Search Results for: Prison

Traveling While Black Across the Atlantic Ocean

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Ethelene Whitmire | Longreads | January 2019 | 19 minutes (4,642 words)

“Welcome aboard!” the Cunard agent exclaimed, and I suddenly felt a clichéd warm tingling sensation. After hesitating for several weeks, I finally…booked a passage? I got a berth? I do not know the lingo. So let us say I got a ticket for a seven-day, eastbound, transatlantic crossing on Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 from New York City (technically the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal) to Southampton, England for June, 2018, the first leg of a trip to Denmark. I was committed — or semi-committed. I placed a 10% deposit (fully refundable for a few weeks) to hold my space, and immediately made a note in my electronic calendar for two days before the deadline to remind myself to cancel if I changed my mind. I’d visited Denmark 12 times since my initial trip in May and June, 2010, including a year as a Fulbright scholar, but I’d always flown there.

I am writing a book about African Americans in 20th century Denmark. During the past few years I followed in their footsteps by visiting Danish cities, towns, villages, islands, a prison, numerous castles, jazz clubs, an educational institution, and the homes and studios where they lived, visited, performed, toured, and studied. A friend suggested I more accurately recreate the experience of the people in my book who lived in the first half of the 20th century, when the only way to get to Denmark from the United States was to cross the Atlantic Ocean by ship. I’d read much of what they’d written about their experiences in letters home, in memoirs, and in one case, in a newspaper column.

They traveled abroad during the Jim Crow era in the United States, and many feared they would face racism and even possible segregation on the ships. Perhaps they were familiar with the oft-told tale of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ 1845 crossing. He was almost thrown overboard by some Americans after the captain invited him to make an anti-slavery speech. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor called Douglass’ voyage “harrowing” in Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. William M. Fowler, Jr. wrote in Steam Titans: Cunard, Collins, and the Epic Battle for Commerce on the North Atlantic that although Douglass booked a first-class cabin, once he was on the Cambria he “discovered that he had been reassigned to quarters in the forecastle, separate from the other passengers, and he was advised to remain secluded there during the crossing.”

I did not worry about segregation during my 21st century transatlantic crossing, but wondered about and anticipated possible microaggressions — slights and condescending comments often based on racial stereotypes. I did not see many images in Cunard’s brochures and website featuring Black people among the passengers. I was educated in predominantly white institutions and worked at similar institutions as an administrator and as a professor, so I was used to being in white spaces. And I live in Wisconsin — one of the whitest states in the nation. I wondered what would my journey be like on the Atlantic Ocean?
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When Black Male Singers Were Sex Symbols

Philadelphia International Records / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ericka Blount Danois | Longreads | January 2019 | 23 minutes (4,688 words)

 

Driving through blinding rain from Baltimore to Philadelphia recently to see the documentary If You Don’t Know Me By Now, about the life of R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass, I was reminded how one of my first encounters with Teddy was as a life-size cardboard cutout of him my mother kept in our living room. Dressed in an Italian silk suit, he became part of my family as my parents and sister passed him daily on our way out the door to school.

I had already admired Teddy when I would browse my father’s extensive record collection as a kid and stare at the covers. Both the Jackson Five’s Third Album and The Teenagers Featuring Frankie Lymon album covers made me wish I had been born just a little bit sooner so I could meet Frankie Lymon or a young Michael Jackson. I thought Marvin Gaye was handsome, but when I saw Teddy Pendergrass’s album Teddy, I said to myself: One day I will marry a man that looks just like that. I don’t know what made Teddy future marriage material and not just a childhood crush. Maybe it was the handsome face and the masculine beard that looked like it tasted like Hershey’s Kisses. Maybe it was the aloof look and the symphony of gold chains on his chest, surrounded by a silk scarf and shirt. Or that North Philly, rough-and-rugged, raspy, commanding baritone voice. Or the way he talked trash on the album’s interludes. Or the half church, half sexual ecstasy shouts and ad-libs, sometimes full-on sermons and conversations mixed with singing. His weellls, ooohwaaahs, and yessssahs all got you to the point that, when he said with conviction “close the door!” on the cut of the same name, you nearly jumped up to slam it shut. He was the kind of man whose steak you made sure was hot when he came home as you handed him his pipe and slippers. Somehow I knew he was the whole package, a man’s man in a time when this is what it meant to be a man. And I wasn’t wrong.

