In some ways, public reputations bring out our best. Charities get more money. Worthy causes gain support. Reputation can even make people “cut off their nose to save their face,” in the words of psychologist Bert Brown. In 1977, he found that, to impress an audience, people would incur huge personal costs: I will sacrifice myself—so long as it’s publicly, of course—to prove to everyone else what a great person I am. In the grifter’s hands, the same effect works to not-so-worthy ends, through no fault of our own. The sheepish man who lost his wallet gets his ten bucks; Hartzell lives to swindle another day.
Reputation comes with a dark side: the same public that rewards us can create vast amounts of pressure, sometimes very difficult to resist, for us to keep performing in ways that grow ever more difficult. Take a scientist making a research career or a journalist establishing his writing chops. You work your ass off, and there is the payoff. A paper in Science. A piece in The New Yorker. You are thrilled. You’re making it. Suddenly, a broad vision of the future is swimming in front of you. The benefits this research will have. The breakthroughs your story has achieved. Prizes, awards, envy from colleagues: we allow all the potentially good things to come to overshadow any shortcomings or doubts we have about our ability to achieve them quickly.
But the glow quickly fades, and it’s on to the next paper, the next story, the next book. Unless you can keep producing, you will fade from the public eye and that glorious vision will never come to pass. You not only have to keep producing; you have to do so quickly, before everyone has forgotten about you. And you have to do it at increasingly high levels. Something that was good for your first big break won’t sustain you over the long haul. Then, you were a neophyte. Now you’re more seasoned. In academia, it certainly doesn’t help that the world is screaming “Publish or perish!” in increasingly harsh tones. Produce, produce, produce. Produce, or be eaten alive.
So what do you do? It took you so long to get that first masterpiece out into the world. But now that it’s out there, you don’t have the luxury of the same amount of time for the follow-up. To most people, it means taking a deep sigh and acknowledging that the glimpse of greatness was but that. You will have to keep slogging along and hope that, with effort and luck, you’ll once more reach a comparable place. Yes, you’ll be out of the spotlight. Yes, your colleague might get tenure faster. But you will do your best, and eventually you will get there.
Others, however, crack—under the pressure of performance, often from people who happen to be very important, coupled with the memory of the warm glow of adulation. And so, they begin to cut corners. One common explanation for Jonah Lehrer’s dramatic fall—the one he gives himself, in fact—is that he was under too much pressure. So he started to borrow from himself rather than produce new work. Then he started to borrow from others. Then he started to change the facts themselves to better fit a nice story. The rest, of course, is history. Same for Marc Hauser or Diederik Stapel, two of the most high-profile perpetrators of academic fraud in recent years. First it’s one small massaged data point. Then you have a reputation to sustain, and new, breaking research to publish. You cannot subsist on history alone. The rest, of course, is history.
The pressures of reputation that are so essential to the blow-off and fix can also, at their strongest, create con artists where there were none before: the same force that makes people loath to disclose they’ve been had can sometimes make those same people into grifters in their own right.
Academia has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Before, you needed only a few publications to get a job offer. The pace was slower. Some people were offered their first job on the strength of their dissertation research. No more. It’s no longer uncommon for candidates for even entry-level positions to have CVs spanning pages upon pages, with dozens of publications, many of them first author, many in top journals. In a crowded field, it’s increasingly difficult to stand out.
Something else has changed in recent years, too: academic retractions, a sign, often, of the con artist at play on the academic turf. Over 1.4 million papers are published each year. Five hundred or so—a quarter of 1 percent—get retracted. About two thirds of those are because people willingly misled or falsified. There are, however, more and more every year. In the last two years alone, according to Retraction Watch, over 170 (and rising) scientific papers have been retracted for a very specific reason: their authors rigged the system of peer review to push their papers through to the end, in at least six separate cases. Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Wiley: the affected publishers are a who’s who of scientific research, the best of the best.
