The justice system, however, wasn’t quite as kind. The convictions came in. All of them.
* * *
C. Thomas and Bebe’s loyal followers may seem like dupes of the highest kind. Suckers, pure and simple, who won’t accept that they’ve been taken in even when the evidence is laid out in front of them. If they want to hold on to the Pattens’ piousness even in light of all evidence to the contrary, so be it. In a way, it serves them right: if you willfully ignore evidence, you get what’s coming to you. But the Patten con wasn’t just any scam. It was the scam of all scams—the one that gets to the heart of why confidence games not only work but thrive the world over, no matter how many expert debunkers and vocal victims there may be. It was a scam of belief, the most profound yet simple belief we have: about the way the world works, why life is the way it is. We want to believe. Believe that things make sense. That an action leads to a result. That things don’t just happen willy-nilly no matter what we do, but rather for a reason. That what we do makes a difference, however small. That we ourselves matter. That there is a grand story, a higher method to the seeming madness. And in the heart of that desire, we easily become blind. The eternal lure of the con is the same reason religions arise spontaneously in most any human society. People always want something to believe in.
“When people want to believe what they want to believe, they are very hard to dissuade.” So David Sullivan—Sully, as he was known to friends—told his rapt Commonwealth Club audience one evening in July 2010. It was the first time he was speaking publicly about his unique profession: an infiltrator of cults. For two decades, Sullivan, a cultural anthropologist turned private investigator, had made it his business to get on the inside of cult-like organizations around the country, learning the groups’ language, their customs and ways, their views on life. It was only as a “true believer” that he could hope to talk to any of the groups’ members—and, potentially, persuade them to leave. He worked closely with law enforcement, following individuals at the behest of their families, trying to extract vulnerable victims or take down powerful organizations. He was remarkably successful, and where he couldn’t go—many cults thrived on a very specific victim profile: young, female, vulnerable—he trained his colleague Jennifer Stalvey to go instead. In her three years working undercover alongside David, Jennifer told me, there was only ever one failure, a woman who to this day remains in the organization that had recruited her many years earlier. Over the years, Sullivan and Stalvey made their share of enemies.
The Pattens, of course, hadn’t been running a cult. But in many ways, the type of faux evangelism they embodied was at the heart of what Sullivan hated most of all: individuals who exploit our need for belief for their own private gains—the hallmark of the confidence game. He would have understood perfectly the Patten flock’s devotion. Indeed, he spoke about people just like them, people who claimed they were raising money to “finance building a new church, finance a new mission in Uganda, Guatemala,” the precise sorts of projects, in short, that the Pattens pressed on their credulous congregants time and time again. That was always the way to hook the fish, be it into a congregation or a scheme or an organization of dubious nature. Appeal to their sense of goodness and make them feel they are making a difference in the world. Make them feel they are part of a greater, better whole, that their participation will make them into better people.
Stalvey remembers the approach well, those hope-filled early days of belonging, when you first feel yourself brought into a fold, a community, a group with a higher purpose that can, in turn, lend purpose to your own life. “The process of starting with just going to yoga and helping children in Africa, to giving up your money, your family—it’s fascinating,” she said as she thought back to those days, now a decade in the past. “It always starts out really wonderful. And there’s some element of truth there—these are psychologists, theologians, really intelligent people who draw you in. And there is always some basis of love and support that is really there. There is a lot of giving.” All cons, cults not least of all, rely on a basis of some sort of truth and reality. What sets them apart from their more legitimate counterparts is where and how that truth is then used. Manipulate it well enough, and no matter the evidence, people will continue to follow. To do otherwise would be to uproot an important, self-defining reality.
“They were usually so convinced,” Sullivan said of cult followers, that he needed to go to extraordinary lengths to challenge their steadfast certainty in the rightness of their cause. “I have to show them that the money that went to the mission was actually spent on a second house, a mistress, a lavish lifestyle in LA. And the trip to visit the orphanage, well, here’s the receipt: they were in Vegas, gambling.” In other words, apart from the mistress, the exact same deceptions that the Pattens had been so fond of—and that their parishioners refused to acknowledge took place or signified much of anything. It’s not surprising. But as Sullivan frequently pointed out, physical evidence often didn’t even matter. Show it to those who’d already bought into the fiction, and many would say, “No, that’s impossible. I know this man; he’s a man of God. No way.” And even though Sullivan had seen the same dynamic play out dozens of times, it didn’t make it any less troubling or difficult to wrap his head around. “That still to this day sometimes stops me in my tracks.” An expertly planted belief is a nearly impossible thing to shake.
Think back on some of the stories in these pages. There’s Thierry Tilly, crafting an alternative world for an aristocratic family that fully replaced their reality for a decade. There’s Oscar Hartzell, implanting a belief in the Drake fortune that was so strong no amount of legal challenges could undermine his followers’ trust. There’s the Cazique of Poyais, a country at the ready, hapless believers sailing off to their deaths under the sway of his new world. There’s Glafira Rosales, creating a family, a history, a world that hoodwinked the art community for twenty years. Every confidence artist you’ve met is in the exact same business, using our deep-rooted need for belief, in all its guises, to advance an agenda all their own. The screaming evangelist or the grandstanding religious leader or the cult spiritual guru is simply the most extreme incarnation: he doesn’t just go after small beliefs; he attacks the core of existence. “We’re really adamant we have free will,” Stalvey said. “But so often, that’s simply not true. Everyone has a weakness. We want to connect to someone or something greater. I’m spiritually bent, and here is someone offering me a way to be a better person. The cult stuff just goes to a different level from your regular con.”
