Find the Fraud

Did you ever get the impression that everyone is lying to you? It happens to me all the time, and the one way to find out who's telling the truth and who's a wretched liar is to read up on fraud. Happily enough, there are plenty of books on the subject.

Fakers tackles a number of forgeries, most of them in the artistic or literary arena. From Clifford Irving's biography of Howard Hughes to Stephen Glass's journalistic escapades, the author loves examining the gray areas where truth becomes fiction.

If you're looking for more dangerous frauds, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit follows the trail of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German man who immigrated to the United States and eventually conned people into thinking he was a Rockefeller. His story takes a series of dark turns, particularly when it's revealed that at one point he may have committed murder. At the point of publication, the murder mystery hadn't yet been solved, but if you don't mind spoilers, plenty of newspapers covered the outcome of the trial. The book is a disturbing dissection of the personality of an obsessive conman.

By contrast, Catch Me If You Can manages to make large-scale forgery and theft sound cute. This could be because the book was partly written by the conman himself, Frank Abagnale, Jr., who claims to have impersonated a doctor, a lawyer, an airline pilot and a number of other professionals. I was so entertained that midway through the book I began to think the author was pulling another con, and it wasn't long before I found out that Abagnale was later forced to clarify some of the claims made by the book and the movie.

It turns out books about fraud can fool you, but through careful study, maybe you'll finally find out who has their hands in your pockets.