Pretend profilers · Fast forgeries · Art-heist apps
And: the Subway series. ...Don't get up; I'll fire myself
the true crime that's worth your time
Remember how I said I’d probably pass on that ID/Jared Fogle docuseries? Looks like I made the right call. My MASTAS pod husband Mark Blankenship made his Crime Seen debut to talk about the show, and apparently made CS ratings history…and not in a good way.
I match-made that pod/guest pairing, so I should probably buy Mark a cocktail for inadvertently exposing him to Subway sex crimes — but the pairing itself apparently worked out great and the discussion is top-notch even if the topic stinks. — SDB
The subject of the Bone Valley podcast is set for a parole hearing May 3. Pointed to by many of the correspondents in our best-of-2022 series as the top true-crime pod of the year, Bone Valley investigated the apparent wrongful conviction of Leo Schofield. The overview from podnews.net:
In 1987, Leo, then 21 years old, was devastated when his teenage wife Michelle was found dead in a phosphate mining pit in Lakeland, Florida. Two years later, Leo was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he has remained despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence unearthed and revealed on the Lava for Good podcast Bone Valley by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Gilbert King and producer Kelsey Decker — evidence pointing to Michelle’s actual killer.
That evidence included an on-mic confession — and not the only one — by one Jeremy Scott; the case then generated a “media firestorm,” with major newsmags devoting episodes to the case. And a Florida judge stepped off the bench to help get Schofield out of prison; former judge Scott Cupp talked to WBUR’s Here & Now about that decision, and the case, last week, and the NYT profiled Cupp in January. — SDB
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It’s recent-reads-roundup time! I’ll start with the one everyone in the t.c.-verse has had on their minds since it dropped…
The Case of the Fake Sherlock [New York] // Discussion here on Best Evidence turned just yesterday, and not for the first time, to the bullshittiness of a lot of “forensic” “testimony.” Guess how much of that sort of testimony has come, over many years and in many jurisdictions, from expert charlatan — not just my word; a federal judge called him that 20 years ago — Richard Walter?
A bunch…because Walter isn’t just your garden-variety “I took a correspondence course in Satanism and now the West Memphis 3 are doing time for some crazy-wall nonsense I yanked out of my bum on the stand” charlatan. Walter is a co-founder of the Vidocq Society, a gathering I have often daydreamed about crashing that is now hopelessly compromised. (After reading David Gauvey Herbert’s description of the book I asked about late last year, and Walter’s co-founders’ grouchy response to the fawning portrayal of Walter therein, so is said book — and its author, apparently an anti-vax crackpot who may suffer from auditory hallucinations.)
Herbert comments that Walter’s “is not the case of an impostor who goes undetected,” eluding suspicion for years. Many saw through him, many of them immediately, but either they figured he would get pantsed and disappear without their making waves, or Walter had put them behind bars and they couldn’t get appellate proceedings (or the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, whose accreditation of Walter created this monster) to take their evidence of his frauds seriously. Pity nobody thought to call Quantico for a rec…
Retired FBI agent Gregg McCrary recalls that the Behavioral Science Unit once invited Walter to Quantico to ask him questions about inmate behavior. “The narcissism, I think, was obvious. He really thought he knew a lot,” McCrary says. The agents learned little, and he was not invited back. “Richard Walter is largely a poseur,” McCrary says. “What I say about Richard is he’s an expert at being an expert, at playing one and convincing people that he is.”
But the flatulently positive attention paid to Walter continued, until an Innocence Project attorney uncovered a handful of Brady violations in the case of the regrettably named Nick McGuffin, a matter that in some ways is ongoing. It’s a shocking, nauseating, super-readable piece that indicts not just Walter but prosecutors, victims’ orgs, and 20/20.
And it’s not the only pertinent content from that issue!
How Stormy Daniels Sees It Ending [New York] // It’s an Olivia Nuzzi joint, which means its half a thousand words too long — nobody cares about your dream, Nuz — but you put up with it because she gets access. What’s interesting here: the charges against Donald Trump here in New York center on the hush money Trump’s campaign paid to Daniels, but Daniels took the hush money and signed the attendant NDA chiefly to put a formal, for-services-rendered end to the threats and intimidation Trump’s people (…allegedly) subjected her to when it seemed like her (…alleged, but whatever, she passed a lie detector) liaison with Trump might threaten his candidacy.