Sullivan died suddenly in 2013, from a recurrence of liver cancer that caught everyone who knew him off guard. (Conspiracy theories, naturally, sprang up almost at once: had he fallen victim to an angry cult out for revenge?) In the months leading up to his death, he had been planning a memoir of sorts, to be cowritten with the journalist Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Josh and I met in the winter of 2015, in a dimly lit bar on a quiet block in New York’s West Village, to talk about David’s work, his outlook, his take on beliefs and deception. “He would have loved to talk to you,” Josh told me. “That’s the exact way he looked at it: cults are the ultimate con game.” The crux of the belief doesn’t matter, Sullivan thought. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Vishnu, Jesus, or a new way to get rich quick. It’s immaterial to me,” he had said. The techniques and basic psychology remained the same. “They’re being profoundly—subtly but profoundly—manipulated at their great expense, at the expense of their life in some cases.”
And the reason it happens—and often happens to the most intelligent of people (note, Sullivan would say, the typical cult recruit: young, smart, sophisticated, savvy)—is that human nature is wired toward creating meaning out of meaninglessness, embracing belief over doubt. “There are certain essential things we all have in common,” Sullivan said. “There’s a deep desire for faith, there’s a deep desire to feel there’s someone up there who really cares about what’s going on and intervenes in our l
ife. There’s a desire to have a coherent worldview: there’s a rhyme and reason for everything we do, and all the terrible things that happen to people—people die, children get leukemia—there’s some reason for it. And here’s this guru who says, ‘I know exactly the reason.’” It’s the reason behind all cons, from the smallest to these, the deepest.
It is our need to hold on to belief, to meaning—logic be damned—that continues to fuel the great cons of the world, even as their contours shift with the times. Before, you could pick cults out like sore thumbs, Sullivan joked. Back in the heyday of sixties spiritualism, you could reliably follow the scent of spiritual awakening to the nearest guru. But in the modern world, it has all become more insidious. They wear suits and ties, host corporate retreats, look increasingly like the more legitimate self-help movements of modern corporate America. Like Landmark, an organization, Jelly-Schapiro told me, that Sully considered quite cult-and con-like, predicated on the same techniques, many of them “not very nice,” that wear at your sense of self and slowly change the parameters of your world. “They are all founded on meaning, community: what everyone wants.”
That’s why Sullivan found cults to be a particularly enraging confidence game, more infuriating than most: it was a co-optation of a very legitimate quest for meaning. Everyone wants to believe, everyone wants meaning, everyone wants stories that make sense of incoherence. Everyone sees meaning in chaos, crafts narrative out of haphazardly floating geometric patterns. It’s natural, and it’s not only understandable but often laudable. Shouldn’t we want to search for truth and discern the meaning of reality? Spiritual cons exploit us at our most vulnerable. And because the process is so natural and insidious, it is particularly difficult to resist. You become a sucker almost in spite of yourself.
In a sense, then, managing to survive the cult or spiritual con—the ultimate in confidence games—is the closest we can come to ever figuring out how to avoid falling for the lure of the con man more broadly. Sullivan and Stalvey, after all, managed to infiltrate cult after cult and come out on the other side. They were, in a sense, con artists in their own right: doing the con artists one better, deceiving them into accepting that they were genuine marks who had been expertly suckered in. Sullivan was largely reticent about his specific approach—tricks of the trade, he called them—but there was one thing he stressed over and over: the key to resisting persuasion and manipulation was to have a strong, unshakeable, even, sense of self. Know who you are no matter what, and hold on to that no matter what. It isn’t easy—it was years before Sullivan was able to find a suitable female infiltrator; Stalvey, he said, was an exception. “It’s very rare to find someone to put into a cult. You have to have a very strong sense of your own identity,” he said. “And it’s not easy to do this. The psychological techniques that are now employed to coerce you are phenomenal.”
When we spoke, Stalvey elaborated on the approach her mentor had taught her. One of the most important things, she said, was to maintain objectivity: logic to counteract feeling. You know your emotions will be manipulated—they always are, in any con, big or small. That’s the whole point of the put-up and the play. And once you become emotional, your reasoning can easily become short-circuited. “Always pay attention to the details,” she told me. That is one way to ensure that you are staying rooted in the physical, the objective, rather than the psychological, the subjective. The details themselves may be harrowing—Stalvey observed everything from physical abuse to kids banging their heads on walls to exercises in extreme shaming. “Through it all, you have to make sure you are observing as much as feeling.”
