Hocus bogus

From artful fake to hollow fraud, a new book examines the science and success of the scam

January 04, 2009|Michael Washburn

FAKERS: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders
By Paul Maliszewski
New Press, 245 pp., $24.95

Effective fabulists - be they satirists, conmen, or merely gifted barroom liars - succeed by being able to predict the content of their mark's imagination. As artists of human expectation they provoke a dream or fear lurking in the mind, beyond doubt, and often beneath belief. A conman leverages greed. Likewise the Ponzi artists and defeated speculators of recent months. And rotten reporters employ a grammar of authenticity concocted of literary device and journalistic convention.

A case in point: Precocious reporter Noah Warren-Mann and businessman Irving T. Fuller, the principal of Telopertors Rex Inc., seemed made for each other. In June 1998, after publishing a series of small pieces in the Business Journal of Central New York, Warren-Mann seized an opportunity and penned a breathless profile of Fuller and his flourishing company, whose avant-garde service was answering phones - for other businesses. The article glorified the businessman's managerial attitude, a brutish, "Darwinian" style that found a receptive audience with both the Business Journal's editors and its readership. The profile impressed Fuller, and he promptly posted excerpts on his company's website and distributed a media kit that included press releases and statements from such notables as George Pataki, then governor of New York.

But every detail of that story was false, though it took some time for the falsehood to be discovered. Warren-Mann and Fuller were companion pseudonyms of Paul Maliszewski, hoaxologist. Maliszewski, a reporter for the Business Journal of Central New York, created them, as he had several other aliases that published satirical letters and columns in the Journal, all unbeknownst to the paper's editors.

Thus we are initiated into Maliszewski's "Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders," an eclectic sampling of the ambitiously false. Maliszewski has spent the better part of a decade exploring - and, in the case of the Business Journal, conducting - hoaxes and cons, all to illuminate how often "belief collaborates with a lie."

In addition to detailing Maliszewski's pseudonymonous moonlighting for the Business Journal, "Fakers" discusses e-mail scams, Vermeer counterfeiter Hans van Meegeren, Howard Hughes impersonator Clifford Irving, and Holocaust deceptions.