The Confidence Game Read online

  Yet try as he may, Wilf couldn’t seem to get his hands on even a single case. “I asked for months, practically begged,” he recalls. Finally, Rudy relented. Wilf could be one of his exclusive buyers.

  A few days later, the cases arrived in Wilf’s cellar. Wilf buys vast quantities of wine. He can’t taste everything, but he makes it a practice to spot-test his new acquisitions, to make sure the bottles are in proper condition. He cracked open a crate and took out a Lafite. It tasted . . . off. “I didn’t think it was fake,” he says. “Just bad. Maybe it wasn’t stored properly. I don’t know. It just tasted wrong.” He returned the entire purchase to Rudy, who, without argument, offered him a full refund.

  In retrospect, Wilf was remarkably prescient: the wines had been fake, and for several years investigators had been looking into Kurniawan’s sources. There had been one event that tipped the scales: an auction in New York, run by Acker Merrall and Condit, an old and renowned wine store and auction house. The auction was scheduled to include a case of particularly rare bottles from Kurniawan’s cellars, including several magnums. The only problem, according to the owner of the château in question: that particular vintage never came in magnums. They had never bottled any in that size.

  Against protests, Acker went forward with the sale all the same. Who knows; records at the time were patchy. Who’s to say the magnums weren’t bottled elsewhere?

  Of course, just like Jaeger’s wines, these were not miraculous exceptions. And soon the evidence reached a tipping point. Police raided Kurniawan’s house. In the basement, they found old labels, fake labels, “recipes” for various wines and vintages, the whole panoply of paraphernalia needed to manufacture old and rare bottles.

  It was indeed an exclusive club, fueled by true scarcity. Too bad it was also fake. Kurniawan is now serving his sentence in Southern California.

  * * *

  Matthew de Unger Brown, or Sebastian Von Anhalt, if you will, was born Matthew Edward Brown in 1984, in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, the son of a Hong Kong–based telecom’s director of legal affairs. When his father died suddenly of a heart attack at forty-two, Matthew, then thirteen, moved in with his mother, Jane, a social worker. They lived in a house not far from his school, by all accounts a middle-class life. (In 2007, Brown’s mother died of a sudden heart attack as well.)

  As a teen, Matthew attended the Oakham School, an expensive second-tier private school in Rutland, where he was both prefect and, at one time, librarian. School, however, didn’t particularly suit him. As former classmate Andrew Cummine later recalled, “He wasn’t very popular. He was strange, always putting on an act. A complex character. He never revealed himself or his feelings but he loved public speaking.”

  What Cummine recalled most, however, was Matthew’s manner. He had his own stationery, his name emblazoned on top, “a bit strange for someone of thirteen.” He was, he’d said, the leader of the Young Conservatives. And he always carried around a thick novel. Ask him anything, and he would quickly formulate an articulate response. And yet he “was in the bottom sets for most subjects.” Somehow, the veneer covered nothing of substance.

  In 2005, Brown—by that point openly gay—married up in the world. Four months after meeting Renate de Unger-Bloeck, an art restorer thirty years his senior with a sizable personal fortune derived in part from her own first marriage, he proposed. He moved into her £2 million London town house, close to Buckingham Palace. His legitimacy was increasing by the second. In short order, his new wife appointed her dashing young husband to the helm of Icehome, her art restoration company. He soon proved, however, to once again be more charm than chops. The company’s finances unraveled, partly due to incompetence, partly, one suspects, to more willful misdeeds, until by 2008, what had once been multiple millions dissolved into bankruptcy. Brown and de Unger-Bloeck soon parted ways. The separation, suffice it to say, was not a particularly pleasant one.

  His parents dead, his wife estranged, Brown took refuge with his aunt, his mother’s sister. He proved, however, a bitter disappointment. “He is 100 percent trouble,” his stepfather, Robert Gant, later said.

  In 2010, Renate de Unger-Bloeck died unexpectedly, apparently of alcohol poisoning. Her name, however, lived on. Matthew Brown rechristened himself Matthew de Unger Brown, and transformed Renate into, by turns, his mother and his secretary.

