Khouri also wrote back to the commission with a strong rebuttal of each of the 73 points. ‘Is it not enough that her father received nothing more than a slap on the wrist for her murder?’ she fired provocatively. ‘I am angered to see that you are more concerned for the “image of Jordan” than for the many innocent victims of honour killings each year in your country.’ It was emotive stuff. She was determined, she said, to ensure that her friend lived on not only in her heart but in the hearts and minds of all those who read the book.
Al-Sabbagh was livid. ‘It was totally crazy. She accused us of only defending Jordan’s reputation, when we had to defend the reputation of Jordanian women against what she wrote,’ she said. She was particularly insulted by Khouri’s assertion that Jordanian women were imprisoned in their own homes. ‘Jordanian women have excellent education levels that are gradually being translated into participation in the workforce. Her tone is that all Jordanian women live under these traditional practices, which is wrong.’
Al-Sabbagh was so incensed, she dug into Khouri’s background and checked the official records. They showed that Khouri had not fled the country in 2000 as she claimed, but had in fact arrived in the US that year on a US passport. On the forms, she had registered herself as the wife of Greek-American John Toliopoulos. Things were not stacking up for Ms Khouri.
Random House, however, was still sticking by their woman. The publisher poured cold water on the commission’s claims, but said they would go back to Khouri and get some answers.
Khouri delivered. It was all, she said, part of the paper trail she needed to create to get out of the country safely. She needed to be married to a foreigner in order to get a passport without her father’s knowledge. Friends, including Dalia’s lover, Michael, had set up the address in America to make it look as though she and her fake husband, John, lived there. She insisted she had never had an American passport, and produced a visa document showing she had applied for a US visa for a publicity tour of the book. This was, she maintained, concrete proof, because why would you need to apply for a visa if you had a US passport? Unless, of course, you had something to hide. US consulates do not check whether visa applicants have a US passport, because it would be illogical for those people to be applying for a visa.
In the back-to-front world of Norma Khouri, all of this made sense. But in 2004 journalists Knox and Overington had gone to Chicago. They had found out that her real name was Norma Majid Khouri Michael Al-Bagain Toliopoulos, and that she had left Jordan as a three-year-old and lived in Chicago from 1973 until 2000. Naturally, she had a US passport. She had wed her husband, John, in Chicago in 1993, and they had two children, Zoe and Christopher. Her mother, Asma, who was a retired nurse, and her four siblings in Chicago were wondering where they had gone. They had no idea she was a literary sensation.
At the time Dalia was supposedly killed over the romance in Jordan, Khouri and her husband were buying and selling townhouses in Chicago’s midway district. ‘I have no idea why they left,’ Asma told the Herald. ‘The mother’s always the last to know … They hurt me big. I miss them so much. But Norma always kept deep secrets. She kept things to herself.’
The Herald spoke to friends, neighbours and family who all remembered the girl who went to the local Catholic school and went on to study computers, before getting a job selling insurance and enrolling at bartending school. Her brother Will Bagain said: ‘I don’t know why she went, she’d kind of run away with John when they first met. Then they came back for a while, but then they went again. One day she was there, the next she was gone.’ He missed his nephew and niece.
Despite being confronted with this enormous weight of evidence, Khouri said to the Herald: ‘I stand by what I wrote. I refute the allegations that you are making, and had I been given more ample time I would have supplied proof. I intend to do so in the future.’ There were also allegations swirling that she was a con woman who had stolen from gullible men and the elderly — including one man who handed over $40,000, believing she was a Jordanian princess who needed the money to buy her way out of a loveless marriage. None of this boded well for her forthcoming sequel, entitled, without apparent irony, A Matter of Honour, which was subsequently cancelled. Executives at Random House still shudder when the name Norma Khouri is mentioned. They had done the right thing by the wrong woman.
The problem with exposing a hoaxer who continues to deny the truth even when faced with proof is that there is no closure. No satisfying gotcha moment. Khouri moved back to the US in 2004 of her own accord and, in 2007, Caroline Overington headed back to Chicago to confront Khouri ahead of the release of a film about the hoax called Forbidden Lie$, directed by Anna Broinowski. Surprisingly, she was invited into Khouri’s home and the two women sat like old friends, drinking red wine over ice on a steamy night in Khouri’s kitchen.