Starting in 2010, Peter Chen, an engineer at the National Pingtung University of Education in Taiwan, went on a publication spree. His research, it seemed, had finally borne fruit—and the Journal of Vibration and Control was seeing the result. Over the next four years, he submitted over sixty papers to the journal. The only problem: the e-mail addresses of the reviewers were fake. They were, in fact, all Chen himself—130 “assumed and fabricated” identities that, an investigation at SAGE found, was “a peer review and citation ring.” And some of the papers didn’t even list him as author. Chen had written papers under other names as well, likely to bolster his own citation count.
Chen almost got away with it. But in May 2013, an author who submitted a paper to the Journal of Vibration and Control received two e-mails from people claiming to be reviewers. In itself, that was remarkable: reviewers never contact authors directly. But the e-mail addresses themselves seemed suspect—they had been sent from Gmail accounts rather than academic institutions. Ali Nayfeh, the editor in chief, forwarded the tip to the publisher. The SAGE editors then e-mailed the reviewers—this time, at their academic posts. One scientist responded quickly. He’d never sent that e-mail and did not even work in a related field. The revelation prompted a fourteen-month investigation, spanning over twenty people in SAGE’s editorial, legal, and production departments. Eventually, 130 suspect e-mail addresses were identified, and SAGE announced retractions for sixty papers—one of the largest retractions in scientific history.
It’s a crime that permeates cyberspace. Take Orlando Figes, a prominent British historian, who admitted to writing fake book reviews on Amazon, praising his own books and attacking those of rivals, using false identities and accounts. And it’s a crime that often speaks of a willingness to bend other rules, as well. Figes was later accused of “inaccuracies” and “factual errors” in his history of the Stalin era, The Whisperers. The Russian translation was subsequently canceled, and allegations of improprieties in past books surfaced soon after. Reputation can be a demanding mistress. It makes you a more pliable mark, willing to help the blow-off along any way you can—but it can also make you into a more ready fraudster of your own.
It’s not that the confidence artist is inherently psychopathic, caring nothing about the fates of others. It’s that, to him, we aren’t worthy of consideration as human beings; we are targets, not unique people. We must forever be just another statistic—one in a stream of “jobs” rather than individuals in our own right. In something psychologists term the “identifiable-victim effect,” people tend to be more generous toward unique individuals than statistics. If you’re asked to donate money to, say, Doctors Without Borders, you will typically give less than if I were to ask you to support Annique, an eight-year-old from Ethiopia who has malaria. It makes no sense—the former needs more money than the latter, and you’d likely have more impact if you reversed your donation amounts—yet the emotional appeal of a victim we can seemingly touch, and certainly identify with, is strong. Baby Jessica, a girl who fell into a well in Texas in 1987, received more than $700,000 in donations. Ali Abbas, a boy caught in the Iraq conflict, commanded £275,000 for medical care within days. Even a dog stranded on a ship in the Pacific got nearly $50,000 in aid. We are more concerned, more emotionally distressed, more empathetic when we have a single, concrete name and face in front of us. And it??
?s very difficult to resist. Even Mother Teresa once remarked, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” The con artist reverses that. He must see us as a homogeneous mass; that way, he will feel no compunction at all when it comes to blowing us off and putting in the fix—leaving us high and dry and the authorities none the wiser.
In 2005, psychologists Deborah Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic set out to determine whether they could break down the identifiable-victim effect through sheer force of logic. In a series of four field studies, they systematically explained to people what went on in their heads when they saw a single victim as opposed to a so-called statistical victim. Then they measured how much money each person gave to a charity or an individual. The results weren’t quite what they had expected. People did indeed start giving less to individual victims—but they didn’t re-channel their generosity to greater statistical causes. Instead, they were simply less generous overall. It didn’t matter how the effect was framed: that people typically give more to individuals or less to statistical victims. And if the statistics were shown along with the victim—this is Annique, and she suffers from malaria, just like 67 percent of the population, or about 61.4 million people—the donations likewise fell.
