Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  Because of the situation van Meegeren found himself in, he was forced to confess the fact that the painting was a forgery executed by him, and not a Vermeer at all. To begin with, the authorities did not believe him, but while in prison, van Meegeren conceived a plan to convince them that this was the truth.

  The sad demise

  He asked for his art materials to be brought to him and proceeded to paint a picture under surveillance by his jailers. To everyone’s amazement, he produced a painting that looked exactly like the work of Vermeer, entitling it ‘Jesus among the Doctors’. It was clear that van Meegeren had the skills to produce an extremely persuasive forgery, and one that would fool even the most highly regarded art expert. As a result, the authorities changed the charge against him, from treason to forgery.

  The fact that he had not been let off the charges infuriated van Meegeren, and he refused to finish off the painting by glazing it and rubbing dirt into the glaze to give it the appearance of age. Even so, he was brought to trial and convicted, receiving a prison sentence of one year. The trial attracted massive press attention, and van Meegeren emerged as something of a national hero. The public warmed to the forger as the man who had cheated the hated Nazi figure Hermann Goring, although it later transpired that Goring had paid for the fake painting with fake currency!

  Sadly, however, van Meegeren was by this time a sick man, and in no position to enjoy his new-found fame and popularity. His abuse of drink and drugs had taken its toll on his health, and instead of serving out his sentence, he was sent to hospital. He died there on December 30, 1947.

  After his death, his works sparked a debate in the art world about the status of forgeries. Commentators such as Arthur Koestler argued that if a copy or forgery is so good that it fools even the experts and delights visitors at museums and galleries where it is shown, there is no real basis to reject it. However, others have pointed out that, sooner or later, it becomes clear that forgeries are not the real thing, however good they are: in van Meegeren’s case, his Vermeer paintings now look like artefacts from the 1930s and 1940s, with elements of film noir in the way the faces are lit, rather than originals from the seventeenth century.

  Clifford Irving

  Clifford Irving is notorious for faking an autobiography of Howard Hughes, the eccentric millionaire who had become a complete recluse after living a highly public life as a movie mogul and businessman in the 1950s. Irving and his co-writer Richard Suskind believed that Hughes’ aversion to publicity was such that he would never step forward to condemn the autobiography as a hoax. However, as it turned out, Hughes broke his silence to do exactly that, and Irving’s ruse was discovered.

  Fascination with forgery

  Irving was born on November 5, 1930, the son of talented media people. His mother Dorothy was a magazine cover artist and his father Jay was a celebrated cartoonist. Irving grew up in a creative environment and attended Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art before going on to study at Cornell University. As a young man he worked at the New York Times, while writing his debut novel, On a Darkling Plain. He also married his first wife, Nina Wilcox, but the marriage broke up after only two years. The novel was published in 1956 and received good reviews, but it did not sell many copies. Irving took time off to travel in Europe and write a second novel, The Losers. This was published in 1958. He lived on the island of Ibiza, remarried, then returned to the United States with his new wife Claire Lydon. Sadly, she died soon afterwards in a car crash. Irving then published a third novel, The Valley, and in 1962 returned to Ibiza. He married again, this time to a British model, Fay Brooke, but the marriage was short-lived. With his fourth wife, artist Edith Sommer, he had two sons.

  While in Ibiza, he became friends with the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory, and wrote a biography of de Hory’s life entitled Fake! Published in 1969, the book was an immediate success. Both Irving and de Hory appeared in a documentary by Orson Welles called F For Fake in 1974, which helped make de Hory a well-known figure.

  Encouraged by this success, and fascinated by the world of forgery, fakes and frauds, Irving came up with a daring plan: to fake an autobiography of the world’s most famous recluse, Howard Hughes.

  The Howard Hughes legend

  During the 1950s, Howard Hughes was one of the United States’ most brilliant public figures, a pioneer of the movie industry and an entrepreneur whose personal charisma and legendary wealth made him a constant focus of attention for the media. By 1958, however, Hughes had tired of the constant glare of publicity and had become completely withdrawn, refusing any contact with the outside world. Reports that he was mentally ill, and would not, for instance, cut his hair or his nails, fuelled public curiosity as to his personal life. There were even reports that he was terminally ill, or possibly dead. As a result, many writers and film-makers had attempted to enquire into what was really going on in Hughes’ world, but Hughes had always managed to bribe them to stop publishing or broadcasting anything concerning him. Irving reasoned that, since Hughes had such a deep aversion to drawing attention to himself, he would not make a fuss when the fake autobiography appeared, but would simply retreat further into his reclusive environment. He was wrong.

  Together with author Richard Suskind, Irving decided to concoct the autobiography, using material from news archives to document the different periods in Hughes’ life. Suskind was in charge of the research for the book, while Irving used his creative talents to forge letters in Hughes’ handwriting. Together, they produced a series of letters, purportedly from Hughes to Irving, in which Hughes expressed interest in the idea of allowing Irving to assist him in writing his autobiography. According to the forged letters, Hughes knew of Irving’s work, in particular the de Hory biography, and would let Irving conduct a series of interviews that might lead to a book. However, Hughes insisted that, for the moment, the project should remain secret.

