Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1) (12 page)

The headlines across the country started much the same: “Authorities Fooled by Teen,” or “Teenager Tricked Officials,” and also “Authorities Duped by Runaway,” but they all essentially printed in bold: “Girl Fooled Officials with White Slavery Tale.”

The opening paragraphs were nearly identical as well:

A 15-year-old girl who ran away from her Tennessee home fooled authorities for seven months with tales of an international white slavery ring before she finally gave up the masquerade.

Of all the agencies that investigated and examined her – the Collin County Sheriff’s Department, Wichita Falls State Hospital, the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Interpol – none could find a flaw in her story
.

There’s a massive difference in not finding a flaw and being fooled. The problem with the headlines was very few people were genuinely deceived; they just didn’t know what to do with me. I stuck to my story and didn’t make many mistakes, and the ones I did, people were willing to overlook or forget. 

But still the papers asked:
How did she fool all those investigators for all those months
?

I’m quoted as saying, “Creative genius.”

Rick confirmed that and then said, “I was dealing with a mastermind.”

He went on to say, “It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had known half the things I was thinking.”

And then, “It’s the most bizarre thing this office has ever encountered. I’m not angered because it’s very logical … a person with the IQ she has could easily have pulled this off. And she did.”

It might have been easy but it wasn’t logical. I also think he might have been cut off and that was meant to read, “It’s very logical that someone with her IQ would get bored and think it entertaining to cut loose all the cannons on a ship.”

He did say, “Despite the testing in Wichita Falls, Tanya needs ‘psychological services of some kind.’”

That assessment was going to be shared by many, but it was a tiny sentence that didn’t make it into many papers. The big story was that a 15-year-old had told an elaborate tale of white slavery, and the Texas authorities had been duped.

But that wasn’t accurate. I caused a lot of doubt in everyone’s mind, and not even Sergiu suspected I was so young, or American. But the only person I fooled, full out, from start to finish, was the deputy in Shelbyville who had helped me run away.

