The butt of my deadly Kalashnikov pressed into my shoulder as I let go a long, vicious burst of fire. A Russian special forces soldier and two Afghan regular troops clambering over the wall only noticed me as they were poised in mid-air. By then it was too late. My weapon bucked and climbed as it spewed out bullets. They had no chance . . .
This was the Boy’s Own tone of his book, which was to be called Jihad! and published under the pseudonym (for security reasons, he claimed) of Tom Carew. Not long after it was submitted to the literary agent Andrew Lownie, Mainstream Publishing in Edinburgh paid a six-figure sum for the book. The fact that a small independent Scottish publisher was willing to stake so much on an unknown first-time writer was testament to the huge market in real-life war diaries, and that market did not disappoint: sales were good enough to warrant translations into several foreign languages, a high-profile extract in the Sunday Times and a fair amount of press coverage for the big blond author.
A year later, the paperback edition came out. Most publishers cannot hope for even more coverage of a paperback release than an original hardback, but it just so happened that it hit the shelves (and newspaper editors’ desks) on a rather pregnant day: 10 September 2001.
No 9/11 conspiracy theorist has yet been mad enough to link Sessarego directly to the timing of the attacks on America, but certainly, within twenty-four hours, he was one of the most sought-after media commentators in Britain. With a book title like Jihad! and a blurb that touted him as the first British soldier to go out and train side by side with the Mujahidin, his twenty years of experience with extremists made him the natural choice for editors seeking an expert view. He wrote articles for national newspapers and appeared on the BBC and CNN looking and sounding for all the world like a genuine SAS fighter. And, as even his detractors in the army community will admit, apart from the fact that he was not a member of the SAS, much of what he said was probably true. But masquerading as something you’re not is, in the eyes of the very close-knit Special Air Service, a very serious breach of etiquette. And as so many people in Hereford and abroad knew of his true identity, it was not long before television news reporters were tipped off and a very public unmasking was orchestrated.
Asked to come to the BBC2 studios to be interviewed by Newsnight’s George Aykyn, the unsuspecting author arrived thinking he would be talking about Afghanistan but was alarmed to find himself being questioned about his own shifty identity instead. Asked directly whether he was not Philip Sessarego, he denied it emphatically, took a swing at a cameraman and hot-footed it out of the studio. Ignominy ensued for his publisher, agent and all the editors who had employed him to write pieces and appear on news programmes. In one fell swoop, his career as a phoney SAS memoirist was over.
The following decade brought less and less good news for Sessarego: he had burnt so many bridges with the military, media and publishing worlds that he fell into the refuge of the brawny unemployed: security work. He ended up in Belgium, reputedly working for criminal gangs involved in extorting protection money from nightclub owners and pimps. Cut off from friends and family in northern England and reduced to living in an Antwerp garage lock-up with only a camping gas stove and a camp-bed, it was several months before his badly decomposed body was found. He had died – for real this time – as a result of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from his gas burner. Those who knew him in his final years reported that he always kept himself fit and ready for action, waiting for the call that never came. But although the end of his life was tragically pathetic, little love was lost between him and his firstborn, Claire, who told the Mirror: ‘He never served in the SAS. He’s just a fantasist who’s trying to make money on the back of other people’s reputations . . . Basically, if I’m going to be blunt about it, I think he is a twat.’
A tough epitaph for a tough but not quite tough enough guy.
MICHAEL GAMBINO
AT THE TURN of the twenty-first century there was nothing so marketable in the American media as mobsters. Except, perhaps, for misery memoirs. And the book that was about to leave Simon & Schuster with egg on its face was a too-good-to-be-true amalgamation of both of those things.
