A Treasury of Deception

by Michael Farquhar

  After he became boss of the Genovese family, Gigante continued the deception to help disguise his new position. Soldiers were instructed never to use his name, but to point to their chin when they referred to him. He conducted much of the family’s business in the wee hours of the morning when he believed the FBI was less vigilant. The rest of the day was spent drooling and sputtering to himself. “The guy acts like a fruitcake 23 hours a day,” noted one investigator who had tracked the Chin for years, “but he finds one hour someplace each day to run the biggest Mafia family in the United States. Is he crazy? He’s the only one not in jail. Maybe he’s a genius.”

  In 1990, Gigante was arrested at his mother’s home on a variety of murder conspiracy and racketeering charges. Mrs. Chin seemed surprised by the accusations (or at least pretended to be), especially about his leadership position in the Genovese organization. “Vincenzo?” she exclaimed. “He’s the boss of the toilet!” For the next seven years, the Chin delayed his day of reckoning as his mental competence was evaluated and debated. When his case finally came to trial in 1997, a number of prominent psychiatrists testified on his behalf. “Mr. Gigante currently has moderate to severe dementia which reflects significant underlying central nervous system dysfunction,” opined Dr. Wilfred G. van Gorp, director of neuropsychology at Columbia University Medical School. The jury was unimpressed, and Gigante was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison.

  Behind bars, the Chin apparently felt free to drop the crazy act. He was captured on tape directing Genovese business in “a coherent, careful, and intelligent manner,” according to prosecutors, and once told a prison guard, “Nobody fucks with me.” Rather than face another trial for running a criminal enterprise from jail, Gigante agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for his seven-year con on the legal system before his 1997 trial. “The jig is up,” announced U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf. “Vincent Gigante was a cunning faker, and those of us in law enforcement always knew that this was an act.” And it only took three decades for them to prove it.

  “Batmen“ of the moon, inspired by the Sun

  Part II

  ALL THE NEWS THAT’S SLIPPED TO PRINT

  Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “advertisements contain the only truths to be relied upon in a newspaper” may have been a bit cynical. But given all the lies, misrepresentations, and distortions that have been printed over the years, his wariness of the Fourth Estate seems well founded.

  1

  What Janet Cooked Up

  It was what’s called in newspaper parlance a “holy shit” story—a drop-your-spoon-in-your-cereal type of exposé that journalists drool over. “Jimmy is 8 years old and a third generation heroin addict,” began reporter Janet Cooke’s breathtaking account of a young drug user on the front page of The Washington Post, “a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.”

  “Jimmy’s World,” as the story was titled, caused an immediate sensation when it ran on September 28, 1980. What was the world coming to, readers wanted to know, when a mother could stand by and allow her live-in boyfriend to inject her child with high-grade heroin? And how could the Post, which had agreed to keep identities confidential, possibly justify protecting these people? Washington’s police chief launched an intensive search for the little boy, while Mayor Marion Barry declared that the city knew who “Jimmy” was and that help was on the way. The following April, the account that so vividly illustrated the depths of the urban drug culture won a Pulitzer Prize. Only problem was, as the Post was mortified to discover, not one word of “Jimmy’s World” was true. Janet Cooke had invented the entire story.

  So how could a newspaper as prestigious as The Washington Post—still basking in the glory of its Watergate investigations—have been so thoroughly suckered? The answer was disarmingly simple. All it took were a few lapses in editorial quality control, and “a one-in-a-million liar,” as Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee called the young woman who had invented “Jimmy.” Less than a week after Cooke won the Pulitzer, which was subsequently returned, the Post’s independent ombudsman Bill Green gave readers the whole story of her epic deception in an exhaustive report of nearly fifteen thousand words that ran in the paper’s front section.

