancourt, orphelin, play-boy et taulard (Paris:
Éditions Michel Lafon 2002) and Mes vies
(Paris: Éditions Michel Lafon 2006) reportedly
portrays him as an intrepid Robin Hood punishing the foolish
nouveaux riches.
David Hampton (1964-2003) immortalised in John Guare's
1990 Six Degrees of Separation, gained attention
during the 1980s in relieving wealthy Manhattanites of
their money by convincing them he was Sidney Poitier's
son.
US waiter Abraham Abdullah was imprisoned in 2001 after
fraudulently gaining over US$20 million by pretending
to represent celebrities such as Steven Spielberg, Oprah
Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Ross Perot and Warren Buffett.
He began by googling those figures, using that information
in forged Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs correspondence
that persuaded credit reporting
services such as Equifax and Experion to supply detailed
reports. Those reports were then used to dupe banks and
brokers into transferring money to accounts controlled
by Abdullah.
Knowing that the institutions would want to verify the
transfers, Abdullah typically included telephone numbers
where he could be reached. The institutions according
gained some reassurance through voicemail answered in
the victim's name. At his arrest he had 800 fraudulent
credit cards and a mere 20,000 blank credit cards.
His precursor was the more inventive US impostor Frederick
Emerson Peters (1885-1959). Peters wrote bad cheques masquerading
as famous people, often succeeding because the victims
framed the cheques as mementos rather than passing them
to a bank.
He initially posed as Theodore Roosevelt II, later becoming
antique expert 'RA Coleman' of the American Peace Society',
'JJ Morton' of the Widener Library, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Booth Tarkington and Gifford Pinchot II. At Peters' death
he was found to have five cheques on his pockets - each
for different identities.
Assuming the persona of someone famous - however improbably
- is not restricted to the US. Novelist Grahame Greene
thus discovered during the 1980s that an imposter was
busy in Asia, wining, dining, romancing and giving interviews.
Alan Conway
(1934-1998) - depicted in the 2006 film Color Me Kubrick
- wined and dined his way through Europe and the US in
the guise of Stanley Kubrick.
US serial ID thief Carlos Lomax was sentenced to 37 months
in prison after pleading guilty to opening 14 credit accounts
with Pittsburgh retailers stores using the identity of
star Will Smith. At the time he was on probation after
running up US$81,000 on an American Express card as sports
journalist Steve Smith. As Will Smith he had pocketed
over US$190,000.
UK authorities claimed in 2004 that Robert Hendy-Freegard
posed as an MI5 officer, convincing people into spending
years in hiding while stealing over £650,000 of
their savings. It is alleged that he persuaded students
and other victims that they were on an IRA hit list through
their association with him, leading them to go undercover
for years in 'safe houses' and travel on spy missions
that featured waiting for hours at railway stations for
non-existent people.
Sydney security guard Richard Kahotea was less creative,
using forged documents in support of claims that he was
a senior ASIO operative, thereby gaining closed court
hearings on four occasions and privileges for an associate.
Kahotea was convicted in to 300 hours of community service
for making a false statement under oath and using fabricated
evidence.
In 2005 Omid Amidi-Mazaheri was jailed for two years after
stealing the identity of a dentist, which allowed him
to become rich through shoddy treatment (drilling cavities
without local anaesthetic, providing fillings that crumbled
within days, dropping equipment down a patient's throat,
failure to observe HIV protocols).
Sheldon Zelitt, former head of Canadian high tech company
VisuaLabs, variously claimed to be a physicist, to have
served in Vietnam, dismantled a MiG fighter plane, developed
a spy satellite, and worked for the CIA and the Mossad.
After that supposed invention of 3-D television seems
to have been a mere bagatelle, albeit one that pushed
VisuaLabs' share price.
Things unravelled at the company's annual meeting in 2001,
when he tried to pass off a Sony device as his new invention.
