Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders

As I write this, Bernard Madoff is about to show up in court and plead guilty to defrauding countless investors of countless billions of dollars. It's not really an especially interesting story; Madoff was a fake, but for the baldest of reasons: he wanted to make money. He seems to have been clever about it, for a while, but there wasn't much flair or creativity, and not much motivation beyond lucre. This lack of style on his part would probably have excluded him from Paul Maliszewski's book _Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders_ (The New Press), even if the revelations about his Ponzi scheme had beat the book's deadline. The book is a collection of essays on different fakers, and of course some of them were in it for the money, but even if so, it usually wasn't just for money, but more for fame or for the sense of tweaking the nose of so-called experts. There seems, for instance, to have been a rash of poetry hoaxes, and it is hard to imagine that there is any money to be made in such efforts. The stories are entertaining in themselves, even though they are often summaries of what is contained in longer works, like the chapter on the _Sun_ newspaper's hoax about the population of the Moon, recently covered in book length in the delightful _The Sun and the Moon_. What Maliszewski has done is not just to gather the stories, but to try to evaluate just why the fakers have been successful, or why those who are hoaxed have decided to be duped. Fakers is more often the stories of the faked, and their collusion with the fakers. To start things off in his first chapter, Maliszewski gets personal, telling the story of reporter Noah Warren-Mann, who in 1998 wrote a profile of the innovative entrepreneur Irving T. Fuller, whose Telopertors Rex Inc. answered phones for other businesses, and this article was included on Fuller's website, and became a part of a press kit. The problems of this story were that Fuller did not exist and that Warren-Mann did not exist. It was Maliszewski himself who had created them, and he had also created other aliases publishing satirical columns and letters. When Maliszewski heard of Stephen Glass, the writer for _The New Republic_, he thought he had found a co-conspirator. After all, Glass's articles tories assumed the conventions of reporting in the vehicles that bore them, and they did what good stories do: they confirmed that what readers assumed to be true was in fact true. If you can imagine bond traders, for instance, who literally worshiped at a picture of Alan Greenspan, Glass could serve this up for you. Maliszewski prints his interviews with a couple of hoaxers. One is Joey Skaggs, a conceptual artist who in 1999 developed Final Curtain, a company which was founded to make cemeteries "on the model and scale of theme parks, complete with restaurants, gift shops, and something called the `timeshare greenhouse'". He was happy to help out reporters who did stories on

In this relatively brief book, Mr. Maliszewski gives us stories of great confidence men, those who have convinced others of the truth of stories and the originality of art that, in the end, turns out to be a fabric of lies. He also purports to an analysis of why people perpetrate these fakes and why so many of us fall for them. After all, many of these fakes are not particularly good. In this, however, he is not quite as successful. The stories he tells are, for the most part, fascinating ones both recent and not-so-recent. The story of James Frey and the over-the-top reaction to the outing of his less-than-true memoir was one in a spate of recent scandals--Stephen Glass, Michael Finkel, and "JT LeRoy"--that seemed to provide inspiration to Mr. Maliszewski. And yet, some of the best tales are the older ones: the story of life on the moon printed as fact in the New York Sun in 1835, Abraham Bredius's Vermeer fakes in the decades before World War II, and the poetry fakes in The New Republic in 1916 and in Australia during World War II. Faking is by no means new. The reasons people produce fakes are a little more difficult to comprehend. Though no one comes out and says it, the main reason seems to be frustration--frustration that Bredius's own work doesn't sell, frustration that magazines print poems by other poets that are worse than yours, frustration that a newspaper wants a story by a deadline that can't be met in a style that the background doesn't provide. Even Mr. Maliszewski's (mostly tedious) stories of his own fake journalism simply indicate his frustration that his work wasn't being taken seriously enough. Why people swallow fakes is more interesting and understandable. It seems to center around two aspects. First, the fake is layered in truth that can make it more difficult to spot. For example, the New York Sun's story was prefaced on the work of a real, famous astronomer who just happened to have no idea his name was being used to perpetrate a fraud. Second, and probably more importantly, we want to believe what we're told. The Vermeer fakes were believed because people desperately wanted them to be real. The same is true for almost all fake stories followed hook, line and sinker. Amazingly, people even want to believe stories they know in advance are fake. (See all people who believe what they see on TV and in the movies is real or Maliszewski's story of the "Great War of the Californias" paintings.) We all like to believe we'd be able to spot a fake but we're all able to be suckered. This was brought home to me by one of the last stories in the book: Michael Chabon's "Golems I Have Known" lecture. In it, Chabon tells of meeting an author of one of his favorite books (Strangely Enough! by C.B. Colby) when he was a kid who turned out to be Joseph Adler, the author of an Holocaust memoir, which turned out to be a fake when the author was revealed to be Victor Fischer, a Nazi journalist. Now, I would have fallen f

"As my hackwork piled still higher I began to think of journalism not as a series of unique assignments or stories, but as a limited number of ideas and conventions, which each story had somehow to affirm." Thus begins Paul Maliszewski's short but colorful career as a hoaxer and satirist. As a young employee of the Business Journal of Central New York Maliszewski conned his own newspaper with letters to the editor from fictitious business "titans" who illustrated and inflated the Journal's bias to grotesque proportions. His disgust with his work and the shabby standard to which he was held served to inspire ever crazier letters, which, to Maliszewski's increasing astonishment, were accepted at face value and posted alongside the editorial. The fun didn't come to a stop until the FBI finally knocked on his door at the behest of a satirically implicated governor. This experience is the platform from which Maliszewski launches his book, Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders. Needless to say, Maliszewski's first impulse when exploring the world of Fakers is often sympathy toward the artists/perpetrators in question. His second impulse is to explore the public mindset that accepts these deceits at face value. Why is a given group of people susceptible to the charms of the most banal fraudulence? Who bears the greater burden of responsibility -- the con or the conned? Under what circumstances? In the course of this short book, Maliszewski looks closely at frauds celebrated and forgotten, exotic and commonplace, and sifts through the conditions that allowed these cons to succeed. He interviews satirists who receive gullible public response which further enlivens and informs the content of their satire. Some of the conclusions Maliszewski reaches might surprise the reader. Maliszewski has a novelist's eye for the subtle elements of persuasion -- the quote at the top of this post is reminiscent of the observations that compel Paul Auster's characters into (often fraudulent) action. This makes Malizsewski's histories richly entertaining, but the deeper pleasure lies in the book's moral discovery. Without giving too much away, I'll admit I was chiefly onside with Maliszewski's moral argument, even as I remained skeptical of any claims regarding the efficacy of satire. As Maliszewski's examples make abundantly clear, this book is pertinent to any time -- but especially ours. Fakers rewards its readers on many levels, offering a value that exceeds its modest price and format. I highly recommend it.