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How a Career Criminal Broke the Convict Code and Saved Himself

Longreads Pick

In USP Florence, the most violent prison in the U.S. federal prison system, rats don’t live long and they don’t die peacefully. But Wayne Byerly talked, and lived — and found redemption.

Source: Westword
Published: Jan 10, 2019
Length: 47 minutes (11,920 words)

This Heist’s for the Birds

A peregrine falcon estimated to be between three and four weeks old stares down the camera.(Andy Abeyta/ Journal Star via AP)

Wildlife criminals generate billions of dollars a year killing or smuggling protected animals. Jeffrey Lendrum took things to a whole new level, literally and figuratively: his specialty is bird eggs, which involves dangling from helicopters or rappelling down cliffs to pluck the eggs from their nests. Joshua Hammer has his story — and the story of the people who will pay a premium for an unhatched peregrine — at Outside online.

Interpol estimates that the illegal wildlife trade is worth as much as $20 billion a year, among the world’s most lucrative black markets. But that trade extends well beyond elephant ivory and rhino horn. Back in November 2009, police in Rio de Janeiro stopped a British pet-shop owner who was trying to smuggle a thousand large Amazonian spiders out of the country in his suitcases. In May 2017, police in East Java rescued about two dozen critically endangered yellow-crested cockatoos that a smuggler had stuffed inside water bottles. And multiple people have been arrested over the years for moving finches from Guyana to New York, where finch “races” in Queens pit the songbirds against each other to see which one sings fastest. One common smuggling M.O. is to dope the birds with rum and stuff them inside hair curlers.

Falcons, which encompass 39 species, are distributed on all continents except Antarctica. In some parts of the world, particularly in the UK, the threat posed by DDT gave way to a new menace: compulsive collectors who stole the eggs of protected species from their nests, blowing out the contents and mounting the shells. The thefts threatened numerous species—red-backed shrikes, ospreys, golden eagles, peregrines—before the Scottish police, in coordination with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, launched Operation Easter in 1997. Many of the perpetrators, it turned out, were middle-aged men driven by a need that even they ­struggled to understand. “Certain individuals just become obsessed with it,” McWilliam said in an interview for the 2015 documentary Poached. “It’s a self-obsessive, self-indulging crime. And why people risk going to prison for a bird’s egg, it just beats me.”

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The Silence of Women

A scold's bridle. From The Strand Magazine:, July to December, 1894. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Jane Brox| an excerpt adapted from Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives| Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | Januray 2019 | 15 minutes (4,034 words)



What becometh a woman best, and first of all? Silence. What second? Silence. What third? Silence. What fourth? Silence. Yea, if a man should aske me till Domes daie I would still crie silence, silence.

Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 1560


For women, silence within the world of judicial punishment has its own complex history. It’s less recorded than that of men, and fragmented. Details must be teased out of obscurity and can be distorted by what is absent. Often, there are more questions than answers for punishment that amounts to silencing on top of silence, since women have long been expected to govern their tongue.