Canadian authorities retrieved him after he fled to the
Czech Republic.
blue bloods and bad cheques
Charles Albert Stopford fled the US in 1983 after attempting
to blow up his boss with a pipe bomb. He assumed the name
Christopher Edward Buckingham after stealing the identity
of a baby who died in 1963. He thereafter purported to
be the Earl of Buckingham, a UK title extinct for over
300 years, flaunting notepaper with the Buckingham coat
of arms and telling his German landlady that he needed
a large apartment to accommodate furniture from his English
castle.
The fake Earl was arrested at Dover in 2005 when an automated
check of the the UK births & deaths database revealed
his passport to be false; he was jailed for that offence
amid speculation that he was a renegade CIA officer or
even a mafia hitman. In prison he continued to insist
that he was an aristocrat.
Charles Lee Crutcher, aka Charles Decrevecoeur, claimed
to be Lord Peter de Vere Beauclerk before being jailed
in 1994.
Two years later Keith Andrews was on trial for fraud after
some 20 years of persuading people that he was Marc Philip
Justin Onslow Berkeley St Leger Curzon, the 10th Viscount
of Doneraile, son of Joy Chantal Helene de Burgoyne of
Paris and husband of Marie-Louise, daughter of the Duc
de Brissac.
Delusions of blue blood were also apparent in the fake
2003 wedding of supposed Japanese Prince Satohito Arisugawa,
in reality Yasuyuki Kitano - conman and son of a greengrocer.
He made a career through product endorsements and as a
recipient of wedding gifts from dazzled commoners, with
the 2003 event bringing in a tidy 13 million yen.
Ottone Eugeno (aka Ottone Eugeno Camelio Bresselhau) claimed
to be Austrian baron Otto Von Bressensdorf, principal
of US investment bank Lyons Capital Inc. Together with
his associates the supposed banker defrauded clients by
convincing them to pay thousands of dollars in "advance
fees".
The US government drily commented that "In reality,
however, Lyons rarely helped clients at all" (PDF)
and questioned whether he was entitled to the title or
the medals worn at business meetings. Lyons had provided
fraudulent financial statements to Dunn & Bradstreet,
which in turn produced a commercial credit
rating used by potential clients in deciding whether
to engage Lyons.
Italian businessman Rosario Poidimani was arrested over
involvement in a scam centred on the claim that he was
the king of Portugal (the last king having expired in
1932). Poidimani allegedly sold imaginary aristocratic
titles and fraudulent diplomatic passports, underpinned
by imaginary offshore bank accounts and an elaborate throne
room.
His associates claimed to be working towards creation
of a sovereign kingdom
(variously in the Ukraine or on a Croatian islet) that
would eventually become a EU member.
Murray Roberts (1919-1974) was fined £50 in 1941
for acting as a locum for a medical practitioner without
being qualified. Unabashed, during World War II he posed
as a brigadier and boasted of having done postgraduate
work in brain surgery in Moscow.
Using fictitious university degrees he gained employment
in Australia as a chemist and editor (notably of the Kalgoorlie
Miner), profitably posed as 'Professor Sir Leonard
Jackson' of the Petrov Royal Commission, gained admission
to Goulburn gaol as a professor of neurosurgery and posed
as 'governor-general designate Lord Russell' (rewarded
first with free hotel accommodation and then free accommodation
in a NSW prison).
Roberts subsequently he claimed to be 'Sir William Penny',
'Sir John Douglas', 'Dr Bodkin Adams', 'Justice Adams'
of the New Zealand Supreme Court and Baron Alfred von
Krupp. In 1962, in the guise of medical supremo 'Lord
Porter', he persuaded one victim to part with £400
towards surgery for that man's "deep seated cancer",
a fraud rewarded with imprisonment for four years.
compulsives
Perhaps more sadly, Emmanuel Carrère's The
Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception (London
Picador 2001) profiles Jean-Claude Romand, who murdered
his family when he could no longer maintain the fiction
- as he had assiduously done for most of his adult life
- that he was a senior World Health Organization bureaucrat.