Most con games, of course, don’t involve such extreme manipulation, but they all depend on the mechanism of emotion to a significant extent. A large part of resistance, of making sure you don’t start getting pulled in, is to know yourself well enough to recognize and control your emotional reactions. What kinds of things provoke what kinds of responses in me—and can I see it happening early enough to resist it, by staying grounded in details and logic? Stanford University psychologist Roderick Kramer believes that one of the ways we can inoculate ourselves against false persuasion is through self-knowledge—one of the elements that forms what Sullivan called your “core self.” Know what people you’re likely to trust, what triggers are likely to catch you, whether positive or negative, and try to be aware enough of your own behavior that you won’t get swept up in it. In short, hone your skills of observation and detail-noting, as Stalvey puts it, when it comes not just to others but to yourself.
Another key element in Stalvey and Sullivan’s arsenal: set limits. “I’d decide before I went in what my limits were, the lines I wouldn’t cross, physically or emotionally,” Stalvey said. She made sure that trusted others knew those limits and were ready to step in if she was getting close to the edge. Of course, cons in real time aren’t as clear-cut: you never know you’re in a con game until it’s over, and even then, not always. But the principle holds: always know the types of comfortable limits you have and the boundaries you won’t cross. Think of how many cons work because they take you, in the emotional heat of the moment, beyond a comfortable boundary. Frank Norfleet borrowing money when he’d never done so before for that second chance at making a fortune. William Franklin Miller’s victims investing even more money to recoup their losses from his ill-timed absence. Sylvia Mitchell’s psychic marks handing over cash only to regret it moments later under the pressure of her steady gaze—but by the time the regret comes, it’s too late. The moral is simple. Know yourself well enough, and ask the questions ahead of time, in any venture or interaction: How much am I willing to stake? How much am I willing to lose? How far am I willing to go? And then never let anyone tell you, “Just once more . . .”
Of course, the entire dynamic of limits is predicated on knowing not just when, but how, to get out: if you have a limit but have no mechanism to enforce it, the limit becomes meaningless, a car with its brakes broken. Stalvey always knew exactly how she would exit the situation. Whom she would call, or who would know to come get her after a certain time if she hadn’t emerged on her own. When it comes to other potential cons, or situations where your comfort level is uncomfortably close, the same thing holds true. To avoid getting duped, Kramer stresses, have an escape clause, or a way of exiting any interaction with your dignity intact. We often are sucked up in cons because we don’t quite know how to disengage—it feels like we’re losing face, letting someone down. And by the time we realize that, no, we should have gotten out, it’s too late.
The final mode of attack—one that is, in many ways, fundamental, says Stalvey—is knowledge, pure and simple. “Just knowing what you’re going through can be immensely helpful,” she says. “It’s like boot camp. If you know you’re going through fifteen hours of psychological hell, you can prepare yourself.” Before going deep into a new cult, she would make sure to learn as much as she could about its history, purpose, and techniques early into her infiltration. That way, she wouldn’t ever be caught completely off guard. Of course, her experience was unique, in the sense of having been planned. You can’t learn about a scam you don’t realize is happening. But what you can do is learn about cons more broadly: the types, the approaches, the methods, the techniques. Seniors who are taught about the grandparent scam, for instance, become far less likely to fall for it. And then, with any luck, you will be able to pick out a con game’s contours before you’ve fallen prey to its approach.
Nothing, of course, is foolproof, and constant resistance takes a deep toll. Stalvey is now transitioning to being a full-time photographer. After three years, and one infiltration that lasted over eight months, she had had enough. “I couldn’t take it. It’s not the life I wanted to be living,” she told me. And even Sullivan, the lifelong infiltrator, came close to calling it quits. “Everybody has a breaking point. I’m trained, I’ve been through this a zillion times,” he said. “I use techniques to keep from being programmed.” And even with all of that, h
e nearly broke.
He remembered that afternoon like it was yesterday. The cold ground, the rustling leaves, the faint echo of voices through the door to the training room, and he, lying in the earth, on his belly, covered by bushes, whispering urgently into a dying cell phone. On the other line: the lawyer who’d hired him for his latest infiltration. “A kind of triple-type-A attorney who knows exactly what he wants,” Sullivan calls him. “He doesn’t brook failure.” And what he most desperately wants to convey to this man is one single, urgent message: he needs to get out. “I can’t take it anymore. I think they’re going to kill me. My cover is blown,” he pleads. He has just come off several days without sleep or food; a session of extreme shaming where he was forced to stand in a corner without food, water, or bathroom access and answer to the name “Anal-Cranial Inversion”; a ransacking of his hotel room and sabotaging of his car; dehydration and exhaustion worse than any he can recall. And mixed with it all, the certainty that he is going to be killed, or at the least badly hurt, after his assigned partner somehow manages to escape from the program. (His fear is justified; he was the one who’d orchestrated her flight.) All he wants to do is make a run for it while he still can.
The attorney doesn’t hesitate. “What do you mean your cover’s blown? What are we paying you for? You get your ass back in there.”
Sullivan insists. “You don’t understand. I’m at the end of my limit. I don’t think I can.”
The lawyer insists more. “Listen to me. Sully, listen to me. You get back in there. You haven’t even been reborn yet.”