  For a newspaper striving for diversity, Janet Cooke was like an answered prayer—bright, ambitious, and black, a 1976 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vassar, and an immensely talented writer. The Post snatched her away from the Toledo Blade in 1979, convinced they had found a rising star reporter. Cooke did not disappoint. She wrote fifty-two well-received stories in her first nine months of employment. “She was a conspicuous member of the newsroom staff,” Bill Green wrote in his report. “When she walked, she pranced. When she smiled, she dazzled. Her wardrobe seemed always new, impeccable and limitless.” But there was something else. “She was consumed by blind and raw ambition,” noted her first editor Vivian Aplin-Brownlee. “It was obvious, but it doesn’t deny the talent.”

  Cooke was assigned to investigate a new type of heroin on the streets of Washington and came back with extensive notes and taped interviews. Among her discoveries was a report she had heard of a young heroin addict. “That’s the story,” City editor Milton Coleman told her. “Go after it. It’s a front-page story.” After a two-week search Cooke told Coleman that she could not find the boy, but a week later she claimed to have found another young user—the soon-to-be infamous “Jimmy.” Because he had promised confidentiality to his reporter for her sources, Coleman did not ask for names or an address. Thus, wrote Green, “The jugular of journalism lay exposed—the faith an editor has to place in a reporter.”

  Coleman had little reason to doubt Cooke. For one thing, she had included so many telling details about “Jimmy” in a thirteen-page memo that outlined her story. “[He] wears a blue and green Izod T-shirt,” Cooke wrote in the memo, “ ‘Bad, ain’t it. I got six of these.’” She meticulously described the imaginary child’s living room, down to a rubber tree plant, fake bamboo blinds, a brown shag rug, two lamps, and a chrome-and-glass coffee table. She also included the elementary school “Jimmy” attended, as well as the general neighborhood in which he lived. There was even a supposed real name, “Tyronne,” which reassured Coleman further.

  As “Jimmy’s World” made its way closer to print, other editors up the chain of command put their trust in Cooke too. “Janet had written a great piece,” said Metro editor Bob Woodward, who had earlier gained prominence for his Watergate reporting with Carl Bernstein. “In a way, both she and the story were almost too good to be true. I had seen her go out on a complicated story and an hour later turn in a beautifully written piece. This story was so well-written and tied together so well that my alarm bells simply didn’t go off. My skepticism left me. I was personally negligent.” Ben Bradlee read “Jimmy’s World” the week before it ran and thought it was “a helluva job,” worthy of the front page that coming Sunday—a day when the Post’s circulation is highest. With Bradlee, as Bill Green wrote in his report, “The story, colors flying, had passed its last and most powerful filter.”

  Almost as soon as “Jimmy’s World” appeared in the paper, doubts about its veracity began rumbling through the newsroom. Coleman was concerned that the police were unable to find the child after several days of searching. Reporter Courtland Milloy grew suspicious when Cooke was unable to locate “Jimmy’s” home as they drove around looking for it. Cooke’s first editor Vivian Aplin-Brownlee was among the most skeptical. “I never believed it,” she told Bill Green, “and I told Milton [Coleman] that. I knew her so well and the depth of her. In her eagerness to make a name she would write further than the truth would allow.” Even outside the newsroom skepticism mounted. “I’ve been told the story is part myth, part reality,” said Mayor Barry. “We all have agreed that we don’t believe that the mother or the pusher would allow a reporter to see them shoot up.”

  Y
et despite the growing doubts, the Post submitted “Jimmy’s World” for a Pulitzer Prize. “I have used the phrase ‘in for a dime, in for a dollar’ to describe my overall conclusion about submitting the Cooke story for a Pulitzer or any other prize,” Woodward told Green. “I believed it, we published it. Official questions had been raised, but we stood by the story and her.” Then, on April 13, 1981, as Bradlee wrote in his memoirs, “the worst happened: ‘Jimmy’s World’ won a Pulitzer.” With that great journalistic honor, the whole fabricated story began to crumble. As various news organizations prepared reports on Cooke and her Pulitzer win, discrepancies in her background repeatedly cropped up. They were quickly brought to the attention of the Post.

