A Treasury of Deception

by Michael Farquhar

  McGraw-Hill and Life were so convinced of Irving’s integrity that a subsequent disavowal of the forthcoming book by the Hughes organization barely rattled them. “Well,” said Ralph Graves, “what did you expect?” From the publisher’s point of view, it was entirely consistent with Hughes’s bizarre behavior to deny his cooperation in his own autobiography. Plus, it wasn’t Hughes himself who denounced the book, just one of his companies. “We have gone to considerable efforts to ascertain that this is indeed the Hughes biography,” Albert Leventhal, head of the books division at McGraw-Hill, told The New York Times. “And we believe what we say is correct.” Donald M. Wilson, an executive at Life, was downright cocky. “Oh, we’re absolutely positive,” he said. “Look, we’re dealing with people like McGraw-Hill, and, you know, we’re not exactly a movie magazine! This is Time, Inc., and McGraw-Hill talking. We’ve checked this out. We have proof.”

  Even an angry phone call from Howard Hughes himself failed to raise red flags. Time’s Frank McCullough, who had once interviewed Hughes in 1958, took the call. There was no mistaking the voice, or the message. The book was a fraud, and so was Clifford Irving. Having read the manuscript, though, McCullough was convinced otherwise. The tone, language, and style were all vintage Hughes. The executives at McGraw-Hill simply concluded that Hughes was either having second thoughts, or that for some mysterious reason of his own he wanted his autobiography to come out under a cloud of suspicion. Yet despite their confidence, the executives decided another handwriting analysis would banish all doubt. The firm of Osborn, Osborn and Osborn was retained, and their report was more than reassuring. “We were jubilant at the totality of the report,” Ralph Graves later admitted—jubilant enough to utterly ignore a warning from Howard Hughes’s personal attorney, Chester Davis.

  “There is no doubt that you have been deceived into thinking you have acquired material which you could publish and that someone is responsible for most serious representations to you and through you to the public,” Davis wrote Harold McGraw. McGraw dismissed him by questioning his credentials: “If you represent Mr. Hughes as legal counsel, we must insist upon the receipt by us of a copy of your specific written authorization from Mr. Hughes relating to the autobiography.”

  Clifford Irving meanwhile kept busy perpetuating his fraud by writing a bogus letter to Hughes and sending a copy to the president of McGraw-Hill, Shelton Fisher. The letter advised Hughes of the efforts his lawyer Chester Davis and others had made to undermine the book, and requested that he “call off the dogs.” Almost as a direct response to the letter he never received (because, of course, it was never sent), Hughes did something Clifford Irving never imagined possible. The famous hermit called a press conference and broke his silence for the first time in fourteen years. “I don’t know him,” Hughes said of Irving in a telephone call with seven journalists. “I have never even heard of him until a matter of a few days ago when this first came to my attention.” The checks that had been cashed in his name—a fact that had reassured the people at McGraw-Hill—infuriated Hughes. “Chester Davis will tell you that I have been very, very critical of him for not being able to uncover the path of these funds.” (“Helga” had not yet been exposed.)

  That Howard Hughes would break years of silence to expose Clifford Irving should have been enough to end the elaborate fraud. But the conference call actually had the opposite effect. The publishers believed that Hughes had denounced the book on the advice of his lawyers. There was too much authenticating evidence for them to think otherwise. For his own part, Irving was characteristically bold with his take on the Hughes press conference. “In my opinion it was a damn good imitation of his voice as it may have been three or four years ago,” he told reporters. “My obligation, of course, is to Howard Hughes and not to the voice on the telephone.” Irving even faced the Grand Inquisitor himself, Mike Wallace, with calm self-assurance on 60 Minutes. “I don’t know why [Hughes] hasn’t surfaced,” he lied to Wallace in reference to his “attempts” to reach Hughes and have him vindicate the book. “It puzzles me. It upsets me. It distresses me. And I don’t mean on my own account because I can handle this. And we have the proof and that’s no problem. It just distresses me that he seems unable to respond.”