  He’d already been Lord Brown of Ardbreckin as a teen, and a vaunted City worker. But his horizons were about to expand. German prince. English QC. Monaco almost-royalty. The boyfriend of CNN anchor Richard Quest. The Honourable Sir Matthew de Unger Brown. The world was his oyster—and he would soon prove himself to be master at all matters of the rope.

  * * *

  In their influential 1959 work “The Bases of Social Power,” John French and Bertram Raven posited that there were five major bases from which power derives: reward power, or the belief that someone is able to reward you; coercive power, or the belief that someone is able to punish you somehow; legitimate power, or an actual basis of authority; referent power, or power derived from your affiliation with someone (or desire to be affiliated with them); and expert power, from someone’s expertise on a topic.

  Con artists are after power: power over you and your future actions. So how do they derive it? From which base does it stem in order for the rope to work its persuasive magic? The grifter will avoid coercion at all costs. That would be unaristocratic. Not to mention unartistic. Con artists don’t demand, they don’t threaten, they don’t intimidate. Instead, they use the softer touch: some reward power with a little authority and affiliation mixed in.

  In one review of the literature on fraud victims, marks said they often thought that not only was the person doing the conning legitimate, but the reward he was offering was the real deal as well. That is a fairly typical perception in many a confidence game: you’re dealing with someone to be reckoned with (legitimate power), and that someone is in a position to reward you, be it financially or otherwise (reward power). Indeed, in establishing their legitimacy, the victims said, their scammers appealed often and early to trust and authority. The logic is clear. If you know someone is asking for something, you need to know early on who that someone is and why, exactly, you should listen.

  We get authority in two ways: by virtue of what we know (authority based on expertise) or by virtue of who we are (authority based on position). The confidence artist will exploit both. But the second is much easier to fake than the first; indeed, the first, or at least the perception of it, often follows in its wake.

  When Dr. Clifford Berry, a professor of physics at New York State Maritime College, first read the Time account of Ferdinand Waldo Demara’s escapades, he—like many others—felt his curiosity piqued. “I thought about Demara’s case for a long time,” he would in turn tell Life some two years later. For one simple reason: his name wasn’t Clifford Berry at all. In Demara’s forays into the professoriate, he glimpsed his own theretofore-successful escapades with academic impostoring.

  The oldest of three children, Marvin Harold Hewitt was born in Philadelphia in 1920. His father, Samuel, was a police sergeant. Marvin dropped out of high school just shy of graduation—he claimed he was bored. Manual labor followed—freight yards, factories, anywhere that could use a powerful seventeen-year-old. Rejected from the army, he joined the Signal Corps (also boring, he declared).

  Then he saw something that caught his eye: teaching. Now that, he mused, wouldn’t be boring. In short order, he replied to an ad for an eighth-grade teacher opening at a new military school, Camp Hill Military Academy. His résumé conveniently forgot to mention his own lack of diploma. Instead, a degree from Temple University had magically appeared in its place. Soon Marvin Hewitt was standing in front of a class of eager thirteen-year-olds, teaching math, geography, and history. That spring, the school closed (perhaps, one thinks, due to its hiring practices). Hewitt’s tenure, however, had been a success. Instructor Hewitt he began, and Instructor Hewitt—this time wi
th actual teaching experience—he remained.

  It had gone off seamlessly. Why stop at junior high school? Hewitt began to telephone local colleges. Might they be seeking a physics instructor? He soon learned that the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science was indeed in the market for a new faculty member. When department head Robert Jones asked Hewitt for his name, Hewitt promptly provided it: Julius Ashkin. The actual Ashkin was beyond qualified; he had worked at Columbia, Los Alamos, and the Argonne National Laboratory. All Hewitt had to do was borrow the identity. Jones was impressed. Ashkin-né-Hewitt was hired to teach approximately three hundred students calculus, trigonometry, and algebra. Among his other responsibilities: supervising physics laboratory work. There was only one minor hitch. Ashkin-né-Ashkin had also gone on the job market. That fall, he, too, was slated to begin teaching, at the University of Rochester.