In 1999 Mario Puzo had died, leaving a gap in the market for inside accounts of Mafia life. The Sopranos had just debuted on HBO and it could be argued that America was keen to look back to a more traditional kind of violence than crack-heads with guns or foreigners with bombs. So when the bosses at the American publishing giant who had first been hoaxed by Helen Joan Wagner in the 1920s were contacted by the grandson of the infamous crime boss Carlo Gambino and offered a fictionalized account of the inner workings of one of the country’s biggest crime families, they quite understandably jumped at the chance. The call came via an agent at the now disbanded Artist’s Management Group who had in turn heard about the book from an associate who had met the author, Michael Gambino, in LA a few years previously. The agent said that Gambino, just out of jail after serving more than a decade for various organized crime activities, was ready to ‘cleanse his soul’ with some cathartic writing which would also, as it happened, give the reading public exactly what it wanted in terms of authentic mob drama. Simon & Schuster reckoned about half a million dollars would be appropriate for a book with this much potential, and were hoping that a whole series of books like Puzo’s could be spun out of this man’s bloody life story.
Michael Gambino had started writing his book while still in prison. Although not blessed with much in the way of natural literary talent, he had enough raw material to ensure that his proposal would strike editors as something that, with the help of a ghost-writer, could be turned into gold. And so it was, albeit fool’s gold. Gambino was paid his handsome advance, and even after paying his agent’s fees he had enough to start living considerably better than he had before he went to prison. Even before the book was finished, Simon & Schuster began the publicity campaign to end all publicity campaigns. They touted The Honoured Society (fans of the Sicily-loving English novelist Norman Lewis will recognize the title) as the work of ‘the highest-ranking mob member’ ever to describe the ‘innermost workings’ of the Mafia. And as soon as the book was published, Gambino was sent to appear on television and radio and booked in for signings and personal appearances. ‘In these days of fake television gangsters and wannabe gangsters, Gambino is the real thing,’ trumpeted the Daily Telegraph.
He certainly looked the part, with his stocky figure, greased-back hair and flashy clothes lending him more than a passing resemblance to a character from The Sopranos. What’s more, he talked the talk. In a thick New York accent, he would dodge detailed questions about the criminals he had consorted with, just like any former don keen not to name names would do. He spoke of the need to ‘cleanse’ himself after all the years of ill behaviour on the mean streets of gangland America. He presented himself as the immigrant son of a son of Carlo Gambino called Vito, born in Sicily but brought to America as a boy to be with his family. And as he chugged coffees in diners while being interviewed by journalists, he always had his eye on the door.
What he did not mention in these interviews was that his real name is not Michael Gambino. Nor, it transpires, is it Michael Pellegrino, the name he went by before he wrote The Honoured Society, and which he still uses now. It was Michael Budaj, the same name as his German immigrant father, who is a factory worker in Chicago and nothing whatsoever to do with the Mafia. This detail was uncovered, long after Gambino’s unmasking, by the investigative journalist Kevin Gray. But before that, only months after publication, much more serious questions were being asked about Gambino than the name under which he chose to write.
It was in mid-December that the real Gambino family’s lawyer, Mike Rosen, contacted the offices of Simon & Schuster to tell them that no one had heard of a man called Michael. He recalled telling their lawyer ‘You’ve been had!’ and pointing out that the only Michael Gambino who has any connection to the family was a teenager at school in upstate New York – a Gambino gran
dson, yes, but one far too young and guileless to be able to write a book like The Honoured Society.
Other Mafia experts began to weigh in with their opinions of the book as well, and they all supported Rosen’s contention that the author was not who he said he was. Evidently, the movie-style executions and wisecracking did not ring true with people like Larry Panaro, a commentator with genuine Mafia connections, who told the journalist Kevin Gray: ‘It took me fifteen pages to know he was a phony. There was no way he could have done all this shit and still be walking around.’ Gerry Capeci, who has published many books on the Mafia, said he ‘suspected its authenticity from day one’.
If Simon & Schuster did not react immediately – which they did not – it was perhaps because they knew full well that Michael Gambino was not their author’s real name: the contract for The Honoured Society is made out to Michael Pellegrino. Of course, it had been in the interests of everyone hoping to make money out of the book to go along with Pellegrino’s chosen surname, but there is some argument about just how much the editors and publicists knew about Pellegrino’s true identity. He says they knew full well that his claim to be Carlo Gambino’s grandson was based only on ‘family legend’. They disagree.
Eventually, more and more facts came to light which proved once and for all that not only was Gambino not a Gambino, he was not a mobster either. He claimed he had spent twelve years in prison for serious crimes. The truth was rather more pathetic.
