Whipping Boy
Page 26
*Cesar is not alone in misattributing the saying to Emerson. Three successful self-help gurus he admires (Dr. Phil, Stephen R. Covey, and Tony Robbins), a T-shirt manufacturer, and a company that prints pithy wisdom on laminated refrigerator magnets have all made the same mistake. Nor is Ralph Waldo Emerson the only nineteenth-century trinomial Harvard man to receive undeserving credit. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry David Thoreau are also wrongly cited as the authors of the Haskins motto, which was first published, anonymously, in a 1940 book titled Meditations in Wall Street.
†Besides brandishing a number of princely titles (e.g., Prince von Badische, Prince of Montezuma, Prince Khimchiachvili, Prince of Thrace) Robert also identified himself as the Duke of Mogolov, the Marquis de Hermosilla, the Count of Cabo St. Eugenio, the Archbishop Metropolitan of the Holy Church of Saint John of Jerusalem, and, most frequently, the Seventy-Fourth Grand Master of the Knights of Malta (Ecumenical).
*By way of example: When I asked Ruth about Barclay’s relocated headquarters, she shot back an email noting it was “a studio apartment in a two-unit wood-frame house built in 1940 and held in trust that a source in Tax Assessor’s office suggested had ‘an extremely low’ valuation of $275,885.”
*Rejected pseudonyms included an Armenian alias (A. Carvasian), an adjectival alias (A. Vain Cesar), a topical alias (Avian Scare), a tough-guy alias (Vic A. Arenas), and a porn-star alias (Asia Craven).
*The crime-fraud exception, as characterized by the Supreme Court in Clark v. United States, states: “A client who consults an attorney for advice that will serve him in the commission of a fraud will have no help from the law. He must let the truth be told.”
*There’s some ambiguity regarding the disease that led to Cesar’s extended isolation. At different times during our talks he mentions German measles, a mild virus that clears up quickly, and measles, which can be much trickier to treat. A letter submitted by a relative prior to sentencing compounds the confusion by citing smallpox as the cause for his hospitalization.
*“Sir” Cesar was in good company. Robert also dubbed (and duped) Oscar-winner Ernest Borgnine, action stars Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris, and the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.
*Colonia was probably Robert’s biggest coup, geographically if not criminally. In 1978, under one of his many royal appellations, Robert quietly claimed possession of an uninhabited patch of the South China Sea previously abandoned by a crackpot adventurer named Tomás Cloma. The territory, a collection of guano-rich outcroppings on the western fringe of the Spratly Islands, had little commercial value until Robert, partnering with another ersatz royal doing business as the Prince de Mariveles, began selling diplomatic passports (unit price: $20,000) to individuals wishing to bypass customs inspection. Four Corsican drug runners arrested in Israel were among those who attempted to benefit from the diplomatic protection of the nonexistent nation-state.