  On January 12,1972, Hughes’s attorney Chester Davis sought an injunction in the Supreme Court of the State of New York to prevent McGraw-Hill and Life from publishing what he called a fraudulent autobiography. The publishers responded with affidavits that would soon come to haunt them. “I believe the book Clifford Irving has produced is precisely what it is represented to be,” declared Harold McGraw, “the story of Howard Hughes in the words of Howard Hughes himself.” Time’s Frank McCullough said in his affidavit, “I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt as to the authenticity of the Howard Hughes autobiography. This conviction is based upon my long-standing personal familiarity with Howard Hughes, my readings of the manuscript, and my interviews with Clifford Irving. My belief in that authenticity is not shaken by denials of that story, nor is my belief in the autobiography shaken by the denials which I have heard from a man I believe to be Howard Hughes. Such actions are perfectly consistent with the Hughes I know.” The affidavits were submitted just before the publishers discovered that it wasn’t Howard R. Hughes who cashed their checks, but the woman known as “Helga R. Hughes,” Clifford Irving’s wife, Edith.

  It wasn’t long before Irving’s epic lie was exposed. Trapped, he admitted his misdeeds, was convicted of fraud, and served fourteen months in federal prison. He also had the dubious distinction of being featured on the cover of Time in 1972, dubbed “Con Man of the Year.”

  8

  Führer over a Fraud

  The Russian archives contain a bullet-pierced skull fragment said to be Adolf Hitler’s. If genuine, it’s a rare relic indeed—all that remains (other than a few teeth) of one of history’s most notorious monsters. Yet while morbidly fascinating, the skull remnant reveals nothing of the demented mind it once contained. An artifact that did that—a diary, say—would not only be a historical bonanza, but extremely lucrative as well.

  Konrad Kujau, a German dealer in Nazi memorabilia, had that sense when he embarked on a major forgery that briefly captured the world’s attention in 1983. He produced sixty-two volumes of nonsense that he passed off as Hitler’s diaries. His efforts were well rewarded when the West German magazine Stern purchased the rights for more than $3 million.

  “After assessment of the diaries,” Stern triumphantly announced, “the biography of the dictator and the history of the National Socialist Nazi state will have to be rewritten.” As it turned out, all that was ever rewritten were the careers of the weekly’s top editors. They had been duped by one of their own staffers. Reporter Gerd Heidemann, in cahoots with Kujau, told his bosses that he had tracked down the diaries after an exhaustive search over several continents. They had been retrieved, he said, from a Luftwaffe plane that had been shot down in the final days of the war. Heidemann insisted that his source—supposedly a German army officer who had found and hidden the diaries—would have to remain anonymous for reasons of safety in what was then East Germany.

  “I can’t tell you where the diaries came from because I don’t even know,” Stern’s editor in chief Peter Koch said in an interview at the time. “We asked Heidemann many times but he refused to tell us. We respect his desire to keep it secret because we never had any reason to distrust him. He has worked here for thirty years.”

  Koch’s faith in Heidemann was buttressed by the fact that a plane believed to have been carrying Hitler’s personal papers had crashed en route from the dictator’s bunker in Berlin to his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden. Also, experts in handwriting had confirmed the diary script was indeed the führer’s. “There can be no doubt that these samples were written personally by Hitler,” the London Sunday Times quoted Max Frey-Zuker, described by the newspaper as “one of Europe’s best-known graphologists.” (Apparently no lessons had been learned from the Hugh
es debacle a decade before, when several handwriting “experts” proved to be less than reliable.) Finally, there was the glowing endorsement of British historian and Hitler scholar Hugh Trevor-Roper, who declared the discovery of the diaries to be “the most significant historical event of the last decade.”

  Amid all the hoopla, however, was a chorus of skeptical scholars. “I don’t believe a word of Heidemann’s story,” Hitler biographer Joachim Fest told The Washington Post. He dismissed the Stern reporter’s account of his search for the diaries as “a lot of bally hoo, nothing more.” Even Hugh Trevor-Roper’s initial enthusiasm cooled considerably. At a press conference Stern believed would settle all doubts about the authenticity of the diaries, Trevor-Roper stated that a “final judgment cannot be given until the whole text has been examined.” (He had only been allowed a brief look at the diaries in a bank vault.) “As a historian I regret that this process has been sacrificed to the requirements of the journalistic scoop.”