  For a time, the two Ashkins coexisted in peace. Hewitt had written to Columbia and, for a dollar, obtained an academic transcript. He’d followed his textbooks closely, and the students were scoring on par with other professors’ on their departmental exams. One close call: Hewitt’s real father was shot and killed by a car thief. Reporters gathered around his home. Afraid of being caught on camera and exposed, he hid inside and, for several days, played hooky from his classes. The danger passed.

  The year concluded successfully. But Hewitt felt too close to home. At any moment exposure could strike him unawares. And so he began to write to colleges farther afield. In due course, he received a reply: Bemidji State Teachers College in Minnesota was hiring. Hewitt promptly sent over Ashkin’s transcript. This time he added a personal flourish: he had also worked for a year as physics consultant to a certain “Christie Engineering Company.” No such company actually existed, but Hewitt was resourceful. Stationery and a secretarial service (the latter legitimate) quickly followed. By the time the college president, Charles Sattgast, inquired as to a reference, Robert Christie, the company head, was ready with a glowing letter.

  Hewitt packed up his new wife—he’d recently gotten married to a local girl proud of being the wife of a professor—and moved to Minnesota. He soon had a sixteen-hour-a-week course load. Analytical and solid geometry, college algebra, physics. He covered them all. But somehow it didn’t seem enough. Bemidji was small. It was, well, boring. He wanted a real university, where people of his own intellectual caliber, such as he perceived it to be, would more readily congregate. Once more, Hewitt sent out applications.

  He soon received an offer from Saint Louis University. Finally, he thought. A school worthy of his name. He would make appropriate demands. His teaching load had been too high, leaving him little time for contemplation and discovery. Here, he would teach ten hours a week. His students had been of too low a caliber. Here, he would teach mostly to graduates. And college algebra? An insult to his intellect. At Saint Louis, he would lecture on nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, and tensor analysis. Julius Ashkin had finally found an intellectual home. There were some close calls—he was, after all, using the real name of a real physicist—but Hewitt was resourceful. His Professor Ashkin flourished.

  Meanwhile, the real Ashkin was successfully publishing from his tenure-track job at the University of Rochester. Hewitt followed his progress carefully, and after each publication he fearfully checked to see whether it would be the key to his undoing. Would anyone notice the disparity in schools and connect the dots?

  No, this life of stress was too much. Hewitt needed another change. Again, he began the application process. He would stay Ashkin, but he would lower the caliber of his school. Lesser schools, he reasoned, wouldn’t follow the literature as closely.

  The University of Utah was thrilled. For references, they received brilliant recommendations from Columbia, Argonne, and Los Alamos—the real Ashkin was a brilliant man making a brilliant career; it was easy to find people willing to vouch for him. His recommendations were far from bogus. They were simply for the wrong man. Hewitt’s luck held out. The hiring committee never called Rochester. And one school, Columbia, even offered a convenient excuse for any potential red flags: there had actually been two Ashkins enrolled at the university. While Ashkin-the-first toiled away at the lowly rank of assistant professor, Utah made Ashkin-the-second an unprecedented offer: full professorship, straight off.

  And then came the letter. It was addressed to Julius Ashkin—but with a question mark appended to the end. The postmark: Rochester. The sender: Julius Ashkin. Ashkin-the-first was understanding, saying he assumed that Ashkin the impostor was “fundamentally a decent man.” He was, he wrote, giving him an opportunity to stop the charade of his own accord, without official action. Someone else at Rochester, though, wasn’t so gentle. The president of the University of Utah, too, had received a letter, from a tipster who was a little less willing than Ashkin to let the impostor off lightly.

  Hewitt was let go. Quietly. The administration even offered him the option of completing his studies at the university. To Hewitt, that was too low to fall. He wouldn’t stoop from full professorship to student status. He ran back to Philadelphia—even spurning another legitimate offer from a friend who had contacted Princeton on his behalf. His Ashkin had simply died. But the great professor lived on—and would go on to teach at the University of Arkansas College of Engineering (electrical engineering) and, of course, at New York State Maritime College (physics and calculus).