  The hoax

  Armed with the letters, Irving got in touch with McGraw-Hill, his publishers, and told them that Hughes had expressed an interest in letting him work on his life story. Excited by this news, the publishers invited Irving to show them the letters, which Irving did. They were fooled and drew up contracts between Irving, Hughes and themselves, promising an advance of over 800 dollars, most of which was due to be paid to Hughes. When the cheque arrived, Irving’s wife put it in a Swiss bank account. The deal was set, and Irving had been paid. All he had to do now was to write the book.

  The fact that Hughes was so secretive about every aspect of his life helped enormously to keep the truth from the publishers while the book was being written. Irving and Suskind reported meetings with Hughes in remote spots far from anywhere, enjoying themselves with tall stories about where and when they had met Hughes – for example, in one instance, on the top of a pyramid in Mexico.

  The book itself was a highly imaginative account of Hughes’ life, using material culled from a variety of sources, such as the private files of Time-Life magazine, and an unpublished manuscript by author James Phelan, who was engaged on ghost­writing the memoirs of Hughes’ former business manager, Noah Dietrich. Phelan did not know that a mutual acquaintance, Stanley Meyer, had given Irving the manuscript to look at, in the hope that he could rewrite it in a more accessible style.

  In 1971, the manuscript arrived at the publishers, McGraw-Hill. The story of Hughes’ life was somewhat lurid and far-fetched, but it was written in a gripping style, and executives at McGraw-Hill were delighted with it. To check its veracity, an expert graphologist was called in to study the handwritten notes on the manuscript, supposedly from Hughes, and the letters were declared to be genuine. McGraw-Hill announced that the book would be published, to great excitement in the literary world.

  However, those who had contact with some of Hughes’ business interests expressed doubts, saying that they had heard nothing about it from the Hughes organisation. Irving argued that the book had been kept a secret, and that Hughes had not told anybody about it while it was
being written. Others, however, expressed their belief that the autobiography was authentic: for example, the last journalist ever to have interviewed Hughes, Frank McCullough, read the manuscript and pronounced it to be a true story. To attempt to authenticate the autobiography further, McGraw-Hill called in a new team of graphologists, Osborn Associates, who also found Hughes’ handwritten notes to be authentic, and asked Irving to undergo a lie detector test, which he passed. It looked to Irving and Suskind as though they had pulled off their scam.

  Endgame

  But then Hughes spoke. To everyone’s amazement he contacted seven journalists whom he had worked with in former times, and conducted a telephone conference with them, which was filmed for television. Speaking down the line, Hughes announced that the autobiography was a hoax, and that he had never met Clifford Irving in his life. He said that he, Hughes, was living in the Bahamas and had not left to meet anyone anywhere. This was sensational news, and the world’s press were, of course, riveted. Irving immediately countered this claim by saying that Hughes’ voice, heard on television, was a fake, and that the journalists had rigged up the whole story to discredit him. However, by this time, his claims were beginning to sound far-fetched, as indeed they were.

  Before long, Hughes’ lawyers were suing not only Irving and his publishers. Swiss police investigated the bank where the cheque from McGraw-Hill to Irving had been deposited, and found that a bank account had been opened in the name of Helga R Hughes. The cheque to H R Hughes had been received shortly afterwards. Police were sent to Ibiza to interview the couple, but once again, Irving denied that he had been involved in the fraud. In the meantime, author James Phelan had noticed that some of the facts from his own book had been lifted from the text. Then the Swiss bank revealed that their account holder was a woman, and the deposited cheque was traced to Edith Irving, Clifford’s wife. Finally, Irving’s cover was blown.

  On January 28, 1972, Clifford Irving and his wife, along with Richard Suskind, confessed everything. They were charged with fraud and went to trial in March of the same year. Irving was convicted and received a prison sentence of fourteen months. His co-author Suskind received a lighter sentence of six months, but in the event only served five. Irving returned the money to his publishers. He spent his time in prison getting fit, also gave up smoking while he was there. After he came out of jail, Irving went on with his career as an author, writing a number of bestselling titles and earning substantial advances for his work.

  Joyti De-Laurey

  Joyti De-Laurey is remembered as the personal assistant who stole over four million pounds from her employers at the bank of Goldman Sachs in the City of London. Starting in 2001, she siphoned money from her bosses’ personal bank accounts into her own, enjoying a lifestyle of reckless spending that would have been completely beyond the means of someone on a personal secretary’s salary. However, such was her charm that her bosses suspected nothing, and it was only after she became greedy and stole too much money at once, that she drew attention to herself. She was found out, arrested, brought to trial and convicted.

  The whole affair attracted a great deal of media attention, especially when it was pointed out that the large amounts of money that De-Laurey had stolen from her employers had gone undiscovered simply because the individuals concerned were so rich that they did not notice the loss of a few million here or there. Thus, in a sense, when the De-Laurey affair hit the headlines and the astronomical incomes of those at the top of the financial elite began to emerge, it was the banking world, as much as De-Laurey herself, that was put on trial, at least in terms of media and popular opinion.