In colonial America this presumption of silence was reinforced by women’s subordinate place in society, and bolstered by centuries of English common law. No woman had the right to vote and once she married — in an age when most women married — she became subject to the law of coverture, which meant that she not only became dependent on her husband but, as William Blackstone in his eighteenth-century work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, explains: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing, and is therefore called in our law — French, a femme covert… under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.” Read more…

The Haväng Dolmen

,Jose More/VWPics via AP Images

Chris Power | A story from the collection Mothers | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | January 2019 | 25 minutes (5,051 words)

 

Several months ago, while travelling in Sweden, I experienced something I have given up trying to explain. In fact, since it happened I have tried to push it as far from my mind as possible. But yesterday afternoon, searching for an errant set of keys, I found, nestled deep in a coat pocket, an acorn that I plucked from its cap in the forest beneath the fortress of Stenshuvud. Then it was smooth and green, but now it is tawny, and ribbed like a little barrel. You wouldn’t know it was the same acorn I picked on a whim, but holding it I felt again the compulsion that propelled me, at the end of that strange day, into the burial chamber at Haväng.

It was the end of September. I was attending a three-day conference in Lund. It finished early on a Friday afternoon, and with the weekend ahead of me, and nothing to hurry back to London for, I elected to stay. My colleagues recommended some sites – Iron and Stone Age, neither era of particular interest to  me, but I thought why not. The only one I had heard of was Ale’s Stones, Sweden’s Stonehenge, built on a clifftop above the Baltic in the shape of a great ship.

I had presented a paper at the conference, ‘Digging Deeper: On the Aetiology of Archaeological Belief.’ It was good work, and I was excited about the presentation, but the few people who turned up lacked the ability to grasp even the simplest of the points I was making. It was a blessing when it was all over and I could leave Lund. I needed some time away from people.

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At Risk, at Home and Abroad

Illustration by Lily Padula

Joy Notoma | Longreads | January 2019 | 12 minutes (3,079 words)

 

Akosua* was in my care when she was assaulted. A man entered the bedroom where she was sleeping and tried to undress her.

She called out, waking us around 3 a.m. Moments later, she appeared in our bedroom doorway hugging herself, a distraught expression on her 15-year-old face. Akosua was sleeping in the bedroom next to where my husband and I slept, in the house we were renting in Benin, a small country on the southern coast of West Africa.

“There was a man!” she stuttered through tears. “He came into my room. He tried to undress me,” she said.

I wanted it be a nightmare, but Akosua was an unlikely person to confuse reality so dramatically, and we would have taken her word for it anyway. She was the type of teenager who contemplated big issues about the world, who could hold her own in conversations about race and politics, who expressed emotions easily while still managing to be grounded. She was selfless in the way American parents sometimes wish their own kids were.

There was an exit door in the bedroom where she slept that I had carelessly neglected to lock, which made me culpable. I was overwhelmed by guilt.

The man who did it was the groundskeeper for the house we were renting, hired by the owner. People called him the security guard, but I never could. It made me feel like the house was a prison. What could he have actually protected us from anyway? His only valuable task which I could discern was yard work, so I called him the groundskeeper. And then it was he — the supposed security guard — who assaulted Akosua.

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Stories to Read in 2019

Here are stories from 2018 that captured Longreads editors’ imaginations as deserving of ongoing attention. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

Danielle Jackson
Writer and contributing editor, Longreads

Always Open, The Eureka Hotel (Jamey Hatley, Strange Horizons)

The July 30 issue of Strange Horizons, a monthly journal dedicated to speculative fiction, focused on narratives of the southeastern United States, and were all written by indigenous authors and other writers of color. In the stories they selected and nurtured, editors Sheree Renee Thomas, Erin Roberts, and Rasha Abdulhadi brought to light a multiciplicitious South, ripe with the region’s “history, music, food, language,” yet sensitive to the hauntings and challenges still left unresolved.

My favorite story of the issue, “Always Open, the Eureka Hotel,” by Memphis-born writer Jamey Hatley, is an innovative, life-stirring feat of storytelling that resists the boundaries of genre and the page itself to dive deep into the interiors of its characters, into the heart and marrow of a place. A young Black girl in Jim Crow Mississippi has been caught in an affair with a mysterious, blues-playing lover; her protective father and brother drive her North, toward Chicago, away from the trouble her lover can bring. Guided by the Negro Motorist Green Book and the Negro Yearbook and Directory, the family journeys through sundown towns and has a menacing encounter with a white police officer. Their stop in Memphis at the Eureka Hotel changes the young girl’s life: “You thought you were hungry for what your lover could teach you, but you were hungry for yourself.”