Now that poor man, I had truly tricked. Our short encounter had been a fast, hard con, and that’s where I truly excelled.

~~~~~~

With some hope of trying to make sense of what I’d done, the local psychologist gave me the Stanford–Binet Intelligence test. She looked worried with the results. At 176, I was just a few points higher than the test actually allowed, and she’d had to calculate the score separately.

It didn’t make her nearly as happy to tell me this as it did for me to hear it.

She tried for a better result with the Wechsler Intelligence test. The Wechsler version gave no extra points for answering with speed, and I’d racked up fourteen points for going fast, but the difference wasn’t enough to provide her any comfort.

In my case, intelligence was a disease that had led to a psychotic episode. But I had returned home of my own will and freely admitted my behavior while away, so it was diagnosed as nothing more than that, an episode.

Hoping to prevent my madness from resurfacing, the psychologist spoke with the dean of the nearby community college and convinced him to accept me into the school based on the scores.

After two tests, one interview, and admission into college, the psychologist didn’t think there was much more she could offer. She warned my parents I would likely do something again if I was not mentally challenged, but, “Other than a high need for stimulation, Tanya is mentally healthy.”

I quoted the first news article, “Either that or ‘a deeply disturbed, very capable liar.’”

But no one in the room found that funny. It was a little too close to what everyone suspected.

My humor hadn’t changed and I felt much the same, but I was viewed differently. I was an unsettling presence in the community that caused people to fall silent. Strangers and friends had to step back for a bit of perspective. They needed to quietly inspect me for cracks, afraid I might break mental at any moment.

One woman was bold enough to ask, “Are you better now?”

I had no idea how to answer that, and it really didn’t matter because nothing I said would make people comfortable with me again. There were questions they couldn’t ask and I couldn’t guess. The papers said slave, but they didn’t mention sex, and the connection was clear to everyone except me.

My father was very disturbed. He no longer believed my behavior with older men had been entirely innocent, and I wasn’t going to tell him that it wasn’t, and neither was I.

But that was something everybody needed to be protected from. It was an image my parents did not need in their head. After every other heartache I had caused them over the past seven months, I did not want my mother crying while my father drove to Texas with a gun.

He was worried enough without knowing about Sergiu, and already he felt the need to express the importance of men respecting women. I agreed. Time and again, I agreed, but he had three dozen ways to say it and a long summer to say it in.

He finally got around to saying, “I never spanked you.”

“And I appreciate it.”

“And I never let that school touch you either.”

The high school had corporal punishment and had tried, but I’d refused to submit. It turned into a three-hour battle with four teachers and the principal. By midafternoon, the principal threatened to call my father and I begged, “Please do.”

They were quickly familiarized with what happens when you stand between a protective father and his youngest child. He was furious, demanding of the administration, “I don’t hit my daughter, so what makes you think I’m going to permit you?” In half the time it took to drive there, he was in the office, and then everyone was hiding their wooden paddles lest he follow through with his threat to try it out on them first.

Why he felt the need to remind me was a mystery, and he’d only say, “No one over the age of four needs to be spanked.”

I said, “Okay. But I told you when I was five I was never having kids, and I haven’t changed my mind.”

“I’m not worried about you having kids.”

I couldn’t imagine who else he thought I might hit. The lesson was making less and less sense. Maybe he thought I had quintessentially changed. I tried to reassure him, “I’m not violent. I’d never hurt anyone.”

That admission made nothing better. He shook his head and asked, “You know Star?” Star was his best friend’s daughter. She had five PhD’s by the time she was 30 and a black belt in karate when she was 12. She was a 13-year-old senior when the six-foot captain of the basketball team passed her in the hall and grabbed her breast. She bounced him down the hall, knocking him off one locker after the next, never letting him fully regain his feet, slamming him one direction to break his nose, and then hurling him another to blacken his eyes. Before she was done making an example of him, she’d cracked his wrist and a rib. After a two-week suspension, she came back to part the crowded halls like Moses at the sea. My father said, “Star never took any shit. You could learn a lot from Star.”

My parents cautiously waited for me to turn sixteen so I could drive myself to college, but I’d waited for the driver’s license so I could continue my search for legitimate identification under an assumed name. I kept Sergiu’s secrets, mentioning him only as the person who had taught me to drive. When I failed the road test, no one was too impressed with his tutoring, but by the fall semester, I’d managed to stop slinging the testing official into the passenger window on the corners, and finally passed when I recognized the stop signs and speed limits weren’t just friendly suggestions.

Having procured my first piece of genuine identification, I understood the basic exchange of information required to get another. You needed something easy like a library card, school form, or bank book, and then a birth certificate.

I was fortunate to have been born at the cusp of all things bad. My birth did not require an immediate Social Security number to see the doctor. My parents only applied for it when I was twelve so I could open a saving’s account. Social Security hadn’t yet turned into our official identity number, so I didn’t have to offer it to get my first driver’s license.

The problem was the birth certificate. I studied mine, which had been issued in New York, and my sister’s issued in Miami. I looked at my friends’ birth certificates from Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Nashville, and then all the small towns of Tennessee. Every one of them was different and most of them were laughably plain without raised seals, official stamps, or even a watermark for security. I was convinced there was no way the Tennessee Department of Driver’s License Services was confirming these shoddy typewriter-abused pieces of paper were genuine. I knew I could forge them if I could get access to a laser printer. But at the time, laser printers cost four thousand dollars, and even my professors only had access to dot matrix.

I needed a laser printer and an IBM computer.

But then I had another idea. I went back to the license center and said, “I lost my driver’s license.”

They said, “Well, you’ll need to get your picture taken again to make a new one.”

I asked, “Don’t you have a copy of my picture on file?”

“No, we don’t make copies.”

Oh man, oh-man-oh-man, there was a question I wanted to ask but didn’t know how to phrase. I worked and worked for a way to say it without giving away my intentions, but there was no subtle way to ask, “So, you’re just taking my word that I am the person on the license?” I went ahead and asked it.

“You
are
aged sixteen, five-foot-eight with brown hair and eyes,” like duh, it’s your description you idiotic little girl.

“And the only place this picture exists is on my license?”

“It’s the only place it needs to exist.”

I didn’t believe her. There was no way it was that simple. I went to another licensing center to have the same conversation a second time, and then I went slightly giddy with wonder.