Michael John Budaj was a small-time crook from Chicago who had spent his adult life in and out of trouble with the police for a string of minor offences and scams. Records show a familiar career trajectory, up to and not including the point where he sold a book for half a million dollars. He did indeed spend a few months here and there in prison, but not twelve years, and not for anything like the bribery, murder, money-laundering and pimping he described in his book.
Being the archetypal unreliable narrator, it is best not to go solely on what Pellegrino says about the affair. But he does point out that the book deal he signed was for a work of fiction, and fiction is what he produced. He claims he spent all the money on lawyers. Friends say he got his teeth fixed and bought a share in a piano bar, and both these things have been easily proven to be true.
His publishers, however, were furious. Yes, it was a novel they had paid him for, not a memoir, but the value of that work was predicated almost entirely on the author having had inside experience of the world he described. Hence the ghost-writer and the florid PR campaign. Before 2001 was out, they began to prepare a case against him and in August 2002 sued his agency for misrepresenting their client. Client and agency were both indignant that the last of the advance ought to be paid and Pellegrino did indeed believe he was the illegitimate grandson of the infamous Carlo. But the more character witnesses came out of the woodwork, the more Pellegrino began to seem like no more than a deluded con-artist on the make. The woman he married – a stripper working at the club where he worked as a doorman – spoke of him knowing all the words to the Godfather films and swaggering around like a gangster in his everyday (decidedly un-mobster-like) life. He claimed to have met famous mobsters in prison, but in fact had never been near the high-security wing in which the Mafia dons were held.
In the end, however, the case against him was unsuccessful and Simon & Schuster settled, awarding him an undisclosed amount which must have convinced him he was having the last laugh. He subsequently retained the services of a PR advisor and was last heard of planning the next two instalments in The Honoured Society trilogy, clearly hoping that the notion of ‘Michael Gambino’ as the creator of a Godfather-like serial brand is more than just a dream.
Simon & Schuster, who, as part of the giant global Viacom brand has a seriously big name to protect, will doubtless do its best not to fall victim to a hoaxer like Pellegrino so easily again. But it will take years of careful vetting of potential memoirists to erase the embarrassment caused by the kid from Chicago who convinced everyone – perhaps including himself – that he was a hotshot. Interviewed at the time of his book’s publication on Good Morning America, Pellegrino recalled his tough years on the wrong side of the law and solemnly opined that those whom you trust the most are ‘usually the people that betray you’. Sadly for his trusting readers, it took one to know one.
JAMES FREY
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST century, the name most synonymous with the literary hoax is James Frey. Such has been the media frenzy surrounding his unmasking as a very unreliable memoirist indeed that even people who have no interest in books seem to have heard of him. It was Oprah Winfrey who brought his crimes against autobiography to such a wide audience, after she was duped into not only making his A Million Little Pieces the book of the month on her highly influential book club, but openly weeping at the honesty with which this marvellous young writer laid bare his experiences with drug and alcohol addiction. And it was Oprah who plotted a devastating trial by television to give him – and his editor Nan Talese – a truly public flogging.
The fuss began when Frey, a thirty-something screen writer and recovering addict, decided to write a book about his adventures in rehab. The resulting work, published by Random House America in 2003, is one of the most harrowing, disgusting and sad memoirs to have hit the bookshops in a long time. Since Dave Pelzer’s now-disputed memoir A Child Called ‘It’, in fact. A Million Little Pieces charts the journey of a blood- and sick-bespattered Frey from his arrival in a treatment centre to his ultimate triumph over his demons (which was achieved with willpower alone rather than AA, which he hates). On the way, he recalls such terrifying instances as his involvement in a fatal smash between a car and a train; being in prison for several months; having root canal surgery with no anaesthetic; and repeatedly throwing up on himself in increasingly foul ways. Naturally, it was an instant success. Sales figures were more than healthy even before Oprah discovered it and made it the subject of her monthly book club, but after her programme entitled ‘The Man who Kept Oprah Awake at Night’, aired in October 2005, Frey started to shift serious copies. Sales figures rose well above one million in one year, and in 2005 his book sold more than any other apart from the new Harry Potter. His triumph over desperate obscurity was, it seemed, complete.
