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By Root 490 0

’s mysterious “sugar daddy,” John Catch, the wealthy patron at the Atomic Energy Authority whose art collection Drewe claimed he was going to inherit. Catch had never collected art, as it turned out, and Volpe discovered that all records of John Cockett, as Drewe was known then, had disappeared from the AEA. Catch, of course, was surprised to learn that he’d been at the center of an art scam—less so when he learned it had been run by his former protégé, who in the early 1990s had tried to use his name as a reference on a résumé Catch knew was filled with fabrications.

In 2000, a bizarre story appeared in the Mail on Sunday suggesting that there had been a connection between Drewe and the “secret world,” a possibility the police had never entirely discounted. The Mail reported that MI5 had played a practical joke on Drewe by using his home address as a front to register dozens of cars used for tracking foreign agents. According to the report, the intelligence services had targeted Drewe as payback for his public insistence that his crimes were committed at their behest. The story emerged after police traced a suspicious vehicle to Drewe’s address, whereupon he revealed that his family had been receiving letters addressed to the front company for years. Drewe later claimed he had unwittingly provided “business services” to MI5, and demanded payment from its director-general, Stephen Lander.

After Drewe’s release, those who had brushed up against him seemed incapable of separating fact from fiction. They believed he still had them under surveillance and that he would attempt to harm them. They advised others to keep their distance.

“Don’t give him any personal information,” warned a former friend. “Tell him lies. He can get in your head if he knows any little thing about you.”

Other acquaintances cautioned reporters to be on their toes, not to sign anything in Drewe’s presence, not to leave signed documents anywhere near him. Everyone who had ever dealt with him had taken a turn for the worse, they said. He was Hannibal Lecter with a ballpoint pen and a paintbrush.

There is no doubt that Drewe was a convincing and accomplished fabricator. Many of his interrogators, though they were not mental health professionals, considered him to fit the description of a pathological liar. Pathological liars are sometimes referred to as “folded,” emotionally “enveloped” by their imagined selves, and thus

“origamists,” from the Japanese word for folded paper birds and animals. The origamist reflects a childhood deficit, say psychologists. If he goes unnoticed by his parents—if he is neither rewarded nor loved—he can “become” someone else in order to seek the attention and praise that has been denied him.

Some psychologists believe that pathological liars cannot help themselves, that they have an uncontrollable impulse to deceive. Their lies simply tumble out. They connect ideas on the run and assemble disparate whoppers to produce a believable whole. Con artists and habitual liars, with their inconsistent stories about their education and family background, are also apt to be expert mind readers, with a special understanding of the psychological vulnerabilities of others. They are able to suppress and regulate their emotions and successfully mask their own nervousness. Many of these counterfeit personalities also possess exaggerated verbal skills and can lie without inhibition. Often, they have at least one other trait in common: They hold a grudge against the establishment.

There is some evidence that pathological lying is genetic and can be passed on from one generation to the next. In a study published in 1995 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, scientists interviewed 108 employees of a temp agency and asked them about their employment and family history. After thoroughly checking their backgrounds, the investigators discovered that 12 of the 108 interviewees had made up much of their professional and personal histories and admitted to lying habitually. After the dissembling dozen agreed to have their brains scanned, it was discovered