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UPTOWN TOP PRANKING

Con artistry of the ages
The Guardian, September 2001

SKY’S one-off drama “Now You See Her” is a competent, mildly diverting – there’s a line for the posters – caper starring Amanda Holden as a scammer who hatches a complex swindle involving Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living” (the pickled shark, to you). Though the writers (and Hirst himself, who presumably gave them permission) deserve faint praise for the sly joke of a con artist conning people with something – modern art – widely regarded as a huge con in itself, they don’t have as much fun with the premise as they could, and it is unlikely that anyone will much remember “Now You See Her” two commercials into the ensuing ad break.
  It’s a shame, as the genuinely great con trick is respectable, even admirable, in a way that other crime isn’t. The great con trick is a phenomenal feat of creativity and planning that also has a rare power to expose human folly, which is why it is one of the most effective weapons available to satirists – nothing could better have laid bare the rabble-rousing witlessness of public debate in this country than the idiot celebrities bilked into spouting incredible rubbish about paedophilia on “Brasseye”. Its usual victims are the stupid, gullible and greedy – three varieties of people it is difficult to scrape together much sympathy for.
  The essence of the great con lies in recognising that, in a straight fight between human imagination and human judgement, there is no contest. However absurd the idea or flimsy the plan, people will buy into it if their vanity and desire and insecurities are properly appealed to: if you build it, even if “it” is an edifice of bunkum on a foundation of balderdash, they will come, as long as they think they’re going to get the best room or a sack of cash or into some kind of trouble if they don’t. Even as you read this, some sucker somewhere is responding to a chain email promising riches at the end of a phone number beginning 809 – the code for the Dominican Republic, where premium rate phone lines are not required to inform callers they are being charged anything up to $25 a minute.
  The following are the very elite among con artists, with emphasis on the latter half of the job description; they are not to be confused with mere liars or pranksters. They dared to dream the greatest dream of all: that they could get away with it. They were right. And, being ultimately no more immune to delusion than the rest of us, wrong.

HANS VAN MEEGEREN
In the years prior to World War II, this Dutch forger painted fake Vermeers of such quality that several hung in museums. One, “Christ At Emmaus”, was solemnly acclaimed as Vermeer’s masterpiece by at least one critic, and Van Meegeren was later estimated to have banked a colossal US$3 million in guilders. Van Meegeren would have escaped censure had he not sold a work titled “Christ And The Adultress” to Herman Goering – after the war, he was charged by Dutch authorities with shipping the Nazis works of national importance. Van Meegeren confessed to the lesser offence of forgery, and demonstrated his guilt to a sceptical court by bashing out another impeccable Vermeer in his cell. The judge, failing to appreciate Van Meegeren’s skill as a painter, or the excellent joke he’d played on the morphine-sodden Reichmarshal, sentenced him to a year’s gaol; Van Meegeren died before serving his time.

ARTURO ALVES REIS
Reis, a Portugese businessman, perpetrated what may be the greatest financial fraud in history, alchemising the base metals of his inventiveness and effrontery into what was, literally, a license to print money. In 1924, Reis convinced Waterlow & Sons, the British printing firm whose clients included the Bank of Portugal, that he had been authorised to organise the printing of notes for Portugal’s then colony of Angola. Reis rapidly became so preposterously rich – estimates run as high as US$125 million – that his prodigious spending was later credited by The Economist with revitalising Portugal’s economy. He not only established his own bank, the Bank of Angola & Metropole, but began to work towards buying the Bank of Portugal itself – a plan that was only scuppered when someone noticed a chronic duplication of serial numbers. Reis spent 20 years in prison, and died a pauper.

VICTOR LUSTIG
Urban myth made flesh, the Czech-born Lustig wrought such glorious havoc upon the world’s credulous and grasping that the 15-year gaol sentence he eventually received in America in 1935 seems almost an affront to posterity. Often impersonating a dispossessed Austrian aristocrat, “Count” Lustig was probably the most prolific and stylish swindler who ever lived: he once took Al Capone, of all people, for $5,000. His finest hour came in 1925 when, posing as the Deputy Director General of the French Ministère de Postes et Télégraphes, he succeeded in selling the Eiffel Tower, for US$125,000, to a scrap metal dealer called Andre Poisson. To Lustig’s doubtless astonished delight, Poisson was too embarassed to take the matter to the gendarmes, so after a discreet interval Lustig returned to Paris and sold the Tower to someone else, this time for $200,000. “I really don’t understand honest people,” Lustig once said. “They lead desperate lives full of boredom.”

KONRAD KUJAU
A compulsive liar, convicted forger and trader in German military memorabilia, Kujau combined these interests to become, for a few weeks in 1983, the most famous man on earth. Though his vast, 58-volume fabrication of Adolf Hitler’s diaries was quickly revealed as hopelessly crude hackery – the work, the West German State Archive declared, of a “limited intellectual capacity” – people desperately wanted it to be true. Newspapers, The Sunday Times, The New York Times, Newsweek and Stern among them, wanted the biggest scoop of the 20th century, and paid millions for it; it remains by some distance the most expensive publishing hoax ever. Historians, Hugh Trevor-Roper among them, wanted the definitive insight into the central figure of the 20th century – despite the fact that the unarguably authentic “Mein Kampf” had already demonstrated beyond doubt that Der Fuhrer was a crank, a buffoon and a bore of possibly unique proportions. Kujau served three and a half years in prison, before returning to work in Stuttgart, painting fake Da Vincis, Michaelangelos and Picassos (“Much better than the originals,” he claimed) for tourists. He died last year, aged 62.

FINE COTTON
While it seems unlikely that this Australian racehorse was the brains behind the operation, the identity of the real mastermind of this infamous turf scandal has never been satisfactorily established. In 1984, Fine Cotton won at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm racetrack. A hitherto unheralded plodder, Fine Cotton had attracted a startling degree of support from punters – some of whom may well have been aware that the animal trading under the name Fine Cotton was, in fact, a proven winner called Bold Personality. Unfortunately for all concerned, Bold Personality’s resemblance to the original Fine Cotton was so slight that the white markings on his legs had to be painted on prior to the race. The scam unravelled faster than a cheap scarf caught on a nail, the trainer did a runner and two bookmakers were suspended.

CHARLES DAWSON
In 1912, Dawson, a solicitor and amateur archaeologist, emerged from a gravel pit in Piltdown, Sussex, with the scientific scoop of the century: the bones of the missing link between man and his banana-chewing ancestors. Piltdown Man was swiftly named Eoanthropus Dawsoni in honour of its discoverer, and allowed Dawson to spend the four years until his death in 1916 being feted as provider of clinching proof of Darwin’s theories. It was not until 1953 that new techniques enabled scientists to confirm that Dawson’s pre-historic relics were, in fact, two 600-year-old skull fragments, a few imported African fossils and an orang-utan’s jawbone – and that Dawson was a scoundrel of uncommon shamelessness. Rather wonderfully, all things considered, the legal firm he founded, Dawson & Hart, now specialises in claims arising from whiplash injuries.

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