Based on deep research (with thorough footnotes!) into Southern foodways, the traditions of conjure and rootwork, and the queer history of the blues, Hatley has created a world in between the real one and a fictional one, between now and the past, to reveal something truer about the South and feminine longing and hope than anything I’ve read in a long time.

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Alternative Reality: ‘Dark Window’

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I look forward to winter ever year, mostly because I like the snow, which quiets a city down, makes it more peaceful. I am aware my opinion may be an unpopular one — and that the snow makes life difficult and perhaps even impossible for the many homeless people in New York City (where I live) and beyond. Snow is no joke for those who are on the streets. I thought about that as I read Doyle Murphy’s long, keenly observed profile, in St Louis’ Riverfront Times, of a 22-year-old transgender woman named Jazmin, who is homeless and doubts that she will make it through the winter alive.

Several of the stories in this list highlight the ways in which cities have abandoned those who need them most. In addition to Jazmin in St. Louis, there was Anthony Benavidez, a 24-year-old man with schizophrenia who was shot and killed by Santa Fe police in his apartment last year, as Aaron Cantú details in his investigation for the Santa Fe Reporter.

Other stories veered from that theme. In the Charleston City Paper, Maura Hogan wrote a fascinating piece on the history of the city’s Garden and Gun Club, the defunct establishment that now lends its name to the magazine. Steven Hale of the Nashville Scene filed a sobering dispatch on the execution of David Earl Miller, Tennessee’s longest-serving incarcerated person on death row, who chose to die by electric chair. Debra Andres Arellano, in Maui Time, wrote an uplifting personal essay on a 51-day workers’ strike at the Sheraton Hotel in Maui that ended with better pay for union members.

For Boulder Weekly, Will Brendza wrote an interesting analysis on a new system that requires emergency medical responders to work from their vehicles all day, often without the possibility of downtime outside of their ambulances. And the Chicago Reader’s Maya Dukmasova interviewed a number of mayoral hopefuls who may not even make it onto the ballot in February but who have interesting stories nonetheless.

I came across many unique stories in alt-weeklies around the country for the third installment in this regular reading list.

1. “Downtown Businesses Consider Jazmin a Nuisance, But the Streets of St. Louis Are Her Home” (Doyle Murphy, November 28, 2018, Riverfront Times)

Doyle Murphy, a staff reporter for the Riverfront Times in St. Louis, paints a sympathetic portrait of Jazmin, a 22-year-old transgender woman from the Milwaukee area who is homeless and spends much of her time panhandling in a McDonald’s drive-through. Murphy follows Jazmin — also known as “Jaz” — through the city as she hops on an unlocked Lime scooter, buys K2 and has an uncomfortable run-in with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a 43-year-old ex-convict named Courvoisier. Jaz is witty and loquacious — “It’s not Missouri,” she says of her chosen state, “It’s misery.” A portentous air hangs over this profile with the grim reality of a long St. Louis winter underway.

In another world, the 22-year-old would be finishing college about now, maybe starting a career. Her dream car is a Chrysler 300 “with the SRT” or a 2008 Volkswagen Jetta — “I don’t know why.” But she does not see a future that includes any of this. Instead, she wonders if she will survive the winter. “The way things are going, I think I’m finna to wind up dead.”

2. “How the Garden and Gun Club upended Charleston’s starched social order in just a few short years” (Maura Hogan, December 12, 2018, Charleston City Paper)

You may be familiar with Garden & Gun, the Charleston-based magazine that was founded in 2007 and has since raked in a number of National Magazine Awards. It’s the publication of choice among those who are too dainty for Guns & Ammo and perhaps too snooty for Better Homes & Gardens. But were you aware that its namesake is a former Charleston nightclub that one might describe as the Studio 54 of the South thanks to its louche atmosphere?