  It soon became apparent that Janet Cooke had lied extensively on the résumé she gave the paper when she applied there in 1979, and on the biography she provided the Pulitzer committee when her story was submitted. Among other falsehoods, she claimed to speak or read four languages, to have graduated magna cum laude from Vassar in 1976, attended the Sorbonne in 1975, and received a master’s degree from the University of Toledo in 1977. None of it was true, as Post editors discovered. She had left Vassar after only one year, never attended the Sorbonne or the University of Toledo, and was dumbfounded when Ben Bradlee began peppering her with questions in French, a language she purported to understand. “You’re just like Richard Nixon,” Bradlee fumed, “you’re trying to cover up.” It was only a matter of time before the “Jimmy” story unraveled along with her résumé. Woodward bluntly accused her of making up the whole thing, and, he declared, “I’m going to prove it if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Eventually Janet Cooke was forced to confess. “ ‘Jimmy’s World’ was in essence a fabrication,” she admitted in a handwritten statement. “I never encountered or interviewed an 8-year-old heroin addict. The September 28, 1980, article in The Washington Post was a serious misrepresentation which I deeply regret. I apologize to my newspaper, my profession, the Pulitzer board and all seekers of the truth. Today, in facing up to the truth, I have submitted my resignation.”

  The fallout from Cooke’s massive fraud, which Ben Bradlee later called “the darkest chapter in my newspaper life,” was fierce. The credibility of a great newspaper had been battered, and many of its detractors reacted with glee. Other readers were simply stunned. “In truth,” read a Post editorial, “just as readers may feel maltreated by publication of the ‘Jimmy’ tale and all the subsequent hullabaloo it created, so we at this newspaper feel at once angry, chagrined, misused ourselves, determined to continue the kind of aggressive reporting Miss Cooke’s story purported to be and determined also to maintain and honor the highest standards of straight and fair reporting. . . . One of these episodes is one too many.”

  Yet the Janet Cooke episode was just one of a hurricane of hoaxes that have blown across newspaper history.

  2

  Ben Franklin: The Devil Made Him Do It

  It’s hard to imagine what a fraud like Janet Cooke could possibly have in common with the great founding father Benjamin Franklin. Not much, it turns out, other than the fact that they both worked for newspapers and wrote complete fabrications. Yet while Cooke was fueling her ambition with her lies, Franklin simply wanted to make a point. He did it by poking fun at stupid people—stupid people who, for example, still believed in witches nearly forty years after the madness at Salem.5

  On October 22, 1730, a story appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette, which Franklin owned, that detailed a witch hunt at Mount Holly, New Jersey. A man and a woman were accused of being in league with the devil, the story (written anonymously by Franklin) reported, charged with “making the Neighbours Sheep dance in an uncommon Manner, and with causing Hogs to speak and sing Psalms, etc., to the great terror and Amazement of the King’s good and peaceable subjects in this Province.” To ascertain the truth of the charges, several tests were applied. In the first, a large Bible would be weighed on a scale against the weight of the accused. If the Bible tipped the scale, it would be certain proof of witchcraft.

  The man and woman agreed to undergo the tests, but only if their most vocal accusers, another man and woman, underwent the trials as well. This being agreed upon, an enormous Bible was produced. The alleged wizard was the first to be weighed, but “to the great Surprise of the Spectators, Flesh and Bones came down plump, and outweighed that good Book by abundance.” Then, the phony story continued, each of the others were put on the scale with the same result: “their Lumps of Mortality . . . were too heavy for Moses and all the Prophets and Apostles.”

  With barely disguised glee, Franklin took his readers further away from reality with the next test, a medieval chestnut in which the accused were bound up and tossed into a pond. Those who floated were surely witches, it was said, while those who sank—and sometimes drowned—were declared innocent.

  The problem at Mount Holly was everyone flunked the test, accused and accusers alike. When to her horror the righteous woman found herself floating, she demanded to be dunked again. Yet still she wouldn’t sink. This, she sputtered, was obviously witchcraft at work. The accused were keeping her buoyant with an evil spell, but “she would be duck’d again a Hundred Times” to get the devil out of her.