  Faced with a storm of doubt and criticism, the editors at Stern remained defiant. “All I can say is that we paid a lot of money for the diaries and we will be paid back with our good reputation,” declared Peter Koch. “All our critics will have to eat their words.” Alas, it was Koch who had to eat crow. Just two weeks after Stern announced its coup, Hans Booms, president of the Federal Archives Office of West Germany, officially debunked the diaries. He told a press conference that close scrutiny by history and crime experts indicated that “with regard to contents, the alleged Hitler diaries are a grotesque, superficial forgery.”

  Indeed they were, replete with glaring errors, anachronisms, and scientific impossibilities. Tests proved, for example, that the diaries contained paper and glue manufactured only after 1955, when Hitler had long been dead. Passages allegedly written in 1934,1935, and 1937 were lifted directly from a 1962 book of the führer’s speeches, which was itself full of errors. In addition, there were expressions used in the diaries that didn’t exist when Hitler was alive. Even the initials in gothic print on the imitation leather diary covers were wrong. Some read “FH,” not “AH.” And then there were the inane entries, like “Must not forget to get tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva [Braun]” and “Because of the new pills I have violent flatulence, and—says Eva—bad breath.”

  Confronted with the overwhelming evidence of fraud, Stern publisher Henri Nannen said, “We have reason to be ashamed that something like this could happen to us.” Editors Peter Koch and Felix Schmidt tendered their resignations, and Gerd Heidemann, needless to say, was fired. He and Konrad Kujau served prison sentences. As a result of the debacle, the publishing world became far more wary of such brazen tricks—until a decade later when publishers in Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Britain, Holland, Spain, Italy, Japan, and the United States eagerly snatched up the rights to The Diary of Jack the Ripper, which was, of course, yet another hoax.

  9

  Murder, Ink

  Deception turned deadly in 1985, when Mark Hofmann, a fallen Mormon and forger of historic documents, murdered two people with pipe bombs in a desperate effort to keep his fraudulent schemes concealed. Rarely had Salt Lake City been racked so hard by a crime, especially when the killer was revealed.

  People in the city’s tightly knit Mormon community believed Hofmann to be a gentle family man, a dutiful son of the church, and a respectable dealer of historic documents. There was, however, another side to this soft-spoken man that few in the City of Saints would have recognized. “Mark looks like all of us, he talks like us, he was raised here,” said county attorney David Biggs. “But after 11:30 at night, he would forge documents and build bombs.”

  By most accounts, Hofmann was quite adept at creating history. He managed to fool the FBI, the Library of Congress, and the Mormon Church with his meticulously crafted fakes. Charles Hamilton, a renowned expert in historic documents, dubbed him “the World’s Greatest Forger” (although, as Hofmann himself suggested, Hamilton’s approbation may have had something to do with the fact that he too had been deceived, and being tricked by the best may have been a bit more palatable). Hofmann forged documents from American history, like letters written by George Washington, Betsy Ross, Miles Standish, and Daniel Boone, as well as “the Oath of a Freeman,” said to be the first document printed in the colonies, and for which the Library of Congress was prepared to pay a million bucks. Hofmann also traded in Mormon history, although in this sphere, profit was not his only motive.

  The forger was outwardly faithful, but he had long been alienated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He viewed the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, as a charismatic fraud. And while most Mormons idolized the man, “Hofmann seemed to admire him as a deceiver, the ultimate con artist,” wrote authors Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts. He made it his mission to rewrite the church’s history to better reflect his deeply cynical view of it.

  At first Hofmann forged letters and papers that tended to validate the faith and fill in some of its historical gaps. Gradually, though, he produced more disturbing documents that undermined the church’s very foundation. Perhaps the most notorious of these was the so-called “Salamander letter,” which offered a far different account of how Joseph Smith came to discover the sacred gold plates that he translated into the Book of Mormon. Church doctrine holds that Smith had been led to the plates by the angel Moroni. The “Salamander letter,” however, hinted at something darker and more sinister. It was supposedly written in 1830 by Martin Harris, an associate of Joseph Smith.