A recent cover story in the Charleston City Paper — South Carolina’s only independent alt-weekly — looks at the legendary club, which is now home to a restaurant called Hank’s Seafood. Its legacy lives on not just through the magazine that borrowed its name, as the theater critic Maura Hogan makes clear in her in-depth investigation.

From its Hayne Street locale to its original home two blocks away on King Street, the always-teeming, ever-joyous nightclub once reverberated so strongly throughout the city that it dramatically altered Charleston’s cultural and social landscape. It did so by encouraging a party-hardy, wildly convivial commingling of demographics that in Charleston cut an unprecedented swath through race, sexual orientation, social status, and income level — and tolerated nothing less than harmony throughout.

At the Garden and Gun Club, differences were checked at the door, so that Spoleto artists, Broad Street lawyers, freshly-out young gay men, Charlestonians of all races, and taffeta-wrapped socialites could get down, get down with anyone and everyone, on the frenetic, teeming dance floor. Side by side, they could belly up and raise a glass at the well-stocked, hard-liquor-fueled bar. They could costume up to great effect for the legendary Halloween party. From wall to flashing, flesh-pressing wall, they could express anything and everything — that is, except for judgment.

3. “The Execution of David Earl Miller” (Steven Hale, December 7, 2018, Nashville Scene)

Steven Hale, a staff writer for the Nashville Scene, recently bore witness to the execution of David Earl Miller, Tennessee’s longest-serving incarcerated person on death row. Miller chose to be executed by electric chair, forgoing a lethal injection. He and three other incarcerated people had filed a lawsuit asking to die by firing squad, “but the suit hasn’t been successful so far,” Hale writes, and Miller ran out of time. Hale describes Miller’s execution in an appropriately clinical tone, but he can’t help feeling unsettled.

Having witnessed Billy Ray Irick’s lethal injection in August, I underestimated how unnerving it would be to feel familiar with the whole production — to know the conference room where a TDOC staffer would offer coffee, to remember the route to the execution chamber, and to notice subtle changes in the prison’s lobby. On Thursday night, there was a Christmas tree covered in lights, and a new sign at the security desk reading, “You can’t have a good day with a bad attitude, and you can’t have a bad day with a good attitude.”

Miller’s similarly sanguine last words: “Beats being on death row.”

4. “Dark Window” (Aaron Cantú, December 11, 2018, Santa Fe Reporter)

Aaron Cantú looks at the short life of Anthony Benavidez, a 24-year-old with schizophrenia who was shot and killed last year in his home by Santa Fe police after a SWAT team was called in after Benavidez stabbed his social worker. For reasons that are unclear, one of the two officers who shot Benavidez turned off his body camera before entering the apartment — in apparent violation of SFPD policy. Rather than going to court, Benavidez’s family settled with the city last month for $400,000, paid for by Travelers, Santa Fe’s insurance carrier, which, Cantú writes, “will try to settle civil suits against the city even if the officers involved are criminally charged and prosecuted.” Widening the scope of his story, Cantú wonders how this setup protects the citizens of Santa Fe.

The only accountability for the killing so far comes from the city’s insurance carrier, a business that has the final say in legal complaints against SFPD officers. One law professor believes these private insurers, who bear most of the financial responsibility when cops in small and mid-sized towns get sued, may be the most powerful entities when it comes to regulating police behavior.

Mayor Alan Webber refused to be interviewed for this story. In a written statement, City Attorney Erin McSherry said: “The settlement was a financial decision determined by the city’s insurance carrier,” and that it was “not an admission of any wrongdoing by the officers or the city.”

With no one from the city offering a detailed explanation, a more fundamental question hangs in the air: If the bloodless calculation of a faceless insurance company is a family’s best option for justice from police violence, to whom are the city and police truly accountable?