Khouri was living in a neat townhouse with her two children who had not seen their father since they left Australia. She still insisted she had written the book as a protest against honour killings. ‘I really thought we could get the laws changed, and then I would come out and say, “Look, I’m married. I’ve got two children. The woman in my book, her name was not Dalia but I had to lie because I was so terrified for my safety, for the safety of my kids,”’ she said.
Overington had decided to visit Khouri, because Broinowski had told her that she too had been completely bewitched and conned by Khouri. Originally, she had set out to make the film to help Khouri clear her name; only as time went on did she realise the truth. Khouri had given her what she claimed was Dalia’s real name. However, it turned out that this woman had been killed in 2001, and not 1996, so she could not possibly be Khouri’s friend from N & D’s hair salon.
‘But that’s the whole point!’ Khouri told Overington. ‘I wanted to prove to Anna that the Jordanian government lies about honour crimes because it doesn’t suit their image. I gave Anna the woman’s name and told her to check with the morgue, and they said, “No, that woman doesn’t exist.” So they lied to her. It was the only way I could prove to her that they lie, and they lie, and they lie.’ More upside-down logic from the queen of double speak.
Overington went back to the film-maker, who clarified things. ‘Let’s be a little disciplined with the facts here,’ said Broinowski. ‘When Norma gave me that name, she said the woman was killed in 1996, so of course they couldn’t find it in their records because she was actually killed in 2001. Norma was trying to pass this woman off as Dalia, but the dates were all wrong.’
At the time that Overington spoke to her, Khouri was also facing allegations of stealing a house and $408,000 in government bonds from a demented neighbour. She told Overington: ‘Did I do the wrong thing? Yes. But I didn’t benefit … I was in fear of my life.’ And that was as near to a confession as Overington could squeeze out of her.
‘Look, I wrote a book,’ said Khouri. ‘I changed a few details, to protect my kids. Now I’m the worst person in the world? It’s ridiculous.’
* * *
It is not as though Khouri was the first hoaxer to con a publisher. Today, modernist poet Ern Malley’s works are celebrated. They include the memorable and completely incomprehensible line: ‘The black swan of trespass on alien waters.’ The English migrant’s poems were only discovered after he had died in 1944 from Graves’ disease. His sister Ethel sent them to Max Harris, the young founder and editor of modernist poetry magazine Angry Penguins, for his opinion. Harris loved them and printed them in an edition with a specially commissioned Sidney Nolan painting on its cover in 1944. Unfortunately, Harris did not create quite the stir he had anticipated — it quickly emerged that neither Ern Malley nor his sister Ethel had ever existed.
The Ern Malley poems became one of Australia’s most notorious literary hoaxes. They were created in just one day by writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who favoured earlier conservative poetry and wanted to show up Harris by submitting sixteen deliberately terrible poems written in the then-current moderni
st style they despised. They certainly did … and the repercussions dealt a severe blow to the development of modern poetry in Australia. But, over time, while the works of McAuley and Stewart are largely forgotten, Malley’s are still discussed and enjoyed. The two writers created the poems by lifting words and phrases from the dictionary, Shakespeare and a book of quotations, and then writing the first thing that came into their head. In doing so, it has been argued, they opened themselves up through parody to true artistic inspiration. Who could ignore the brilliance of a line like ‘I am still / The black swan of trespass on alien waters.’ It feels like it should mean something but it is complete nonsense.
The whole debacle was a disaster for poor old Harris who was not only ridiculed for falling for the con, he was put on trial, convicted and fined because of the poems’ pornographic content. He simply could not take a trick. Angry Penguins folded in 1946.
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Another one who opened herself up to true artistic inspiration was Helen Demidenko, whose book The Hand That Signed the Paper won the 1993 Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. It controversially told the story of two Ukrainian peasants who were persecuted during Stalin’s communist purges, and who hailed the Nazi invaders during World War II as liberators, not oppressors. The two men joined Hitler’s killing machine and their exploits are described in vivid detail.