  “I hear Joseph found a gold bible,” the letter opens, “& he says it is true I found it 4 years ago with my stone but only just got it because of the enchantment.” The text continues with a description of how Smith was led to the plates by a white salamander, a creature associated with the occult in folklore. “The story of Joseph Smith finding the gold plates was present [in the letter],” wrote Sillitoe and Roberts, “but embedded in a context that suggested ceremonial magic and ghoulism, a strange contrast to the traditional story of the Angel Moroni.” Hofmann sold the letter to his friend Steven F. Christensen, an idealistic Mormon bishop who later donated it to the church. The following year, Christensen would become the forger’s first murder victim.

  He was blown up by a pipe bomb at his office on the morning of October 15, 1985. Three hours later, Kathleen Sheets, the wife of Christensen’s former business partner, was killed the same way when she picked up a package left at her home and addressed to her husband. Both bombs had been planted by Hofmann early that morning as his wife and children slept. “Why would this meek-looking, scholarly, respectable, almost a wimp of a man commit this horrible crime?” Salt Lake County prosecutor Robert L. Stott asked rhetorically as he reconstructed the crime at a symposium held at Brigham Young University almost two years after the murders.

  Simply put, Hofmann had gotten himself into a jam. He had promised the church another amazing find known as the McLellin Collection, a series of letters from a former Mormon who had fallen out with Joseph Smith. It was expected to be very critical of the church, which paid Hofmann $165,000 to acquire it. The problem was, he had also received a $150,000 advance from an antiquities dealer for the very same papers—which did not actually exist. Deeply in debt, and in danger of being exposed as a fraud by his friend Christensen, the broker on the nonexistent McLellin Collection, Hofmann turned to murder. One bomb would silence Christensen, and the other, intended for Christensen’s former partner Gary Sheets, was supposed to cast suspicion on disgruntled investors in Sheets and Christensen’s failed business venture.

  A third bomb, which investigators believe was intended for another Mormon bishop, blew up in Hofmann’s van the day after the murders. The killer was grievously wounded, and the explosion produced evidence that led to his arrest. Hofmann pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and two counts of document fraud. The Utah Board of Pardons, which was ultimately responsible for determining a sentence after a complicated plea bargain, found that the killer sho
wed no remorse for his crimes and recommended that he serve the rest of his life in prison. There Hofmann reportedly offered fellow inmates cash from a secret stash to have members of the board of pardons killed—preferably with pipe bombs.

  Anti-Semitic cartoon featuring the Jewish monster devouring the world

  Part VII

  THE DEADLIEST LIES EVER TOLD

  “Not a word from their mouth can be trusted; their heart is filled with destruction.Their throat is an open grave, with their tongues they speak deceit.”

  —PSALMS 5:9

  Evil thrives on lies, the most malignant of which have metastasized throughout nations—even the world—with devastating consequences. What follows is a mere glimpse of the misery wrought by the obliteration of truth. A fuller account would, sadly, occupy volumes.

  1

  The Blood Libel

  On the day before Easter, 1144, the body of a twelve-year-old boy named William was found in a forest just outside Norwich, England. Though there were signs of violence on the young apprentice, his death would have been unremarkable in an age when a child’s life was often short and brutal. But a zealous monk named Thomas of Monmouth made William a martyr when he claimed the boy was murdered by Jews in a gruesome ritual that mocked the crucifixion of Jesus.

  Most historians agree that Thomas’s tale—detailed in his epic The Life and Passion of Saint William the Martyr of Norwich—was the seed from which grew what professor Alan Dundes called “one of the most bizarre and dangerous legends ever created by the human imagination.” The widespread belief that Jews routinely killed Christian children in secret rituals, commonly called the Blood Libel, has endured for nearly nine centuries, influenced anti-Semites from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler, and caused untold misery to millions of innocent people over the ages. And to think it all flowed from one stupid little story.