Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  Suicide attempt

  By the 1950s, de Hory was living in Miami, selling his works by mail order so that there would be little chance of his true identity being traced. But in 1955, his luck ran out. A Matisse that he had forged was sold to the Fogg Art Museum, and an expert there realised that the museum had been sold a fake. In addition, a Chicago art dealer named Joseph Faulkner had also realised that he had been duped and had begun court proceedings against him. De Hory went on the run again, using false identity papers to travel to Mexico City. However, complications of a different kind then ensued, when he was accused of murdering a British homosexual there. He was jailed for the murder, but it transpired that he was completely innocent, so he was eventually let out. De Hory returned to the United States, but by now his spirit was broken.

  De Hory knew that his career as a forger was coming to an end: his style of painting was beginning to be recognised and it was only a matter of time before the orders for his work ceased. He also knew that he had few other options in life: painting was his only real skill. Moreover, he was terrified of being caught for his forgeries and thrown in jail again: his experiences as a prisoner – seldom for anything he had done wrong – had completely traumatised him. At a low point, he took an overdose of sleeping pills, intending to end his life; but, fortunately, he was discovered before he died and taken to hospital.

  The next phase of de Hory’s life began when he went back to Miami and began a relationship with Ferdinand Legros, a man with great skill as a confidence trickster. Legros began to sell de Hory’s paintings for him, but like Chamberlin, he turned out to be a double-dealer, keeping most of the money for himself and lying to de Hory about the prices buyers had paid for the paintings. In addition, Legros was a violently bad-tempered man who constantly argued with his lover, Real Lessard, who travelled with them. In the end, de Hory left the pair of them to battle it out together, travelling to Europe to try to find some peace of mind.

  On the run

  Sadly, however, de Hory found that he was unable to survive without Legros, so began a commercial partnership with him once more. This time, Legros installed de Hory in a luxury villa in Ibiza, Spain, where he could set up his studio and produce his forgeries. Meanwhile, Legros would sell them to museums and galleries in Europe’s big cities. The plan worked for a while, but de Hory became unhappy at his island retreat. Legros kept de Hory on a tight budget, keeping the profits of his transactions for himself; also, de Hory was lonely and missed city life. He began to produce inferior paintings, and before long they were discovered as fakes. The police were notified, and soon de Hory was on the run again. He fled to Australia, but eventually returned to his home in Ibiza once more. In 1966, Legros and Lessard turned up at the house, also on the run. They asked de Hory to leave, and took over the house for themselves there, but police caught up with them over forgeries they had made to a Texas oil magnate, and they were arrested.

  Next, it was de Hory’s turn to be pursued by the police. Without any evidence to show that he had committed crimes in Spain, in 1968 the police managed to charge him with homosexual activities and consorting with criminals. Once again, he was sent to jail. However, when he came out, he unexpectedly found that a new phase of success had opened up in his life. Biographer Clifford Irving had written a best-selling account of his life, and he became a celebrity, appearing on television and in a film by Orson Welles. For the first time, he was able to sell his own paintings. However, he then found out that the authorities were planning to extradite him. Faced with more upheaval, he made another suicide attempt, and this time succeeded.

  Frank Abagnale, Jr

  Frank Abagnale, Jr was a con man whose extraordinary exploits, posing as an airline pilot, a doctor, a lawyer and a university lecturer, shocked the world when he was revealed as an impostor. A high-school dropout with no qualifications at all, he nevertheless managed to conterfeit documents and behave in such a way as to convince those around him that he was trustworthy and reliable. His bizarre adventures lasted for five years during the 1960s, after which he was arrested and brought to trial. Ever resourceful, after serving his prison sentence, he used his inside knowledge to set up a fraud consultancy company, which he still runs to this day.

  Early life

  Abagnale was born in 1948 and grew up in Westchester County, New York. His father ran a stationery store. He received a religious education at a school run by The Congregation of Christian Brothers, an Irish Catholic sect, which later received a great deal of criticism for abuse of children in their care.

  When he was sixteen, his parents divorced, and his life began to go off the rails. He began to spend money on his father’s credit cards, running up huge bills and attempting to impress his girlfriends with his wealth. To begin with, his father was reasonably tolerant of his behaviour, but when he realised that Frank Jr was about to bankrupt him, he put a stop to the spending sprees. At this point, traumatised by his parents’ split and all the financial problems he had created for his father, he ran away from home. He never saw his father again, but over a decade later, made contact with his mother once more.

  ‘The Big Nale’

  Thus it was that, at the age of just sixteen, Abagnale began life on his own in New York City. He had one advantage over the other runaways that came to the city: although he was young, he found it easy to get by: strangely enough, his hair had begun to turn gray, giving him a mature, authoritative air. Taking advantage of his looks, he altered his driving license to pretend he was ten years older than he was, and from then on began a career of crime in the city that later earned him the name ‘The Big Nale’.