One of the reasons Rosales was so successful for so long is that she cared nary a moment about the reputations she was savaging. One of the reasons Hartzell persisted for decades was that he conned tens of thousands—a sea, not individuals. It’s easy to rationalize away conning someone—they were complicit, too. A truly honest mark, the saying goes, would never be conned. Of course, that’s far from the truth, but the rationalization goes a long way. It allows the grifter to play the game to the end, disappearing into the night in a well-played blow-off, or after a well-timed fix, if it comes to that. And it allows him to keep the game going over and over, following each successful ending with a fresh beginning.
But we are not statistics to ourselves. And our view of the world is so egocentric, so intimately tied to the notion that we are just as important to everyone else as we are to ourselves, that we cannot fathom that everybody isn’t caring nearly as much about our story as we ourselves do. So we cling to our reputation. We think everyone pays attention to the slightest thing we do, the slightest thing we say, the slightest deviation in our demeanor. And so, to the end, our concern for our reputation allows the confidence game to continue, over and over and over: the blow-off and the fix reach their intended end. We stay quiet. And the wheel turns again. The same players. The same victims. The same tricks. All sustained by our need to believe, not only in the best version of the world, but in the best version of ourselves.
CHAPTER 10
THE (REAL) OLDEST PROFESSION
Con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule.
—PAUL AUSTER
Bebe Patten looked resplendent: tall and elegant in her streaming white silk gown, roses adorning her hair. She had learned from the best. When she was a young girl, Bebe Harrison, she had studied with the great Sister Aimee at the International Institute of Four-Square Evangelism. Now, as she stood in front of the thousands-strong congregation, swaying back and forth, she could say she’d done her mentor one better. She was planting the tree, she said. “Amen,” they replied. They’d be the ones harvesting the fruit, she called. “Amen,” they replied. She was doing God’s work. Saving the sinners. It didn’t hurt if the saving came with a price tag.
Below, her husband was busy with the collections. She’d met Carl Thomas Patten—C. Thomas, he went by; the C, he joked, was short for “cash”—in Oakland, California. Patten was over six feet tall, 218 pounds. He dwarfed most men who came near, if not in length then at least in girth. He was a careful dresser. Bebe appreciated that in a man. Fond of handmade cowboy boots—only the best—and never without his Stetson, a silk tie ever at his throat, Patten had done well for himself. Another trait Bebe admired. His father had been a bootlegger back in Tennessee, and though Carl himself had never finished high school—he’d been expelled for operating a still out of the basement—he always somehow landed on his feet. He’d even gotten the judge to suspend a two-year sentence for transporting stolen cars across state lines. When he talked, people listened. The Tennessee cowboy, Bebe thought, would make a perfect evangelist.
In short order, Patten was ordained in the Fundamental Ministerial Association. And it only got better from there. Ten years of revival meetings had netted them a tidy sum, most going into their personal accounts rather than the myriad missions they claimed to uphold, and they were, at last, ready to settle down.
It had been six years since they’d first arrived in Elm Tabernacle, one of Oakland’s less glamorous districts, in 1944. They’d started out in the tiny pulpit of the local church, their followers barely filling the front pews. But they were preaching the faith, good and true. Their followers had heard the call—that, or read the advertisements that Thomas placed in all the papers—a steady five thousand to six thousand dollars a week going toward reminders of “Green Palms! Choir Girls in White! Music! Miracles! Blessings! Healings!” Within weeks, the crowds were overflowing the church doors. They moved then to Oakland Women’s City Club. That, too, soon overflowed. Next, the eight-thousand-seat Oakland Arena. Less than five months later, and $35,000 richer, they took up at the City Club. This town was as pious as they came. The Pattens liked it. Here, they would make their home.