  Franklin reported that some of the more reasonable voices among the spectators decided that it was perfectly natural for the two men to stay afloat. It was simply the instinct to swim and survive. In the case of the women, however, it was obvious that their dresses were keeping them from going under. The only solution, the article concluded, was to wait for warmer weather and have the women dunked again. Nude.

  3

  A Poe Excuse for a Hoax

  Ben Franklin made up a number of satiric tales disguised as truth, and he wasn’t the only famous American to do so. Mark Twain wrote quite a few doozies designed to fool the public, as did Edgar Allan Poe. Poor Poe, however, never found much of an audience for most of the tales of science and exploration he concocted, bogged down as they often were with mind-numbing detail. His first attempted hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” appeared in a magazine called the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835. It told of a man who flew to the moon in a balloon and lived among its inhabitants for five years. Alas, “Hans Pfaall” was a flop. Considering typical passages like this one, in which Poe describes the view of earth from the balloon, it’s little wonder why:

  “I had, thoughtlessly enough, expected to see [earth’s] real convexity become evident as I ascended; but a very little reflection sufficed to explain the discrepancy. A line, dropped from my position perpendicularly to the earth, would have formed the perpendicular of a right-angled triangle, of which the base would have extended from the right-angle to the horizon, and the hypothenuse from the horizon to my position.” Perhaps Poe would have been better off keeping it simple, like, “Wow! What a view!”

  Then, adding to the sting of his failure, soon after the first installment of Poe’s story appeared, the New York Sun published an equally untrue but far more popular moon account. Dispirited, the hard-drinking writer decided against continuing his serial, leaving his hero stuck on the moon. “I did not think it advisable even to bring my voyager back to his parent Earth,” Poe said. “He remains where I left him, and is still, I believe, ‘the man in the moon.’ ”

  4

  The Sun Promises the Moon

  The New York Sun’s six-part moon series was a sensation, perhaps the most successful hoax in newspaper history. Thousands were lured in by the paper’s fantastic tale of exotic life on earth’s nearest neighbor, and the Sun’s circulation became the largest in the world.

  The series, which began in August 1835, was relatively restrained at first, setting a tone of pseudoscientific credibility. It was reported that Sir John Herschel, son of the great astronomer Sir William Herschel (the first to observe Neptune), had sailed to South Africa with a newly developed telescope capable of focusing on the moon with incredible clarity. The mechanics of the h
uge instrument were described in academic detail, almost lulling the reader into believing the bombshells that were to follow. The story, invented by Sun staffer Richard Adams Locke, then went on to explain how the mass-market “penny” newspaper managed to get the scoop of the century. Herschel, Locke wrote, had sent a report of his lunar discoveries to the Royal Society in London, while his assistant, Dr. Andrew Grant, wrote a report of his own for the prestigious Edinburgh Journal of Science that was published in a special supplement brought to the Sun by a gentleman returning from Scotland. That Herschel was actually in South Africa making well-publicized astronomical observations only lent more credibility to Locke’s tale.

  Having stirred reader interest with this introductory article, Locke further tantalized them in the next installment with glimpses of the lunar landscape and its inhabitants. There were beaches with brilliant white sand, rocks of green marble, and forests like none seen on earth. Buffalo-like creatures roamed vast plains, and another strange animal that “would be classed on Earth as a monster” was spotted as well, bluish in color, with a head and beard like a goat, and a single horn.

  The images became more and more vivid in subsequent installments. Locke, as if quoting from Dr. Grant’s imaginary report, described vast lakes and oceans, abandoned temples of emerald, and a strange beaverlike creature with no tail that walked upright on two feet. “It carries its young in its arms like a human being,” it was reported, “and moves with an easy gliding motion. Its huts are constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages, and from the appearance of smoke in nearly all of them, there is no doubt of its being acquainted with the use of fire.”