Australian scammer Barry Faulkner came to police attention
in 1968 when he posed as a doctor at Royal Brisbane Hospital,
conducting bogus examinations on pregnant women. He subsequently
purported to be a US Air Force colonel, a US Marine Corps
officer, Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, a CIA agent, a gynaecologist,
an Olympic official and pilots for Virgin Blue, Ansett,
Canadian Airlines, the Royal Flying Doctor Service and
Lauda Air.
UK serial bride Emma Golightly was jailed in 2007 despite
claims she suffered from a split personality. As an unemployed
19 year old she convinced a succession of men that she
was a multimillionaire businesswoman with a terminal condition.
Despite a history of bounced cheques she persuaded her
suitors - found through dating
sites and lonelyhearts ads in newspapers - to shower
her with treats, including the usual designer shoes and
luxury cars, while she stole over £250,000 from
their credit cards. The £12,000 reception after
one bigamous wedding fizzled because she had not paid
for a marriage registrar.
fake kids
Serial imposter Frédéric Bourdin recurrently
posed as a teenager. In 2005, at age 31, he was exposed
after spending a month at a French school in the guise
of a 15 year old - supposedly a Spanish orphan named Francisco
Hernandez-Fernandez - with forged identity papers. The
headmistress explained he "appeared a bit older than
his friends - two or three years at most".
Bourdin had previously served a six-year prison term in
the US after posing as a long-lost son (living with the
supposed parents for three months before his deception
was exposed by a journalist and confirmed by a DNA test)
and claiming in 2004 to be a boy of 14 who disappeared
near Grenoble in 1996 at the age of six.
He was deported from
Spain after he claimed to be Ruben Sanchez Espinosa, whose
mother supposedly died in the Madrid train bombings of
March 2004. He also posed as a tiger tamer, a rich British
holidaymaker, a businessman and a college lecturer.
32 year old Brian MacKinnon duped teachers and pupils
at Glasgow's Bearsden Academy into believing that he was
17 year old Canadian Brandon Lee. He had studied at Bearsden
13 years earlier. After matriculating from Bearsden he
started a medical degree at the University of Dundee,
being discovered when his passport was found during a
holiday in Tenerife.
22 year old US sex offender Joshua Gardner less successfully
posed in 2005 as 17 year old Caspian James Crichton-Stuart
IV, supposed fifth Duke of Cleveland. If he had adopted
a less glittering persona - how many dukes go to Minnesota
high schools - he might have got away with it.
29 year old convicted sex offender Neil Rodreick attended
an Arizona public school for four months in the guise
of Casey Price, supposedly a seventh grader, and Oklahoma
schools in 2005 as a supposed 12 year old. Rodreick was
arrested in 2007.
28 year old drifter James Hogue, portrayed in The
Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical
Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue (New
York: New Press 2008) by David Samuels, persuaded the
Princeton University admissions committee that he was
16 year old self-taught orphan cowboy and athlete Alexi
Indris-Santana.
Hogue gained admission to Princeton, along with US$30,000
assistance, but was rumbled by a spectator at an athletics
event in his sophomore year. He was arrested for defrauding
Princeton of the financial aid, served a short sentence
and then turned up at Harvard before engaging in a range
of crimes under different names. At sentencing in 2006
the judge mildly said the 10 year sentence was an attempt
to get Hogue's attention.
the odour of sanctity
A
preceding page of this guide highlighted the severity
of traditional punishments for pretending to be a member
of the clergy (particularly where there was an established
church) or claiming an ecclesiastical authority to which
the offender was not entitled.
That assertion might be that the offender was divine -
for example Christ or the Jewish Messiah - or might be
more modest, for example that the offender was a displaced
patriarch, visiting cardinal or priest.
It reflects the opportunity for scammers to exploit the
good faith of the pious (or merely leverage the state's
respect for religious dignitaries) or evade punishment
for some crimes (in regimes where there was 'benefit of
clergy'). It also reflects the psychology of some identity
offences, in which putting on clerical robes variously
secures for the respect - even love - of ordinary people
and brings the offender closer to the deity, a sort of
holiness by osmosis.