~~~~~~

I had the local printers run a thousand stylish flyers and then plastered them all over Nashville and Atlanta.

Models needed for winter runway work. Must be over eighteen and between 5’8” and 5’9”. Headshots preferred but photographs accepted. Please send details to: P.O. Box in Nashville.

The Caucasian models with brown, black, or red hair received a phone call.

“This all sounds excellent. I think you’ll be
perfect
for the team. You’ll absolutely
love
the other nine girls. I need to send you a contract, but before I do, I just need proof you’re over eighteen. If you could mail to the same P.O. Box a copy of your driver’s license or birth certificate, either will be fine, both would be even better. And you know what? Just throw in your Social Security number while you’re at it — you know how the auditors are with taxes these days,” and we’d both groan at the trouble they caused.

It hadn’t been intended, but I ended up with nearly twenty original or certified birth certificates. It was 1986 and identity fraud was not yet a publicized issue, and, as I discovered, models were absolutely desperate to please. It made them terribly easy to manipulate, a trait that simultaneously pleased and distressed me. They needed to be protected from the likes of me, but I knew there were people with intentions far worse than mine that would cause them no end of unhappiness.

By the end of our chatty conversations, I knew their mother’s maiden name, what their father did for a living, and where everyone in their family was born. I’d put the phone down knowing every distinct detail of their identity so that I didn’t really need a copy of anything, but I still asked for them to send it.

Almost always I walked away disturbed by the hope and expectation I was going to shatter. My greatest concern was the weeks of anxiety I would cause when they didn’t get the promised contract. I could imagine it, and I couldn’t stomach it. I sent them all apology letters explaining the show had been canceled but I would keep their details for the spring event.

Conscience appeased, I organized the treasure into a file. Some names were only copies of the driver’s license, most came with Social Security numbers, and almost twenty had genuine birth certificates.

I started going to the Driver’s Licensing Service Centers and saying, “Hi, I’m Ms. Model and I lost my license. That’s me alright: aged twenty, five-foot-eight with brown hair and eyes.”

~~~~~~

Every week I added another Tennessee issued driver’s license to my collection. The names and addresses were unfamiliar but the picture in the corner was clearly me. In some my hair was flaming red, and in others I was Goth, but the high cheek bones and strong lines of my face remained the same. I was never going to be a spy that could don a disguise and meld into any person. But as Tennessee didn’t keep a copy of the pictures on file, the risks associated with my crime were so low as to be nonexistent.

There was nothing to slow me down, and I wasn’t going to stop until I had at least a dozen IDs, and a few more from Georgia, but I had very little idea of what I wanted to do with them.

For inspiration, I went to the library to look up con artists and fraud. The books repeatedly referenced check kiting. If it hadn’t had such an appealing name, I might have overlooked it, but I just loved saying the words: check kiting.

It sounded breezy, but essentially it was nothing more than writing one bad check to cover another. It’s illegal the very moment you don’t have the funds to cover either check, but it becomes particularly criminal when you withdraw the erroneous balance that’s been created.

History’s most outrageous kiters had brought several major banks to their knees, and because of it, the banks were on the lookout for similar activity. But as the library books explained, it was more difficult to spot by using multiple accounts with different names. The more accounts, the longer you could float the checks.

There was no risk I would bankrupt a bank when all I needed was five thousand dollars. The goal was a laser printer and a computer so I could continue my experiments in creating legal identification.

I opened four checking accounts in four unique names at four separate banks in four adjoining states, and then I started writing checks from one account to the other, keeping them all up in the air, in transit, increasing the value of deposits until I had withdrawn nearly eight thousand dollars. Then I let the checks fall where they may, and whose ever name was on the license got to explain they hadn’t been involved.

When I had opened the accounts, each bank had taken photocopies of the driver’s license with my image in the corner, and while the pictures were black blobs of grainy ink, barely recognizable as female, I assumed it was enough to clear the models of wrong doing. The fear that I would mess up anyone’s life didn’t prevent me from doing it, but it did keep me from continuing the practice.

Not wanting to explain to my parents how I came to be in possession of the computer and printing equipment, I kept it at a friend’s house. John Mittwede and I had classes together three times a week. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we’d leave campus to race each other through the curvy back roads to his house. I had a six-cylinder Mustang and no fear of passing on the curves, so it was a race he never won. Early on he declared me crazy and himself foolish for playing games with a lunatic.

When he met my grandmother, he thought she was prophetic because she could never get his name right, always calling him Nitwitty.

“And I am a nitwit for letting you do this here.” From the very start, he protested, but he was also an artist, and he found immense joy in the new technology of laser printing. He wanted to see what the printer could do, but not in the same way I did.

“There are better things to use this for than birth certificates,” but then he’d grimace and criticize that I was doing it wrong, without style and with no regard for perfection.

I’d say, “They won’t notice,” and wave it away, but he couldn’t bear to see it.

He’d smoke a joint, eat some pills, and then shoo me away from the computer to do it himself. When I pulled the documents from the printer to finish them, I was reminded he didn’t like my handwriting either. I could forge a signature better than he, but as long as we were making everybody up out of air and imagination, he thought the mother’s and father’s signatures should complement the doctor’s. The husband’s should be dark and bold, the wife’s should scroll fancifully across the paper, and the doctor had to dominate them both with decisive authority, then everybody had to have the proper amount of loops both above and below the line.

I would laugh at his obsession, but his need for visual harmony meant he made all of the birth certificates I used, and he made them very pretty. The agents at the Driver’s License Service Centers never remarked on this however. They just took the document for how it appeared and started me with the written exam. This I never failed, but I’d still roll through the stop signs, pass in the intersections, or think the agent would just love to read the book on the backseat and reach around to get it, then I’d have to return to take the road test again.

