Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [74]
One of the more talented and famous con men was Ferdinand Demara, an American hospital orderly who assumed the identity of a doctor during the Korean War and performed a number of successful surgeries. With minimal education, he posed as a civil engineer, a sheriff’s deputy, a prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a lawyer, a Benedictine and a Trappist monk, a cancer researcher, and an editor. While he never made much money at any of these deceptions, he gained a short-lived respectability. A brilliant mimic with a hugely retentive memory, he studied textbooks to master the techniques he needed to perform each new character’s role. Demara, who was portrayed by Tony Curtis in the 1961 movie The Great Impostor, once described his motivation as “rascality, pure rascality.” Six feet tall and 350 pounds, he died in 1982 at age sixty after suffering a heart attack. He had two cardinal rules: First, always remember that the burden of proof is on the accuser, and second, when you’re in danger, attack.
John Drewe seemed to have mastered both rules.
Detective Higgs was beginning to wonder if Batsheva Goudsmid had been conned by Drewe, and if there might not be some truth behind her accusations that he was involved in selling stolen or forged art. For weeks she had been badgering the detective to arrest Drewe, berating him and the rest of his squad. These harangues had done little to endear her to Higgs’s men, serving mainly to reinforce the notion that she was off her rocker, but Higgs had come to feel that her hysteria might be justified. She had reason to think she was under attack.
Higgs called family court and was told that Drewe had indeed been granted custody of the children, and that Goudsmid was considered mentally unstable. They had based their decision, in part, on Drewe’s status in the academic and scientific communities.
Higgs pointed out that there were enormous gaps in Drewe’s story. “I can’t find any substance to this man,” he told a court official. “Something’s off.”
By early May, four months after the fire, Higgs still had no evidence that Drewe had a motive for setting the fire. The only strategy left was to put Drewe in a lineup and see if Horoko Tominaga could identify him as the stranger she had seen in the boardinghouse bathroom, a man of average height and weight, in his forties, with glasses and a mustache.
Higgs scheduled the lineup and arranged to have Tominaga flown back from Japan. When she arrived at the Hampstead police station, it was too late: Drewe had already come and gone. He’d complained that the lineup was stacked against him because he was the only one wearing a suit, and would therefore stand out. Higgs knew that if Tominaga had picked Drewe out as the perpetrator, he would have been able to challenge the police successfully in court. The detective was furious: The least his colleagues could have done was loan Drewe a pair of jeans and a shirt.
He rescheduled the lineup for the following week, but when Drewe arrived he was unrecognizable. He had cut his hair short, shaved off his mustache, and shed his glasses. Tominaga looked carefully at each man but could not identify the stranger she had seen in the bathroom. Without her testimony, the police had nothing to go on—not a shred of evidence linking Drewe to arson—and they sent her home.
Neither did the police have any evidence that Konigsberg had blackmailed Drewe. The investigation was stalled.
When Goudsmid heard what had happened, she called Higgs in a rage. “You had him and you let him go?” she sputtered.
But there was nothing Higgs could do. He only had the authority to investigate the fire, and Goudsmid’s suggestion that Drewe was being blackmailed