Bebe’s sermons stemmed from the Pentecostal traditions. As she and her flock survived “exhaustive and emotional bouts with the devil,” there was Thomas, collecting away. He had close communion with the Lord, and his savior never failed to inform him of precisely what they would accomplish that day, down to the last cent. As Bernard Taper recalled, writing in The New Yorker in 1959, Patten’s voice would ring through the vast space. “All right, now, brothers and sisters, God says there’s five thousand two hundred and forty dollars and fifty-five cents that is here today that is to be taken up for His work, and God’s word never fails,” went the patter. “If God told me that money is here, it is here. That’s a fact. How many say, Amen?” A chorus of Amens. “Hallelujah, to His glorious name. That’s a lot of money, but believe it or not, brothers and sisters, there’s three people here among you going to open their hearts to the Lord and pledge a thousand dollars each. Isn’t that glorious? Everybody say Amen!” Amen. “How many people believe the Lord is telling the truth when He says there’s three people here going to give a thousand dollars each? Raise your hand.” A chorus. “Now, who’ll be the first? Somebody in the back rows?” A timid hand. “Pray for him, brothers and sisters. He’s got his hand up. It’s brother Lilian. Bless you, Lord, and the angels sing! Isn’t that wonderful? Now there’s just two more going to feel the Holy Spirit on them today, just two more . . .” And on it went. If there was resistance, God’s wrath wasn’t long in coming. “God is going to slap you cock-eyed in about two minutes! This is where the fireworks start . . .”
Now they owned the whole place—just a quarter of a million dollars was all it had taken. Well, their congregation owned it, the Pattens told them. It was a people’s church. “It will always belong to the people. It will be here until Jesus comes, until the hinges are rusted off the door,” Bebe sang. The physical deeds, though, were—naturally—in the Pattens’ names.
A school followed. A plan for a tabernacle (never actually built). Life was good. The congregants flocked. The Patten bank account held six figures, nearing $1 million. Bebe’s dress: made by the dressmaker to the stars, Adrian of Hollywood. C. Thomas’s boots: one of two hundred custom pairs, at $200 a pop. In the garage, four Cadillacs, two Packards, a Lincoln, a Chrysler, and an Oldsmobile. Preach the faith.
A month later, Bebe again stood in front of an audience. Gone was her white gown. She was in a blue skirt, pleated, and a tight blue collegiate sweater, the gold P of the Patten Academy for Religious Education emblazoned on the front, a gold cross prominently at her neck. And she wasn’t preaching to her fl
ock. She was instead addressing a courthouse—though that, too, was packed as tightly as could be, crowds spilling into the aisles. It was February 1950, and C. Thomas was being indicted for grand theft, fraud, embezzlement, and obtaining money under false pretenses. (For some reason, Bebe was not part of the indictment.) For four and a half months, the prosecution meticulously detailed how the Pattens had used their power to rob their congregation blind. Close to $700,000, the records showed, had gone to their own private use. Not just their lavish lifestyle. Turned out, C. Thomas also had a nasty gambling habit. “I made a little mistake,” he shrugged when one casino owner testified against him, $4,000 debt in hand. They’d even sold the church they promised the congregants would always be there.
The Pattens were vocal in their own defense. “People give it to me,” C. Thomas objected. “I’m the man who keeps the wheel lubricated to keep the spiritual machinery moving.” He’d robbed no one, he insisted, echoing the refrain favored by clergy since the pre-Reformation heights of indulgence selling. Every cent was a willing donation. “We have God on our side!” Bebe echoed. “Glory Hallelujah! Amen!”
Even here, the answering chorus of “Amens!” dwarfed the courthouse. Their flock, or at least some of it, remained loyal.
C. Thomas hurled his curse in the direction of the jurors. “When you get your eyes off Jesus, you will always go down! How many say Amen?” Amen. Amen.
As the trial drew to a close, and the assistant DA read off her characterization of Bebe—“It was she who made the emotional appeal, she who set the stage . . .”—Bebe turned her wrath on the court. She held up a single rose. “This is just one of the many flowers that will come from the graves of those opposing us,” she cried. “It came from the casket of that woman”—a woman who’d criticized the Patten church and quit in protest of its ways. “Now she has no power to change God’s word. She is praying in hell tonight.” She continued with a death wish on anyone who would dare question her legitimacy. “Lord, knock someone cold, no matter how unimportant, just as a sign You’re on our side!” Strings of shouted “Amens” followed her exit. Her flock wouldn’t desert her.