  Money laundering

  Joyti De-Laurey was a thirty-five-year-old Hindu woman married to a fifty-year-old chauffer named Tony. The couple lived in a suburban house on relatively modest means. De-Laurey worked as a personal secretary at Goldman Sachs, one of the leading investment banks in London, on a modest salary of around 20,000 pounds. Her bosses were millionaire banker Jennifer Moses and Moses’ husband Ron Beller. As well as dealing with normal office arrangements, De-Laurey undertook to organise all aspects of their busy personal lives, such as arranging birthday parties, holidays abroad, shopping trips, beauty sessions and so on. De-Laurey was extremely hard-working and went to great lengths to please her employers, so much so that as time went on, they began to leave everything to her, congratulating themselves on having found such a helpful personal assistant who could work on her own initiative. They even awarded De-Laurey substantial bonuses for what they thought was her loyal service to them.

  Unbeknown to them, however, De-Laurey was swindling them on an almost daily basis, forging their signatures on their personal cheque books, and helping herself whenever she liked to money from their personal accounts. She began cautiously, signing cheques for small amounts of money at first, but when her bosses appeared not to notice what was going on, she became more daring. She began to take out bigger and bigger amounts, making over seventy withdrawals in a period of only four months. To hide what she was doing, she opened bank accounts abroad under her maiden name and enlisted the help of other members of her family in her money-laundering venture.

  The high life

  Strangely enough, although De-Laurey began to live the high life as the money poured in, nobody at the bank noticed what was going on. Her neighbours were surprised to see a fleet of luxury cars parked outside her house, and they noticed that her husband Tony was driving around on an expensive motor bike complete with personalised number plates. De-Laurey also made a lot of alterations to her house and took holidays whenever she could. She and her husband loved holidaying in Cyprus and bought a luxurious villa and a boat there. The villa alone was worth 700,000 pounds. She also bought a Range Rover and a custom-built Aston Martin. Not only this, the couple began to take flying lessons, spending at least 2,000 pounds on a course for herself and her husband. According to De-Laurey’s neighbours, who were watching all this with amazement, and were interviewed later, they thought she had won the lottery and so no questions were asked.

  De-Laurey’s next scam was outrageous, and later attracted a great deal of criticism in the press. She told her employers that she had contracted cervical cancer, and needed to have expensive treatment at a hospital in the United States. Such was the warmth of her bosses’ affection and concern for her that they paid for the trip. What they did not know was that, instead of going to hospital, De-Laurey was spending the time away from work in a luxury hotel in Beverly Hills, shopping on Rodeo Drive and eating out in the finest restaurants in the area.

  Two million missing

  On her return, De-Laurey began to work for Edward Scott Mead, a director at Goldman Sachs. She came with glowing references from her previous bosses, Jennifer Moses and Ron Beller. Her new boss Mead was even richer than Moses, and De-Laurey resolved to steal ever larger amounts of money from him, aware that he was too wealthy to notice what was going on. However, it was at this point that she made her mistake. She became too greedy, and her behaviour became reckless. Amazingly, she stole two million pounds out of Mead’s account, but it was only four months later that he became aware of it, when he dipped into his funds to make a charity donation to his former college.

  When Mead found out what had happened, he was naturally furious and had De-Laurey arrested and charged. When the case came to trial, De-Laurey was convicted and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. The others received shorter sentences. Mead called De-Laurey a liar and a thief, and announced that she had abused the trust of the bank directors in the most cynical, calculating way. However, the press were less than sympathetic to Mead, particularly when it emerged that he had so much money in his account that he had not noticed the loss of two million pounds for several months.

  Sordid details

  As the trial progressed, sordid details about Mead’s personal life began to come out, including the fact that he was having an affair. De-Laurey had tried to defend herself by claiming that Mead had paid her the mo
ney to cover up details of the affair, but this proved to be untrue; however, during the course of the trial, Mead was forced to admit that he had, as De-Laurey claimed, indeed been unfaithful to his wife. In addition, it emerged that the salaries paid to the bank’s top executives were exorbitantly high, and the press became extremely critical of this aspect of the bankers’ personal lives as well. The picture that emerged in the newspapers and on television was one of over-paid, over-privileged capitalists at Goldman Sachs and other banks in the city, living a life of ease and luxury while their minions did all the work. Because of this, journalists expressed a certain amount of sympathy with De-Laurey’s attempt to redress the balance by helping herself to their inflated salaries whenever she had the opportunity.

  The De-Laurey affair also prompted discussion of some of the more shady dealings of the banking world, which some argued were not very different to the type of activities that De-Laurey had engaged in. Such was the hostility in the press towards Mead, in particular, that he complained to the newspapers that he often felt as though he, not the defendant, was on trial. And when De-Laurey was given a seven-year prison sentence, many felt that this was overly harsh; she had been shown to be a thief, they argued, but her actions had not caused any real hardship to anyone, and therefore she should have received a more lenient sentence.