And not for nothing, but Daniels’s description of said liaison, at least here, reeeeally makes it sound like Daniels chose to consent to, or to tell herself she’d consented, as a means of psychological de-escalation, versus resisting Trump — only to have the nearby bodyguard side with his boss.
She didn’t say “no.” She didn’t say “yes,” either. To me, she said, “When I tried to step around him, he was like, ‘I thought you wanted to be a director. Sometimes you have to do whatever it takes.’ And I knew his bodyguard was outside the door.” She froze. She does not remember getting undressed, though she knows she must have. “It was an out-of-body experience. … He wasn’t aggressive, and I know for damn sure I could have outrun him if I tried, but I didn’t.”
He’s just crapped up so many people’s lives, honestly.
The Accidental Journalist [AirMail] // I haven’t read much Edward Jay Epstein — just Inquest, which I think everyone reads during “their JFK phase” — but I stock plenty of it, mostly minor triumphs of mid-century design. And thanks to Ash Carter’s profile of Epstein, I’d gladly read a book about Epstein as well…or at least about the pre-assassination period in which, having flunked out of Cornell, he tried to make a movie of The Iliad.
Epstein spent the next few years, and the $6,000 he received upon turning 21, trying to film The Iliad in a heroic attempt to impress a fellow student who dreamed of playing Helen of Troy. With a little hubris—he expressed his intention to cast Marlon Brando as Achilles in a way that implied it was a done deal—and a set of business cards identifying himself as a producer, Epstein commissioned a partial shooting script from his cousin’s friend, Mario Puzo, raised $7 million from an independent production company, and secured the full cooperation of the Greek government.
But he returned home with no usable footage, no Helen, and a Diners Club card that was “fatally encumbered with debt.”
The piece goes on to trace Epstein’s, well, accidental journey into the heart of the Warren Commission; it’s wonderfully process-y with fantastic graphics, and I recommend it.
LA Auctioneer Admits to Helping Create Fake Basquiats [Hyperallergic] // We tipped y’all to the “Fauxsquiat” story when it broke last June; after a few other twists, here’s yet another plot development from earlier this week, in which Michael Barzman
and a co-conspirator identified in court documents as “J.F.” created between 20 and 30 artworks and agreed to split any profits they made from selling the copies.
“J.F. spent a maximum of 30 minutes on each image and as little as five minutes on others, and then gave them to [Barzman] to sell on eBay,” the plea agreement reads.
That is a strikingly small amount of time devoted to each work, given that almost every other forgery story — whether it’s art, currency, or books and ephemera — involves so much time and/or specialty equipment and/or specialized knowledge and skill that it really does seem way easier and faster just to get a straight job.
Barzman and “J.F.” found the “smarter not harder” art-forgery path, not only with a solid ROI on the upfront hours invested but with a superficially credible provenance narrative, one that contained enough truth about Barzman’s vocational provenance to make it easy for him to stick to.
Eventually, though, as Valentina Di Liscia’s piece makes clear, the “smarter” part disintegrated. The first crack in the story was, as we noted last year, an anachronistic font that a FedEx designer clocked in one of the disputed pieces. The second?
The US Attorney’s Office said Barzman initially denied creating the paintings even as he admitted to lying about the artwork’s storage-locker backstory — and, remarkably, continued to lie after FBI agents showed him the verso of one of the seized paintings made on cardboard in which his name was visible on a mailing label that had been painted over.
Oops?
But lest you think the feds’ competency when it comes to cracking art crimes is indisputable, our (apparently) top source when it comes to the fine-arts true-crime subgenre has a couple of notes…
FBI’s New Stolen Art App Leaves a Lot to Be Desired [Hyperallergic again] // tl;dr: Elaine Velie advises would-be Gardner-heist citizen sleuths to use Interpol’s version instead, but go ahead and read the whole thing, which features bone-dry thumbs-downs on the FBI app’s search function (…relatable!):
FBI Art Crime agent Colleen Childers said the new program is a push to make the existing database more user-friendly, an aspiration that the app in its current state does not exactly speak to. A search for “George Washington” revealed a New England Patriots Super Bowl ring that was tragically described as “signatures of Pres. from George Washington to Harding on paper,” with its medium listed as “manuscript.” Further, artist searchers for “Vermeer” and “Manet” — two artists whose work was stolen in the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist — came back empty.
Velie does go on to note that neither app “incorporate[s] systematically looted art held in held collections and museums,” and trafficked art is the primary focus of the FBI’s seizures of late. — SDB
Coming up on Best Evidence: Dershowitz, Depardieu, and your weekend true-crime to-dos.
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