~~~~~~

Check kiting was more amusing to say than do, but it gave me a taste for banks. I liked the feel of banks. I liked the ones with marble floors and chandeliers as much as the ones with corporate carpet and stained paneling. I was comfortable in the hushed atmosphere that was so similar to a library. I not only liked the little slips of paper you had to fill out to deposit or withdraw, but also the black pens on ball chains that would loop so nicely into a circle. I adored the antique vaults and was mesmerized by the rows of safety deposit boxes. I imagined they held fabulous secrets. The women wore dresses and the men wore suits, and everything was so very tidy. Banks were marvelous.

And I could be twenty-three again. It was a good age to acquire a loan. I asked for five-thousand dollars, and all the loan officers wanted in return was a copy of a 1040 tax return and proof of employment. It didn’t seem right that it should be so easy.

I expected to be caught by some unexpected security feature. I thought I was wasting money renting a house, setting up a phone, and then waiting for the bank to call so I could confirm I worked at whatever imaginary business I had named on the form.

I wondered if I really could just get away with filling out a 1040EZ and then photocopying it, as though this alone were evidence of filing with the IRS, but it never failed to appease.

It was harder to get a Social Security number than five thousand dollars.

But not much harder.

I entered the banks looking civil, but I would go into Social Security like a backwoods holy-roller. With my hair brushed straight and rolled into a bun, I finished the look of a Pentecostal by scrubbing my face clean of makeup and wearing socks in sandals under a long floral skirt. The clothes I wore had been homemade and were well-used by the time I bought them at the Salvation Army, so no one doubted that if it were Sunday, I’d be speaking in tongues or proselytizing with snakes; but as it was midweek, I was staring at the floor, acting shy and backwards, making everyone uncomfortable that I had come down off the mountain.

I also knew how to speak wood-hick: “I got me a job at the Piggly Wiggly but my mamma didn’t never get me one of those Social Security numbers, and they say I needs one to work.”

And then there was the phrase that always put an end to every agent’s curiosity about why I didn’t already have one: “I’s homeschooled …
by my daddy
.” Nobody was crossing into that shit.