5. “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” (Debra Andres Arellano, December 12, 2018, Maui Time)

Union workers at the Sheraton Hotel in Maui recently ended a 51-day strike after negotiating better hourly pay and safer working conditions, among other things. It was one of the longest strikes in Hawaii, writes Debra Andres Arellano, who recounts the workers’ saga in a moving personal essay. The piece includes reflections from some who joined the picket line, including Virgil Seatriz Jr., a bell clerk at the Sheraton who describes how the strike brought workers closer together.

“Before, we would just show up to work, swipe in, swipe out, either nod or say hello to other departments. Now, we almost know each other by name, no matter which department you worked at,” Virgil explained. “There’s a sense of ‘ohana now where you consider your coworkers your brothers and sisters.” He added, “Before the strike, I think we would just let things go with the flow and voice our opinions individually than as a whole. As a whole we can now voice what’s right or wrong, not individually.”

6. “Waiting for an emergency” (Will Brendza, December 13, 2008, Boulder Weekly)

In Boulder, Colorado, emergency medical responders have, under a newly implemented model, been relegated to their ambulances for 10-hour shifts, often without the possibility of a lunch break or any sort of downtime outside the vehicle. That’s because American Medical Response, the medical transportation company that provides emergency services in Boulder and elsewhere, not long ago decided to eliminate EMS stations in favor of a system known as “street corning posting,” in which ambulances are parked throughout the city ready for action at all times. The system apparently increases efficiency despite that it may be draining and unhealthy for responders.

It is becoming more and more common across the state of Colorado, according to Will Brendza’s piece in Boulder Weekly.

It’s simply more effective to keep EMS locked and loaded, prepped and positioned to respond, than to trifle with the cost of EMS stations and the challenges they present. Street corner posting is becoming the industry standard in Colorado, and whether or not it is popular among ambulance crews seems to be irrelevant.

7. “Overlooked mayoral hopefuls share bold visions for Chicago” (Maya Dukmasova, December 13, 2018, Chicago Reader)

Chicago Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova spoke with some of the lesser-known candidates who may or may not be on the ballot in Chicago’s mayoral election early this year. They include a brazen pastor named Catherine Brown D’Tycoon; 87-year-old Conrien Hykes Clark, who wants to take on the city’s drug problem; and a police officer named Roger L. Washington. Even if they don’t make it that far, it is still refreshing to hear from them — and, as Dukmasova writes, it will “say little about the viability of their ideas or the seriousness of their commitment to the city.”

As we met with and interviewed the Chicagoans who dream most vividly of taking up the city’s highest office, it became clear that, if nothing else, most of them are acutely aware of the problems faced by ordinary people here. They may not have the campaign funds, party backing, or name-recognition needed to win this election, but they also don’t stink of the bullshit that tends to envelop the “viable” candidates who calculate statements to sound as inoffensive as possible while withholding most actionable opinions and commitments.

8. “As Long Beach Luxury Development Booms, the Poor Get Left Behind” (Joshua Frank, December 13, 2018, OC Weekly)

In Long Beach, California, a surge in luxury development has led to increased rents so onerous that many residents are forced to leave their homes. It is a story that has become all too common in metropolitan areas throughout the country. In his cover story for OC Weekly, Joshua Frank walked through Long Beach and interviewed a number of residents about the city’s housing crisis.

Off East Fourth Street and Redondo Avenue, Jeremy Rodriguez was served a 60-day notice to vacate in early November, when his one-year lease was up. Despite always paying his rent on time and never having been in trouble with his landlord, he was provided no reason for the eviction and offered no option to stay. Rodriguez, who manages a craft-beer tasting room in Long Beach, is now forced to find a new place for his child, girlfriend and small dog in the middle of the hectic holiday season.

***

Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review.

“I wanted to be someone else”: A Reading List about Con Artists, Grifters, and Imposters

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The documentary film The Imposter (2012) opens with footage from a handheld video camera. This is Carey’s room, a child’s voice narrates. This is the birthday girl’s mattress, and she even got a TV in her room, ain’t she lucky. The camera, tilted, focuses for just a moment on a girl who smiles widely, tossing back her teased shoulder-length hair. Ain’t she beautiful. The camera whirls away to a blur of lamp and wall before settling close up on the face of a blond boy who looks amused. The narrator introduces him, saying, and here, is our brother, Nick.