The book’s anti-Semitic tone clearly positioned it for controversy. Before entering the manuscript for the Vogel Literary Award, Demidenko had submitted it to a publisher at University of Queensland Press, who had rejected it. Her author’s note in the book said: ‘The things narrated in this book really happened, the things they did [are] historical actualities.’ She said she wrote the book based on taped interviews with relatives, including her uncle Vitaly Demidenko.
When Demidenko’s book was published in 1994, it won the Miles Franklin Award and the young author from Brisbane — she was just twenty when she wrote the book — gave a string of interviews and talks at literary festivals emphasising her Ukrainian heritage. ‘I depended very heavily on my dad’s memories of what the famine was like,’ she said, ‘and his brother and some of my other relatives as well.’ Her father, Tato, who was terrified of flying, had come to visit her after she won the Vogel Award. ‘He’d drunk so much vodka the hosties had to stretcher him on board the plane,’ she said.
The truth, when it was finally exposed by Brisbane newspaper The Courier-Mail, was much more prosaic. She was in fact the daughter of English migrants Harry and Grace Darville who hailed, not from the Ukraine, but from the north Lincolnshire town of Scunthorpe. The literary establishment, already embroiled in a heated debate about the sympathetic treatment of Nazi war criminals in the book, went into meltdown. The literary world wrung its hands over the nature of ethnicity, authenticity and identity. Two books were written about the issue, Robert Manne’s critical The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust and Andrew Riemer’s far more sympathetic The Demidenko Debate.
Years later, Darville, who had since moved to Scotland and become a lawyer, explained her motivation: ‘I did literature at university in my first degree and I did have it suggested to me in one tutorial that Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country was an illegitimate book about the black experience because it’s written by a white person. I just remember sitting there thinking: “This is nonsense. This is absolute rolled-gold nonsense and it needs to be exposed.”’
More than twenty years on, she remains unrepentant, telling the Weekend Australian that she believes it may have been useful in helping people to understand that writers imagine themselves into other peoples’ perspectives, writing under pseudonyms, and that it is important to have great literature rather than representative literature. Rather missing the point that it was one big hoax and that people don’t like to be conned into caring. Anyway, she maintained the whole mess was our fault because the Australian people just weren’t ready for it.
She returned to Australia in 2014 to work for Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm, who had no problem with her past. ‘The controversy at the time was that she extended the fiction into her authorship,’ he said. ‘I recall at the time thinking it was hilarious, it was all a big joke, but she kept up the fiction for quite a while.’
But it was not a joke for everyone. Sue Abbey, the University of Queensland Press publisher who had first rejected Demidenko’s manuscript, recalled that shortly after the scandal broke, ‘a beautiful young Ukrainian woman came to us with a story based on her family’s history’. But by then commissioning editors were looking at things differently. Abbey said the ‘damage’ done by Demidenko was ‘significant’.
The beautiful young woman’s authentic manuscript was rejected.
Think Big: Audacious con artists
IMAGINE an island off the coast of South America that could be turned into a casino and holiday hub to rival Macau — a Monte Carlo of the Caribbean. A sun-kissed paradise where tourists could frolic, and businessmen and miners could bet high stakes. Well, imagine no more — Azulcaribe is that place.
While the island, which lies off the coast of Venezuela, is actually called La Blanquilla, Azulcaribe is, according to its glittering website, ‘an international mega development of significant importance to the region and the world. Azulcaribe includes; hotels, apartments, casinos, port, airport and is a service center to the oil and gas industry.’ It touts itself as a fantastic eco-friendly resort, which boasts ten casinos and 30,000 hotel rooms, and operates in sympathy with the Venezuelan people, who are the island’s true owners. ‘Developed by international companies, Azulcaribe is proudly Venezuelan,’ reads the website.
It goes on: ‘With modern infrastructure, resorts, casinos and security Azulcaribe is a designed as a center for commerce and trade providing a gateway to the region as does Hong Kong for China. Developed from an idea in to spectacular grandeur as did Dubai and Las Vegas te prominence of Azulcaribe is assured [sic].’ Hang on a minute — that doesn’t quite scan. Surely an island resort with that many casinos and hotel rooms could afford to hire someone to check the spelling and grammar on its website?