Oprah tearfully recommended his memoir to all her viewers, especially those with a friend or family battling substance abuse. (Frey had been into everything, from wine to crack.) She told how the entire staff of her production company, Harpo, was glued to the book, calling it ‘like nothing you’ve ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we’d come in the next morning saying, “What page are you on?” ’
However, three months later, on 8 January 2006, the legal news website The Smoking Gun revealed that police records from the time of Frey’s self-confessed crimes and incarceration did not corroborate what was written in the book. The car-train crash in which two young women died had been in the news at the time, but there was nothing showing Frey’s involvement. One of the deceased girls’ parents even came forward to say she would have known if Frey had been involved and he emphatically had not. It also seemed that rather than having been in jail for more than eighty days, as he claimed, he had only been held in custody for a few hours. And another of Frey’s criminal boasts, that he had been intimidated by FBI investigators over a high-level drugs ring, was, in reality, a not very exciting student pot-selling misdemeanour he had been questioned about while at university.
The editors of The Smoking Gun approached Frey with their findings via an off-the-record email, which Frey then reproduced, calling it the latest attempt to discredit him: ‘Let the haters hate,’ he wrote, ‘let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won’t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response.’
When the website finally published their article ‘A Million Little Lies: Exploring James Frey’s Fiction Addiction’, however, the mud they flung at the discredited author proved ha
rder to wash off. Suddenly, the news, television and online media which had once been so impressed by the bestselling memoirist’s work all cottoned on to the fact that they may have been taken in and began demanding answers. Especially as Frey’s follow-up to that first volume of memoir, My Friend Leonard, had recently been published.
Frey decided to go on the popular CNN talk show Larry King Live and, sitting next to his mother whom he had brought to the studio with him, attempt some damage limitation. This took the form of denying most of the accusations against him and claiming that the main point of the book – his struggle with addiction – was all true, and he had only changed certain minor details to protect the identities of those involved. Towards the end of filming, King took a phone-call from Oprah Winfrey, who defended her beloved Frey, maintaining that his book could be a valuable resource for anyone coping with alcoholism. Later, Oprah would admit: ‘I regret that phone call. I left the impression that the truth does not matter. To everyone who has challenged me about this book – you are absolutely right.’
While, in the days that followed the Larry King interview, Oprah had cause to regret ever endorsing A Million Little Pieces, his publishers and agents were getting seriously worried too. Although his editor Nan Talese seemed to be standing by him, Random House’s lawyers were realizing that to avoid accusations of consumer abuse they would have to either insert retractions into each new edition of the book, or set aside a fund of money to pay off litigious book-buyers who had been conned into buying something which was wrongly described as non-fiction. In fact, they ended up doing both.
In the Frey household, however, things were going from bad to worse. Kassie Evershevski, who had been James’ agent for nearly five years, parted company with the author over ‘matters of trust’, but conceded in an interview with Publishers Weekly that she still considered him ‘a very talented writer’. The fatal blow was to come on 26 January 2006 when Oprah invited both Frey and Nan Talese to come and sit on her sofa to discuss the general subject of truth and authorship in literature. What she actually had in mind was a grand public drubbing for the writer who had made her look stupid in front of millions of viewers. During an interview that is most uncomfortable to witness but impossible to look away from (not unlike Frey’s book), Oprah – power-dressed and coiffed spectacularly sleekly for the interrogation – repeatedly attacks him over the specifics of his mis-truths. She forces him to admit that he lied about his criminal activities, and to see how much he has embarrassed her. Then she brings in his publisher and compels her to admit that she did nothing to check the facts of Frey’s memoir, even though elements of them – the pain-relief-free dental surgery, for example – seem nothing if not far-fetched. Various other commentators such as Maureen Dowd and the New York Times’ Frank Rich are brought on to add their indignant two penn’orth, and by the end of the show the Frey debacle has been extrapolated to exemplify, along with the war in Iraq and the rise of reality TV, a nation almost dangerously reliant on lies and misinformation. The following days’ news reports gleefully echoed Larry King’s comment that ‘Oprah annihilates James Frey’.
Telling Tales Page 18