The screen fades to black, and text appears: In 1994, 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared from San Antonio, Texas.

Three years and four months after the disappearance, in Linares, Spain, a tourist couple called the local police station to say they’d found a kid, who they presumed to be about 14 or 15 years old, no I.D. or documents on him.

In documentary-style interviews years after the events, Nicholas’ remaining family — his mother, Beverly Dollarhide, his sister, Carey Gibson, and his brother-in-law, Bryan Gibson — remember their reactions to hearing that Nicholas had been found alive, in Spain.

“Of course it was mysterious,” Bryan says. “It was exciting, worrisome, it was all mixed emotions.”

“Ecstatic, bewildered, you know, Spain?” Carey wonders. “How did he get there? You have a hundred thousand questions that you want answered immediately.”

“I felt wonderful,” Beverly says.

After the title credit, the documentary rewinds to the moment when the police were first called. In a re-enacted scene, rain pours over a dimly lit street. Someone huddles with their knees pulled to their chest in a phone booth, face obscured by a hood. Police remark that “he seems very young,” “he’s very scared,” and “we tried to get him some food, but he doesn’t want it.”

The scene cuts to a man being interviewed alone, his brown eyes expressive. “From as long as I remember, I wanted to be someone else. Someone who was acceptable. The most important thing and what I learned very fast was to be convincing,” he says with a French accent. “When the police arrived, I have immediately to put into their minds that they have a kid in front of them, not an adult so it was very important for me to behave like one. I wanted to provoke on them a sense of guilt, of being adults that close to a kid who is that scared. When you see a kid that have nervous reflexes, you can’t touch him, you can’t approach him, then you understand that something is wrong,” the man says. He stares directly at the camera for emphasis. “I was not the one telling them I’ve been sexually abused — I had them asking me that. By my attitude, by my way of doing things they were the ones who were thinking about it, and that gave me power.”

The man being interviewed for the documentary is Frédéric Pierre Bourdin, a man who viewers later learn was a serial impostor, someone who frequently stole the identities of missing children. What’s interesting about the documentary, is that Bourdin narrates the reasoning behind his decisions while the events of his impersonation are re-enacted onscreen. As the events of the documentary unfurl, questions are raised. Who would steal the identity of a missing child? What family who lost a slender blond 13-year-old from the U.S. would accept a 23-year old man with a dark five-o’-clock shadow and an unshakeable French accent masquerading as their own 16-year-old family member just three years later? What is so appealing about adopting an identity — and a family — so far from one’s own? Who is harmed by an act of impersonation?

These questions are not unique to The Imposter. The following essays about con artists, grifters, and imposters are compelling in their attempts to answer why and how people deceive others.

1. Who is Anna March? (Melissa Chadburn and Carolyn Kellogg, July 26, 2018, LA Times)

Anna March — or a woman who goes by Anna March — who portrayed herself as a “spunky, apologetic, sex-positive feminist ready to raise hell” began to raise the suspicion of the literary community with her outlandish events and mysterious generosity. Melissa Chadburn and Carolyn Kellogg, in an immense feat of reporting, uncover Anna March’s past identities, reveal her significant debts, and detail how she harmed others through her deception.

2. The Secret Life of a Con Man (Dustin Grinnell, August 12, 2014, Narratively)

For a price of $75 and under the condition of anonymity, Dustin Grinnell interviews “GM,” who he describes “a con man with a conscience.” GM divulges how he came to be a grifter, his methods, and his anxieties.

“GM once spent three weeks casing a mother of three, learning everything he could about her life, routine and preferences. When he finally found a way in, he robbed her of over $1,000. It was a good score. And because she was a piece of shit, GM concluded, the crime was justifiable.”

