Customer Reviews

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

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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 for this because Colby is a real person and his book was also one of my favorites as a child. However, all the rest of it is completely fake. Why would I have fallen for it? Because there is something I know to be true--Colby's book--and, as a fan of Chabon, I want his story to be true. Scary, how easy we can be misled.

In the end, Maliszewski has chosen an interesting subject and done a fairly good job of giving us a taste of what it's all about. If there are some lapses in analysis and a rather narrow focus, that can be forgiven. He tells some very good stories.

"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.

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 his company: "I made up answers I thought they'd like." For a lot of reporters, this was a story too good to check on, and once the stories were on the wires, other media fed off them, assuming that the original authors had done all the checking necessary. After Skaggs revealed the hoax, few papers printed explanations or retractions.

These are useful meditations not just on truth or lies, but often on the undefined region in between. Vermeer counterfeiter Hans van Meegeren is here, and Howard Hughes impersonator Clifford Irving, and the unreliable memoirist James Frey. A simple faker is someone who merely harnesses greed; the artistic faker is one who understands human expectation and is able to harness a fear or a dream in an ostensibly plausible way. Over and over again, in an amusing and instructive book, Maliszewski shows how important the characteristics of the audience are for a hoax to be successful. We care less about a story that "tells it like it is" than we do for one that confirms for us what we imagine must be so. It won't do for there just to be a lie but there has also to be belief that not only accepts the lie but collaborates with it to make it seem true, Maliszewski says. I believe him.

In my collection of books on frauds and fakers, this book is a disappointment. It is hardly "the one true guide to the world of forgery" as stated on the dust jacket. The book contains a few amusing tales but there are other books that include more and more interesting con artists. Mr. Maliszewski came to write about frauds the same way that addicts become drug counselors. There is no bibliography and no index.

One reason we are duped by frauds and fakers of the literary kind, argues Paul Maliszewski, is that "good writing gets confused with authentic experience." That's part of the problem with this book, which combines excellent writing and fascinating storytelling with a flawed and poorly articulated premise; that our increasingly complex lives make us somehow more prone to create -- and accept -- frauds and fakes of all kinds.

Reading this book in the wake of the Madoff scandal may strike a lot of nerves -- and indeed, the author does address the roots of the human willingness to believe, albeit in ways that anyone who has ever thought about the matter won't find too striking or original. The Madoff fraud occurred too recently for inclusion in this list of sins, while Maliszewski himself seems to rely very heavily on literary and journalistic frauds, both familiar (James Frey and Stephen Glass) and unfamiliar (the 'Spectra' school of poetry). Perhaps that's because the reason for Maliszewski's fascination with his subject originates in his own misdeeds; as a bored reporter, disgusted with the low standards of his managing editor, he set out to pull off a series of low-level frauds, creating contributors to the paper who didn't exist in real life and watching as their opinions and actions were given the Good Housekeeping seal of approval by being published.

There's no one as ardent in the pursuit of their perceived duty to society like a poacher turned gamekeeper, and Maliszewski's ability to pull the wool over the eyes of his erstwhile employer seem to have jaded him to such a degree that sometimes this book reads like a jeremiad. That's fine, but authors of jeremiads must never sound shrill, sour or arrogant (at times, this author crosses all those boundaries) and above all, they must display wit and erudition, the first of which is lacking and the second of which is inadequate for the task at hand. He's trying to get at the reasons that fakers want to deceive us, and the reasons they succeed. The prose the he produces is flawless: "Being fooled and believing seemed to me ... increasingly interchangeable, even indistinguishable. Belief collaborates with a lie. It smoothes over the lie's rough edges until the lie feels silken." The arguments? Not so much. He implies that the more we rely on excessive media consumption to filter our reality, the more we are vulnerable to falling victim to fakers who, by offering us access to an experience that feels as if it should be real, promise us a view "however fleeting, of a great thing rarely glimpsed." And yet his examples show us that people have used the media for hoaxes long before Jayson Blair snookered the editors and readers of the New York.

The underlying question -- what is fiction and what is reality? -- is important enough to deserve a more carefully structured and thoughtful analysis than Maliszewski's memoir-ish tour through a selection of his personal favorites in his collection of hoaxes. It's interesting enough, very well written, but the undertone of anger (at us and himself for falling victim to this, as well as at the hoaxers themselves) ultimately becomes irksome. The book's structure -- a combination of memoir-style essays, analytical essays, Q&As with hoaxers, short anecdotes -- also felt flimsy and contributed to the sense that a central unifying theme was missing. His insights as erratic as the book's structure, sometimes thoughtful (as in his ruminations on Stephen Glass "selling the palaver right back to them" by delivering articles that his editors never questioned because they were precisely what the latter wanted to receive) but also venturing into the banal. (For instance; "Hope quiets doubts and, in doing so, make the extraordinary and fictional seem tenable.")

Intriguing, but ultimately its value lies in Maliszewski's own ability to recount a good story rather than analyze his subject. A tentative 3.5 stars; certainly not 4 stars.

On a related subject, plagiarism (there's been a lot of that around lately, too), you might want to check out a wonderful book on the topic by Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words - The Classic Book on Plagiarism, which would collect a solid 4 stars from me as being fascinating, quirky, well-written and providing the kind of analytic and narrative arc that is missing in Maliszewski's book.

Faking and hoaxing is something that I find inherently fascinating, in no small part because I do it so often. I seem to share this trait with Mr. Maliszewski, and what he's written here is a mostly well-written examination of fakers and why they fake. He covers faking journalists, art frauds, etc, with a nice, readable prose style that only occasionally is clunky. The book is a solid two and a half stars-- completely middle of the road in almost way [the two stars are given as the book errs more on the two than the three side of things.] One major issue this book has is repetitiveness. I did not bother to count the number of times JT LeRoy or Stephen Glass were brought up, but it was quite a bit, and not every time were they brought up with any new information or analysis on them. Sometimes I would come across sentences I would swear I read earlier in the book [and, as it turns out, I had]. The book spends an uneven amount of time covering different subjects; for example, a paragraph on the always-fascinating story of the Cardiff Giant, but half-a-chapter on Stephen Glass.
The book is certainly worth reading for a few reasons; the story Mr. Maliszewski tells in the introduction of his personal experience with faking is a fun read [although after reading this book, I am a little inclined to doubt its veracity, but perhaps that is what Mr. Maliszewski wants], and, if you have an interest in this sort of thing, it will be worth a read, as you will come out having learned a few things. But what bothers me most is the wasted potential; there is a shell of a very, very good book here, but the one in front of me seems strangely unfinished.

I wish there was more on fake art and jewelry, and less on the written word.