  When he was unmasked for a second and final time, Hewitt dodged all responsibility for the fraud. It wasn’t at all his fault. It was the system itself. The system had flaws. He wasn’t to blame if they hired him. And, in a sense, he was absolutely right. The process was designed by humans. The same humans who are built to trust. We don’t always have nets to catch fraud because we never expect to need them, especially not when we’re dealing with a successful—brilliant, even—mind. We trust that mind implicitly. The man who holds power, however illusory it may be, is a man in the perfect position to rope.

  We often obey power reflexively, without ever quite stopping to reflect on why we’re doing what we are and whether it is, in fact, something we should be doing. While the most famous—or, rather, infamous—study on the phenomenon is Stanley Milgram’s obedience study,1 in which people thought they were giving dangerous electric shocks to a man with a heart condition but did it anyway because they were told to continue, the phenomenon has been broadly replicated in multiple settings. In one study, personnel managers discriminated against applicants by race when their superiors instructed them to do so. In another, employees engaged in routinely corrupt practices, like stealing or price-fixing, when their higher-ups so directed them. When someone in power tells us to do something, we tend to do it. The rope is often at its most effective when we trust the power of its source, the con man.

  A position can be powerful, as French and Raven pointed out, not simply through actual authority. It can also draw us in by its referent nature: the person in power is someone we are affiliated with already or want to be affiliated with in the future.

  One of the first things a con artist does is establish trust—often by being the exact type of person he thinks you aspire to be, or at least, want to be associated with. Someone like you. Someone you would like to become. Someone you’d like others to know you’re friends with. That way, you are much more likely to bite when he throws the rope your way. One broker who fell for Bernie Madoff’s spell remarked that there was “something about this person, pedigree, and reputation that inspired trust.”

  And there was something else crucial about Madoff: he was part of the Jewish community. A community he leveraged to its full extent. As Michael Shermer put it, “It was an affinity scheme, it was insidery. We have to take care of each other; he’s one of us.” Madoff is far from alone. Con artists often use communities to quickly gauge character and belief and acquire a veneer of the same. Religious communities are frequent targets—another con man you’ll meet later in this book used his Episcopalian ties to thei
r best effect. But so, too, are connoisseurs, members of certain clubs, whatever it takes. The authority we grant someone comes often as more of an afterthought than anything else, by virtue of their belonging to the exact right group, one that we’re particularly eager to either join or be liked by. There’s a reason Matthew Brown didn’t pose as just anyone. He was aristocracy. And aristocracy is something you want to affiliate with.

  Brown knew it, too, and took every opportunity—and every new identity—to bolster his credentials, with fake Wikipedia entries (that were, for the most part, quickly removed, but stayed up long enough for victims to chance upon them), and social media accounts, from Facebook to Twitter to more niche markets, depending on his quarry. Some, like Badoo and Google Plus profiles for Matthew de Unger Brown, are still active. The Internet has, in many ways, made establishing a trustworthy identity far simpler than it ever has been. All you need to do is create a firm social media presence—the more accounts, the better—and voilà, you’re a real person with whatever pedigree you’ve chosen to fashion for yourself. Create a few feeder accounts under other names that seem to support your exclusive affiliations (“Great party on your yacht last night!!”), and your value rises even further. People are lazy. Few will bother to check Burke’s Peerage when everything else is so readily available. It’s why an entirely new set of legal considerations, many of them to do with the implications of bogus reviews, has suddenly emerged with the advent of online ratings and postings, on sites from Yelp to Amazon to eHarmony. The more digital we become, the more difficult it can be to separate reality from fiction—and the easier it is to establish a firm basis for the rope to work its magic.

  In some cases, in fact, Matthew Brown’s supposed affiliation was the only thing he had going for him—and it worked like a charm, even when it came to things like opening a bank account. An early escapade: On October 14, 2004, the London Evening Standard published an account of a recent teen—Brown, as it later turned out—who had done more than his share of teen-gone-wild antics. The young man, then eighteen, had made a habit of convincing credit card companies that he was a member of the aristocracy. He’d posed as a lord and City worker, no less—a salary of £86,000 per year, he said—and, in November 2002, received his first American Express card. The card company failed to conduct the most basic checks because it implicitly trusted the authority lent by the aristocratic connection, not wanting, it seems, to run the risk of questioning the story: it would be unseemly to undermine a gentleman’s word.