3. The Rise and Fall of Toronto’s Classiest Con Man (Michael Lista, May 29, 2017, The Walrus)

Michael Lista, in this fascinating piece, exposes the breadth of James Regan’s swindling, which reaches many years back in time and covers a wide array of establishments.

“Regan is a man at war—with landlords, car dealers, courts, hotels, clubs, and civic institutions. He is at war with the NHL and the Catholic Church. He is at war with law, at war with facts, at war with human nature. He’s even at war with gravity—as his cons come crashing down, he refuses to do anything but pretend to rise.”

4. The Lives and Lies of a Professional Imposter (James C. McKinley Jr. and Rick Rojas, February 4, 2016, The New York Times)

Jeremy Wilson — if that’s even his real name — began his life as a con man in high school, when he showed up to class in a wheelchair in order to solicit money from peers. Since that time, he has assumed an alarming number of identities, leading to comparisons between his case and that of Frank Abagnale Jr., “the notorious con artist whose life was chronicled in the 2002 film ‘Catch Me if You Can.’”

“Investigators say Mr. Wilson is a professional impostor and a skilled forger. Though fraud has become an increasingly invisible offense in a digital world, Mr. Wilson has stuck with a decidedly old-fashioned approach, stealing checks and creating new personas, occasionally with accents and falsified papers, the police said.”

5. How Anna Delvey Tricked New York (Jessica Pressler, May 28, 2018, The Cut)

After Anna Delvey checks into 11 Howard hotel in Soho, New York for a month-long stay, she quickly makes an impression with her money, handing out $100 bills to nearly anyone who crossed her path. She befriends — or at least spends significant time with — Neffatari Davis, who goes by “Neff,” the concierge at the hotel, who became privy to Delvey’s wildly extravagant lifestyle, one that included $4,500 spent on a personal trainer, dinners with Macaulay Culkin, and party after party. In this widely-shared and captivating essay, Jessica Pressler unveils Anna Delvey’s elaborate money-related schemes and what happens when Delvey’s lies — and lifestyle — begin to collapse.

“WANNABE SOCIALITE BUSTED FOR SKIPPING OUT ON PRICEY HOTEL BILLS, blared the headline in the Post, which referenced an incident in which Anna attempted to leave the restaurant at Le Parker without paying. “Why are you making a big deal about this?” she’d protested to police. “Give me five minutes and I can get a friend to pay.””

Related Reading: “As an added bonus, she paid for everything”: My Bright-Lights Misadventure with a Magician of Manhattan (Rachel DeLoache Williams, April 13, 2018, Vanity Fair)

6. The Great High School Impostor (Daniel Riley, May 1, 2018, GQ)

At the age of nineteen, chasing his idea of the American dream, Artur Samarin paid an American couple two thousand dollars, changed his birthdate so he would appear five years younger, and just a few months later, started his first day as a freshman at Harrisburg High, in Pennsylvania. The ruse continued until just three months of Artur’s senior year, when police entered his classroom and escorted him away. In this riveting account, Daniel Riley explores the complicated relationship between Artur and the American couple who initially supported him, Artur’s intentions, and the legal issues that arose as a result of Artur’s deception.

“There was a suggestion that a sort of transference had occurred, a blurring of the lines between the real person and the fake, a sense that Artur Samarin actually was Asher Potts.”

7. A Con Man Reinvents Himself…As a Reality TV Magician (Jess Zimmerman, October 13, 2015, Atlas Obscura)

After spending five years in federal prison as a result of illegal schemes carried out as a con man, Aiden Sinclair asserts that he has changed his ways. Sinclair claims that, in place of deception, his only tricks now are acts of magic, ones he performs on stage at America’s Got Talent. But rather than accept Sinclair’s new life at face value, Jess Zimmerman, in this compelling piece, asks, “Sinclair has made his “grifter magician” background part of his performance persona, but is it just a performance? Can con men really change?”

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness.