A Treasury of Deception Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part I - SUPER-DUPERS

  Chapter 1 - Charlatan’s Web

  Chapter 2 - A Taste for Trickery

  Chapter 3 - “Prince of Humbugs”

  Chapter 4 - Unreal Estate

  Chapter 5 - Imposter on a Role

  Chapter 6 - CHINcanery

  Part II - ALL THE NEWS THAT’S SLIPPED TO PRINT

  Chapter 1 - What Janet Cooked Up

  Chapter 2 - Ben Franklin: The Devil Made Him Do It

  Chapter 3 - A Poe Excuse for a Hoax

  Chapter 4 - The Sun Promises the Moon

  Chapter 5 - The Hoax That Roared

  Chapter 6 - Extra! Greed All About It!

  Chapter 7 - False Alarm

  Chapter 8 - Mencken Up History

  Chapter 9 - Khmer Ruse

  Chapter 10 - Times Bomb

  Part III - THE WARS OF THE RUSES

  Chapter 1 - The Agony of Deceit

  Chapter 2 - Sun‘s Burn

  Chapter 3 - A Bridge Too Far?

  Chapter 4 - Stretching the Troops

  Chapter 5 - Warning: Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Success

  Chapter 6 - Drowned and Dirty: The Man Who Never Was

  Chapter 7 - Phantom Force

  Part IV - STATE-SPONSORED DECEPTIONS

  Chapter 1 - A Bogus Bequest

  Chapter 2 - Three Kings with Aces Up Their Sleeves

  Chapter 3 - Cardinal Sin

  Chapter 4 - Tricking a Fight

  Chapter 5 - The Lies and Fraud of the Third Reich

  Chapter 6 - Elena’s Padded Résumé

  Chapter 7 - Gadhafi: Dead to Rights

  Chapter 8 - Red, White, and Not Always True

  Part V - SCIENCE FICTIONS

  Chapter 1 - Monkey Business

  Chapter 2 - Bunny Tale

  Chapter 3 - Casting Stones

  Chapter 4 - A Hoax in Perpetuity

  Chapter 5 - Diagnostic Deception

  Chapter 6 - A Naked Lie

  Chapter 7 - Duplicity

  Part VI - FANTASTIC FORGERIES AND LITERARY FRAUDS

  Chapter 1 - Shrouding the Truth

  Chapter 2 - To Be ... Or Not to Be the Bard

  Chapter 3 - They Just Can’t Be Etruscted

  Chapter 4 - French Fraud

  Chapter 5 - A Thin Vermeer

  Chapter 6 - Not Quite the Surreal Deal

  Chapter 7 - “Con Man of the Year”

  Chapter 8 - Führer over a Fraud

  Chapter 9 - Murder, Ink

  Part VII - THE DEADLIEST LIES EVER TOLD

  Chapter 1 - The Blood Libel

  Chapter 2 - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

  Chapter 3 - Witchcraze

  Chapter 4 - A Big Red Lie

  Chapter 5 - What in the Name of God!

  Part VIII - THE GREAT PRETENDERS

  Chapter 1 - The Paupers Who Would Be Prince

  Chapter 2 - Tsar Struck

  Chapter 3 - Queen-Wanna-Be

  Chapter 4 - A School of Dauphins

  Chapter 5 - The Last Tsarevna?

  Part IX - ESCAPES HATCHED

  Chapter 1 - A Bloody Good Ruse

  Chapter 2 - Cross-Dressed for Success

  Chapter 3 - Special Delivery from Bondage

  Chapter 4 - Sneak Retreat

  Chapter 5 - Out of Colditz

  Part X - GOTCHA!

  Chapter 1 - No Shot, Sherlock: An Unlikely Fairy Tale

  Chapter 2 - The Weirdest Thing You Ever Sawed

  Chapter 3 - Home Delivery

  Chapter 4 - A Ruse of One’s Own

  Chapter 5 - Practically Indecent: Alan Abel and the Siege of Troy

  Chapter 6 - Plucking Pasta and Pulling Legs

  Chapter 7 - Painting the Town Purple

  Chapter 8 - Underhand Pitches

  Appendix I - Ten Tricksters from Scripture

  Appendix II - Ten Great Liars in Literature

  Appendix III - Ten Classic Deceptions from Greek Mythology

  Appendix IV - Ten Egregious Examples of Modern American Doublespeak

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A TREASURY OF DECEPTION

  Michael Farquhar is the author of A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories of History’s Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors and A Treasury of Great American Scandals: Tantalizing True Tales of Historic Misbehavior by the Founding Fathers and Others Who Let Freedom Swing. A writer and editor at The Washington Post specializing in history, he is coauthor of The Century: History as It Happened on the Front Page of the Capital’s Newspaper. His work has been published in The Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, Reader’s Digest, and Discovery Online. He appeared on the History Channel’s programs Russia:The Land of the Tsars and The French Revolution.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Penguin Books 2005

  Copyright © Michael Farquhar, 2005

  All rights reserved

  Illustration credits

  Frontispiece: Patterson Clark

  Page 140: Copyright © Nick Galifianakis, 2005

  All other illustrations: The Granger Collection, New York

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Farquhar, Michael.

  A treasury of deception : liars, misleaders, hoodwinkers, and the extraordinary true

  stories of history’s greatest hoaxes, fakes, and frauds / Michael Farquhar.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-0-143-03544-2

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  C/R TK

  For my mom and dad,

  who (except about Santa Claus)

  have always told me the truth.

  “All that deceives may be said to enchant.”

  —PLATO

  Introduction

  Beauty is truth,” Keats wrote, “truth beauty.” History, however, is blemished, disfigured even, by deception. The quest for truth, mankind’s greatest ambition, has forever been compromised in favor of more immediate considerations—not all of t
hem ignoble, by the way. The hoodwinking of Hitler, for example, may very well have saved civilization. The frequent sacrifice of our ideals is a fundamental part of being human, and the great lies perpetrated throughout history are as varied and nuanced as humanity itself.

  For centuries the Vatican laid claim to much of Europe because of a preposterously forged document known as the Donation of Constantine. In 1915 renowned scientists declared the so-called Piltdown Man irrefutable evidence of the missing link between man and ape, even though it turned out to be a clumsy concoction made from the skull of a medieval Englishman and the jawbone of an orangutan. Hitler never wrote his diaries. Anastasia never escaped the Bolsheviks. Nostradamus didn’t have a clue about the future. And Bill Clinton really did have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

  Call this a historical treasury of imposters, charlatans, and liars. Or call it a hoax: a bogus excuse for a book of no actual value, other than the gleeful celebration of the art of deceit. Some of the stories may be familiar. Pardon the retelling, but no collection of deception would be complete without them. Many are culled from the annals of Western civilization, a reflection of the author’s woeful ignorance of the Eastern world. And, most important, though this is an anthology of lies, every story is true!

  Nostradamus: Fraud of the “Centuries“

  Part I

  SUPER-DUPERS

  All of the characters in this treasury of deception could rightly be called “super-dupers,” but those featured in this part of the book don’t fit neatly into categories as the others do. Sure, they were all con men of sorts, but each had a unique flair for mendacity.

  1

  Charlatan’s Web

  If Nostradamus was such a know-it-all, why didn’t he clue in his beloved king that it might be a good idea to sit out the tournament that would kill him in 1559? Instead, the famed sixteenth-century “seer,” born Michel de Nostredame, wrote a dedicatory epistle to Henri II in his book of prophesies, Centuries, predicting great things for the French monarch. He even went so far as to call the king “invincible.” Soon after, Henri was dead, the victim of a freak jousting accident. Subsequently, however, Nostradamus flourished under the patronage of King Henri’s widow, Catherine de Médicis. And, thanks to four centuries’ worth of credulous disciples, he is still flourishing.

  Through the nearly one thousand quatrains that constitute Centuries, Nostradamus has been credited with predicting a wide range of calamities, from the Great Fire of London to the rise of Hitler. The methods he used to write his predictions, and the way his believers have interpreted them, are a marvel of systematic deception and unwavering faith. The trick, perhaps best articulated by noted debunker James “The Amazing” Randi, is to make lots of pronouncements, cage them in ambiguous language, and use as much symbolism and allegory as possible. Those who are desperate to believe can then cram into them an almost infinite amount of meaning and truth.

  John Hogue, for example, marvels over Nostradamus’s remarkable abilities in a number of books. He has a field day with this quatrain:

  The religion of the name of the seas will win,

  Against the sect of the son of Adaluncatif,

  The obstinate deplored sect will be afraid

  Of the two who are wounded by A & A.

  This of course refers to Libyan despot Mu’ammar Gadhafi, Hogue gushes. “Adaluncatif” is obviously an anagram for Cadafi Luna (even if there is no place for that extra t), which he translates into “Gadhafi Moon.” The moon features a crescent, which happens to be a symbol of Islam. Then there’s this quatrain, used to prove the master’s foreknowledge of the Beast of Berlin:

  Beasts mad with hunger will swim across rivers,

  Most of the army will be against the Lower Danube.

  The great one shall be dragged in an iron cage

  When the child brother will observe nothing.

  The old Latin word for the Lower Danube, used on Roman maps of the area, is Hister, which sounds so much like Hitler that Nostradamians have been in ecstasy ever since they made the (tenuous) connection. Before then, the verse was applied to a Turkish invasion of the region, an event that conveniently occurred before Nostradamus wrote Centuries. This was a sure way to guarantee a successful prophecy.

  Cataclysmic events being his forte, Nostradamus predicted the end of the world. Interpretations of when that would be, however, vary between 1999 and 7000. It is impossible to determine an exact date because Nostradamus knew the greatest rule of prophecy: avoid specifics at all costs.

  2

  A Taste for Trickery

  His real name is unknown to this day, but the man calling himself George Psalmanazar created one of the most impressive and successful hoaxes in history. He arrived in London in 1704, billing himself as the “Native of Formosa.” Although he had never been near the island (present-day Taiwan, which at that time was largely unexplored), he told excited audiences that he was a member of a princely Formosan family who had made his way to Japan and then to the outside world. His book, An Historical and Geographic Description of Formosa, presented elaborate details and drawings of Formosan clothing, culture, religion, and manners—all entirely fabricated. It even had a Formosan alphabet chart.

  Psalmanazar became a European sensation. His book was a bestseller, and was translated into a number of languages. Scientific societies sat spellbound at his lectures. The Formosa he described was a strange and brutal society, where a man had only to declare his wife an adulteress in order to behead and eat her. Each year, he said, eighteen thousand boys under the age of nine were sacrificed to the Formosan god, and cannibalism was lustily practiced. The consumption of the blood of snakes, he said, allowed most Formosans to live well past one hundred years.

  If anyone ever disputed Psalmanazar on his facts, he held firm to a strategy of stubbornness. “What ever I had once affirmed in conversation,” he later wrote, “tho’ to ever so few people, and tho’ ever so improbable, or even absurd, should never be amended or contradicted in the narrative. Thus having once, inadvertently in conversation, made the yearly number of sacrificed infants to amount to eighteen thousand, I could never be persuaded to lessen it, though I had been often made sensible of the impossibility of so small an island losing so many inhabitants every year, without becoming at length quite depopulated, supposing the inhabitants to have been so stupid as to comply.”

  Psalmanazar’s ruse was so successful that the Bishop of London sent him to Oxford, where he was to study and lecture on Formosan history, and the Anglican Church commissioned him to translate the Old and New Testaments into his native language. Within a few years, though, the charade began to crumble and its perpetrator was increasingly burdened by guilt, as well as a wicked opium addiction. His tortured memoirs, published two years after his death in 1763, revealed the deception—but never his true identity.

  3

  “Prince of Humbugs”

  It was 1842, a year of great scientific advances. Joseph Henry discovered the oscillatory character of the electrical discharge, while Christian Doppler lent his name to the effect of a moving source on sound waves. The first law of thermodynamics was introduced, and ether was used for the first time as a surgical anesthetic. Steam-powered ships plied America’s waterways, a feat unimaginable to most just a few years before, and Queen Victoria gave the royal stamp of approval to a new method of transportation when she took her first train ride.

  Science and technology certainly seemed to rule in 1842, but in that very same year of stunning human achievement, P.T. Barnum, the self-styled “Prince of Humbugs,” put on display a blatant fraud he called “the Feejee Mermaid.” People lined up by the thousands to see what amounted to the head and torso of a dead monkey attached to the tail of a dried-out fish. They were, it seemed, as eager as ever to swallow any heap of bunk fed to them. What was wrong? Shouldn’t folks living in such an enlightened era have been just a bit more sophisticated? Well, not necessarily.

  Some historians say it was
precisely because of the dizzying rate of progress that people were left so credulous. The onslaught of new discoveries made almost anything seem possible. It was this dynamic that made the New York Sun’s bogus accounts of life on the moon so believable (see Part II, Chapter 4). And it’s what buttered P.T. Barnum’s bread. “Every crowd has a silver lining,” he reportedly said, and it was his life’s mission to relieve them of it.

  The legendary showman and humbug artist made his debut in 1835 with an exhibition of what he called “the most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the world,” an elderly black woman named Joice Heth. She was 161 years old, Barnum trumpeted, and had served as a nurse to none other than George Washington when he was just a baby. A master of publicity, Barnum corralled huge audiences in New York with handbills, posters, and paid newspaper features announcing the “most ancient specimen of mortality” Americans were ever likely to encounter, the first person “to put clothes” on the father of the nation.

  So successful was the New York exhibition of Joice Heth that Barnum put her on a tour of New England to regale the public with tales of little George and the Washington family. When interest began to wane, Barnum was prepared. He planted a letter in a Boston newspaper that claimed Joice Heth was a fraud, “a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numberless springs, ingeniously put together and made to move at the slightest touch, according to the will of the operator.” It was a brilliant ploy. Now people paid to see whether Joice Heth was real, or some kind of robot.1

  With his career launched, Barnum began to assemble other curiosities to display at his new American Museum in New York City. Many of the objects were of dubious origin, like a wooden leg said to have belonged to General Santa Anna, but few items excited the masses like the Feejee Mermaid. Barnum described it to an associate: “The animal was an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen, about three feet long. Its mouth was open, its tail turned over, and its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony.” Unappealing as it may have been, Barnum was determined to make his “mermaid” a real money maker.