  Realising that counterfeiting could earn him a living, Abagnale decided to make some changes to his bank account. He managed to alter the numbers on the deposit slips normally found at his bank in such a way that each time a client of the bank made a deposit into their account, it went into Abagnale’s account instead. In this way, he amassed over 40,000 dollars before the bank discovered what was going on. However, not content with this sum, he also wrote hundreds of bad cheques that went unpaid. In addition, he ran up a huge overdraft on his account.

  Realising that his frauds were going undetected, at least for a number of weeks, sometimes months, Abagnale went on to open a number of other accounts in several banks. He also developed a range of fraudulent banking activities, such as printing out counterfeit cheques, putting them into his account and then asking to borrow large sums of money on his account.

  The Skywayman

  Eventually, his frauds were discovered, and Abagnale had to make a swift exit as a bank customer. He now had to look for new ways to earn a living. This time, he resolved to try his hand at a new type of fraud, which on the face of it, looked completely impossible: he took to impersonating aeroplane pilots so that he could ride around the country free of charge.

  He had found out that, within the aviation industry, pilots often rode around on aeroplanes as passengers, using seats that had not been booked and were available for staff only. The pilots charged their expenses to the airline company that employed them. This practise was known as ‘dead­heading’ and was a way in which airline companies helped each other out.

  The way Abagnale operated was to get a sample pass sent to him, which he then altered. He managed to obtain an FAA pilot’s certificate by buying a display plaque, copying it and resizing it to fit the ID form. He also got a Pan Am uniform by phoning the outfitters, telling them that he had lost his uniform and needed to buy another one in a hurry. The bill was charged to an employee of Pan Am. Armed with his new identity, and calling himself Frank Williams, he turned up at airports asking for a ride on TWA planes. The first time he did this, he did not know where the special seat for the pilots was located on the plane, and had to be shown where to sit by an air hostess; yet no one blew his cover. Indeed, airline pilots were so well respected in the 1960s that no one thought to ask him any questions at all, and he made many trips around the world as Pilot Frank William
s over a period of two years, earning the nickname, ‘The Skywayman’.

  Doctor at large

  Abagnale made the most of his new career impersonating an airline pilot, using his authoritative position to live the high life. He cashed bad cheques everywhere, and had many romances with air hostesses who often did not realise he was many years their junior. In addition, he travelled the world, which had been a long held ambition since he was a child. However, after a while, he got tired of being permanently on the run and of being unable to confide in anyone about his true identity. He became very lonely and decided that wanted a more stable life. Also, he knew that sooner or later, his subterfuge would be discovered.

  His next move was to rent an apartment in Georgia, which he did by pretending to be a doctor. Having secured the rental, he decided to take on the doctor’s persona for keeps. Not long afterwards, he met another doctor, who asked him if he could help out at the hospital where he worked. Extraordinarily, he was allowed to begin work at the hospital without anyone asking to see any evidence of his qualifications for the job. Yet such was Abagnale’s personal charm that he managed to cover his ignorance by joking and laughing with the staff, who found him to be a convivial character and who did not suspect for one moment that they were working with a man who did not even have a high-school diploma, let alone any qualifications in medicine.

  The wheel of deception

  By this time, Abagnale’s behaviour was verging on the insane, yet he did – thankfully – still have enough sense to quit the job when he realised that he was endangering his patients’ lives. He was also aware that soon enough he would be caught out and his lie exposed. Thus, he moved on again – this time to Louisiana, where he decided, overnight, to become a lawyer.

  His new job went well for a time, and he earned a good living, managing to fool everyone around him that he was a qualified attorney. However, as before, he soon realised that time was running out for him, so he switched again – this time, to the relatively harmless position of sociology lecturer. And so it went on, changing occupations under a variety of aliases – including Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Robert Monjo and Frank Adams – and amassing a huge fortune by forging cheques, until, finally, the wheel of deception came full circle and he returned to his first job, impersonating an airline pilot.

  The long arm of the law

  In the five years since he had first arrived in New York City as a sixteen-year-old, Abagnale had committed hundreds of frauds. Not surprisingly, by this time, a number of law enforcement agencies, both within and outside the United States, were looking for him. In fact, he was a wanted man in every American state, and was also being pursued by international police from a total of twenty-six countries.

  The end came when he was arrested while attempting to board an Air France plane in his guise as a Pan Am pilot. He was twenty-one years old. He was tried and convicted in a court of law in France, and given a prison sentence, before returning to the United States, where he also served a sentence. However, there was a twist to the tale: while in prison in the United States, he was approached by the US security services, which asked for help in solving a number of large fraud cases. In return for agreeing to help them, Abagnale was let out of jail and enabled to form his own company. He then paid off his debts and began a new career, this time for real – catching criminals guilty of fraud.