Daniel Vasconi in The Onion naughtily claimed
in 2002 that
I've
admired priests all my life. Whenever a priest walked
into a room, everyone seemed to look at him with respect
and admiration. I always thought it'd be great to be
a priest, but the thought of going through years of
vocational training and having to stop screwing women
was too much for me. It was a glorious moment, indeed,
when I realized I didn't need to do all that to become
a priest.
To become a priest, all you really need is a priest
outfit from a costume shop, a Bible, and the right attitude.
If you can remember to stop swearing, be discreet ...
and wash the stench of pot smoke out of your clothes,
you're home free. Who knew it would be so easy?
The thing you have to realize is, when you dress up
like a priest, people want to believe you're a priest.
I recently visited a small town in Missouri where no
one knew me and started walking around in my priest
outfit. Within a few hours, I was invited to a week's
worth of home-cooked meals. Man, did I eat good! And
you know what? Not a single person asked me to show
my priest ID card before serving up the roast turkey
and mashed potatoes.
Religious identity fraud is not entirely a thing of the
past, although arguably less common because of secularisation
in Western economies. It is often bizarre and involves
recurrent offences.
German carpenter Gerhard Vilsmeier spent 25 years in the
guise of a Roman Catholic priest. During the mid-1980s
he was accepted in the Tyrolean parish of Schwarz as missionary
priest 'Axel Kolbe'. Detection forced embarrassed religious
authorities to redo the weddings and christenings at which
Vilsmeier had officiated.
He moved to Berlin, claiming to be a doctor of ecclesiastical
law and a Bavarian priest on sabbatical. He was detected
after six months of service, with the church belatedly
requesting to see his documentation.
Unabashed by a £1,400 from a Berlin court for false
use of a title, he spent the closing months of 2005 in
Austria as a priest, having persuaded the presumably pious
folk of Neukirchen an der Enknach that he was an organist
from a nearby parish and then a priest without a parish.
A diocesan spokesperson explained "the man was extremely
well-versed in all things theological".
We trust that there would be a somewhat more searching
examination of fraudsters who appear to be extremely well
versed in all things legal or medical.
Musician Massimiliano Muzzi more benignly toured the world
in the guise of the Pope's organist, with his promoters
claiming that he was a virtuoso who performed at private
masses in the papal chapel and at organ at St Peter's
Basilica. In 2008 Italian police revealed the arrest of
a man who had posed as a priest and sought to hear confessions
in St Peter's. The imposter used had clerical robes and
documents, including what appearewd to be an authentic
Vatican pass.
Australian scammer James Crouch (1830?-1891) "assumed
the garb of whichever religious denomination suited his
purpose", posing as a cardinal in Rome in 1855, as
lecturer Rev Arthur Mereton in England in 1857 (meanwhile
committing frauds for which he was sentenced as Edward
Morton) before absconding to Australia in 1859 as a chaplain
with forged credentials. In 1861 he appeared at Braidwood
as Rev Montague Mereton, conducting an illegal marriage
and stealing £100 of gold.
In 1870, as Rev Thomas Oscar Roland Keating, he was active
as a scammer in the USA - depicted in Trial and Persecutions
of Miss Edith O'Gorman, Otherwise Sister Teresa de Chantal
of St Joseph's Convent (1878), a shocker in the style
of the 'Maria Monk' propaganda.
In 1872 he was sentenced to five years penal servitude
and seven years police surveillance in the UK for forging
documents purporting to be issued by the bishop of Bath
& Wells. His impostures in various ecclesiastical
roles recurred in Dublin after release from prison, before
he moved to Sydney in 1890 as Rev Theodore Oswald Keatinge.
More recently 'Father Giustino Visconti', supposedly a
lecturer in canon law at Fordham University in New York,
was charged with criminal impersonation and grand larceny
for bilked a widow of her retirement savings. Visconti
- in reality John Fortune (an unemployed man with no religious
training) - had performed a baptism, said as many as five
Masses and heard confessions in the Fordham section of
the Bronx.
next page (stolen honour
)
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