A cursory check on Google reveals that the island of La Blanquilla is as beautiful as it’s portrayed on the website. A popular dive spot in the Caribbean Sea, it is famed for its white sandy beaches. It remains unspoilt by any resort development, or any development for that matter, because the population of the island remains steadfastly at zero. Azulcaribe is in fact a chimera dreamt up by failed Melbourne-born property tycoon John Victor Sparrow.
His partners in the Caribbean con were Charles Buckley, a bankrupt Manchester solicitor so adept at avoiding the long arm of the law that he has been described as the finest legal mind of his generation, and Peter Sealey, a Scottish bankrupt who ran a particularly pernicious pyramid scheme in the UK. An unlikely trio, but when they promised returns of up to $50 million on $350,000 loans, people were queuing up to throw their money at them. Together, they trousered an estimated $10 million. Not bad for a homemade website about a deserted outcrop in the middle of the Caribbean. Luckily for them, the Greater Manchester Police did not have the resources available to investigate the fraud.
Sparrow, who, according to his own febrile imagination, was a spy recruited to work for the CIA, MI6, MI5 and, for good measure, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, had also forged South American government bonds. He got his come-uppance in Spain, trying to earn ill-gotten coin from the forgeries. Despite this, his website maintains: ‘John Sparrow is a proud member of the team that carries his name.’ Closer inspection indicates that he might be the only member of the team that carries his name. His website continues: ‘Working in places such as London, New York, Milan, Switzerland, Asia, Caribbean and his much loved Mexico and Spain, Mr. Sparrow has developed a deserved reputation of integrity and confidentiality while at times being close to controversy, interesting events and glamour.’ You can say that again. What is sure about the con man is that he has not be
en afraid to think big.
* * *
Another big thinker is Norman Davidson Kelly, a gregarious Scot not afraid to big note his friends in high places. He currently lives with his wife, Daphne, in a stately pile called Little Boarhunt in Hampshire in the heart of the English countryside. He has, however, proven reluctant to talk about his past, which is not surprising given his role in dragging his former Australian employer BHP Billiton into the biggest corporate scandal in the nation’s history.
It was 1996, after the first Gulf War, when sanctions were crippling the Iraqi economy. Dictator Saddam Hussein complained that his people were starving. A deal was struck — the United Nations (UN) Oil for Food program — which effectively allowed food to be traded for Iraqi oil. Iraq put the money it earned from selling oil into a UN escrow account. The Iraqis could then apply to the UN to buy food and medicine, which the UN officials would pay for using the account. So far so incorruptible.
By 1999, however, Saddam’s boys had found a way to screw the system by adding an after-sales service component, such as a trucking fee, to the original bill. This eventually led to the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) paying $290 million in kickbacks to Saddam and his thugs. It worked very simply: if the AWB had $200,000 worth of wheat to sell, it would invoice the UN for $240,000. It would take the $200,000 it was owed, and kick back the remaining $40,000 to Saddam or his ministers. The money was frittered on palaces, Arabian racehorses for Saddam’s sadistic son Uday, and guns for the National Guard, who would soon be shooting at Aussie soldiers. It was also given to support the families of Palestinian suicide bombers who had blown up restaurants in Israel. None of this appeared to have bothered the officials at the AWB, who brainstormed ways to keep the kickbacks going without the UN finding out. One wag suggested ‘a very large suitcase’.
Circling this troubled world was BHP’s self-styled roving ambassador in the Middle East, Davidson Kelly. He was a fixer, strolling the carpets and making deals. His eye was on the big prize — access to Iraq’s hugely profitable oilfields. To curry favour with the Iraqi authorities, he sanctioned the delivery of 20,000 tonnes of wheat, ostensibly as a gift for the Iraqi people. Of course, it was no such thing. BHP’s own internal reports clearly show that helping the starving people of Iraq was at the bottom of Davidson Kelly and executive Tom Harley’s list of motivations for the gesture. Kickbacks were always gratefully received by Saddam’s boys. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, however, felt differently and said that the shipment must be treated as humanitarian aid and, therefore, be written off the company’s books.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Page 20