  Abalagne has since married, had a family and used his remarkable skills to catch other criminals. In 1980, he recounted the bizarre story of his life in a book entitled Catch Me if You Can, which was a bestselling title in the United States, and later became the basis of a film of the same name.

  Han van Meegeren

  Han van Meegeren was one of the most ingenious art forgers of his time, amassing a fortune for himself of around forty million dollars by the end of his career. He spent years developing techniques to produce perfect forgeries of Dutch masters such as Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch and Frans Hals, and was also a talented painter in his own right, as well as a skilled art restorer. His forgeries were so accurate that they would, most likely, never have been discovered as such until years after his death. However, during the occupation of Holland by the Germans in World War II, he sold one of his paintings to a leading member of the Nazi government, Hermann Goring. To begin with, nobody believed van Meegeren’s story, but he went on to prove his case, whereupon he was hailed as a national hero.

  Ridiculed artist

  He was born Henricus Antonius van Meegeren in Deventer, Holland, in 1899. The third child in the family, he was brought up a Roman Catholic. He developed an interest in art, but his father did not approve and sent him to study architecture at university. However, van Meegeren rebelled against his father and decided to do his own thing and become a painter. He developed a passion for the style of the Dutch Golden Age painters of the seventeenth century, so much so that they inspired his own works. Instead of painting in a contemporary style, he made reference to the historical paintings of the Golden Age, using the same rich colours and complex perspectives, but these did not go down well with the art critics of the day, who complained that his work was derivative and old-fashioned. In some instances, he was even ridiculed for his classic style. This meant that he could not pursue his career as an original artist, as no one would buy his pictures.

  Plan of revenge

  Stung by the critics’ panning of his work, van Meegeren plotted his revenge. He would paint a picture in the style of a Dutch master, present it to a gallery and then wait for the art critics of the day to praise it to the skies. He would then make it known that the painting was a fake, so that the critics would be revealed as stupid, ignorant and easily led. To confound them, he painted a beautiful Vermeer, using his by now well-honed skills as a painter of the period. It was entitled Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus and was a careful copying of Vermeer’s style, down to the type of canvases, brushes, paints and glazes used in the seventeenth century. He made sure to give the painting the appearance of extreme age, baking the glaze so that the painting looked old and grubby.

  Van Meegeren claimed that the painting was an unknown, early work by Vermeer, and it caused great excitement when it was first shown. In the absence of scientific dating techniques, to accurately measure the age of a painting, such as are available today, the critics declared the painting genuine. To van Meegeren’s delight, one of the critics was Abraham Bredius, whose reviews of van Meegeren’s work had been scathing. Van Meegeren had the pleasure of standing with a large crowd in front of the painting, and hearing Bredius praise it to the skies, declaring that it was Vermeer’s ‘masterpiece’.

  Van Meegeren came up with a plausible story as to how he had acquired the painting, telling potential buyers that it had come from an aristocratic Italian family who had lost their money and needed funds, but they did not want it to be known who they were. Eventually, the painting was bought by the Boymans Museum of Rotterdam for the sum of two and a half million dollars.

  Large fortune

  Van Meegeren had painted Christ at Emmaus to show up his critics rather than to make a fortune. However, his success in fooling the art world was such that he now realised he could make huge sums of money by continuing his career as a forger. Beginning with Christ at Emmaus, which fetched a huge sum, over the next few years he began a series of forgeries, including works by Pieter de Hooch, Frans Hals and – of course – Vermeer.

  So accurate were they that nothing was suspected for years, and van Meegeren was able to amass a large fortune from the proceeds of the paintings. He was helped by the fact that the World War II broke out, causing a certain amount of chaos and bringing into being a busy black market trade in all kinds of valuable goods, including old masters, as currencies declined in value. One of his paintings became the most expensive ever sold in the world at the time, fetching over a million Dutch guilders.

  Van Meegeren was now a very rich man, and he proceeded to spend his money with great abandon, developing a taste for the high life. S
oon, he became renowned for his drink and drug-fuelled excesses. It became clear, however, that his wealth had not brought him happiness in his personal life. Commentators have suggested that the reason for this lay in the fact that he had never been taken seriously as an original artist, even though he was a highly skilled painter, and that despite his wealth, this lack of recognition continued to rankle with him.

  Nazi collector

  Van Meegeren went on painting Vermeers, producing six more after the ‘Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus’. In 1943, he sold the last one, entitled ‘Christ and the Adultress’ to Hermann Goring, one of the most prominent members of the Nazi regime. At the time, the Nazis were occupying Holland. At the end of the war, the Dutch authorities began the work of restoring the art works that the Nazis had plundered from the country, and the Vermeer was found in Goring’s collection. It came to light that the Vermeer had been sold to him by van Meegeren, so the authorities contacted van Meegeren to find out more. He was arrested and charged with collaboration, which was a serious crime at the time, amounting to treason and carrying with it the death penalty.