shouldn’t follow their way of thinking, or you’ll end up where they ended-facing a brick wall.”
“This is strange, now that you mention it, David,” I said. “Because it goes along with my line of thinking. If what I’ve discovered so far checks out, then the entire theoretical structure the FBI is working from will collapse. They had just one chink in the armor. Maybe we don’t have Albert C. Ward III assuming eleven aliases. Maybe we’ve got ourselves a Mr. Anonymous with twelve aliases, including one as Albert C. Ward III.”
“I hear you,” said David, digesting my words. “Anything to support it?”
“Ward had a pronounced stutter. None of the imposters is described in the files as having that disability. On the contrary. The suspect in each of the eleven indicted cases actually has been pretty articulate,” I said, gaining confidence with my theory.
“Go on,” said David, sounding interested.
I picked up speed. “Let’s establish, just for the sake of our little discussion here, that twenty-year-olds couldn’t have pulled off the scams, because they weren’t sophisticated enough, and because the little evidence we’ve gathered shows the perpetrators appeared to be much older. Therefore, let’s suppose that whoever assumed the identity of four, and maybe even all twelve, young American men made a hit on a bank or on un- suspecting investors and ran with the money. Now, I don’t even have this con artist’s picture, if Ward’s identity was also stolen. The yearbook picture and the photos that Donald Peterson, the retired school principal, sent me were definitely of Ward. But apparently the FBI never asked any of the victims whether the scam artist’s photo was in a photo array that included that year-book photo of Ward. If my target wasn’t Ward after all, then whom was I chasing? I’m back to square one, hunting a single ghost or a cemetery’s worth.”
“Dan, it’s Bob. Didn’t you just tell us that you think the FBI was wrong, and even the person calling himself Ward was an imposter who assumed Ward’s identity, and not Ward himself? So if the FBI was wrong on that, why wouldn’t they be wrong on the entire concept? Take your idea even further.”
“How?”
“How do we know that the twelve cases are connected? Maybe just two or three or none at all,” said Bob.
“The FBI said so.”
“They could be wrong, you know. You’ve just suggested it,” added David.
“Anyway, the FBI’s conclusion isn’t proof, but assumption,” concluded Bob.
“OK,” I said. “Although we’ve enough doubts concerning the FBI’s conclusion, we also must make assumptions that could turn out to be just as baseless.”
“Like what?” asked Bob.
“Like the one that seems most logical at this time, and take it from there.”
“Fine,” said David. “How about that? Assuming that all of the cases are connected, who could mastermind such an operation?”
“If it went beyond the one-person-crime-spree pattern we see in the usual identity thefts, I’d see a criminal organization with international activities, or some other structured body.”
“Any basis for that?” Bob asked, more in curiosity than as a challenge.
“No proof, just my hunch.”
“Why?” Clearly, like David, he wasn’t the kind of guy who would settle for easy answers.
“Because it involves young American men, none of whom apparently knew any of the others, who first left the country at about the same time, each for reasons of his own. Only after they left the country did the common denominator kick in: their identities were stolen. The first step of the conspiracy didn’t start here. It started somewhere, anywhere, wherever these guys lost their passports. Take Ward. He was traveling in Africa and Asia without known incident until he stopped writing his friends here. Since we don’t know where the others went, it could have happened anywhere. But the fact remains-their passports were also taken. Therefore, my conclusion is that an organization that operates in more than one location could be behind it. Besides, why limit ourselves to thinking it was a criminal enterprise? Maybe there’s a foreign power or a terrorist organization behind this.”
“Any basis for that?” asked David.
“Not at this time, but need I remind you that we lost our innocence on nine eleven? Things that weren’t plausible earlier are a reality now.” I didn’t want to elaborate, but in my mind was my Mossad training concerning planting sleeper agents in target countries. Those passports could now be used by foreign agents operating in any country that welcomes U.S. citizens. These could be used for far more dangerous purposes than money siphoning. I had no proof, just a hunch that I registered in my mind to develop later.
David brought me back to reality, which he was very good at. In fact, I sometimes felt as if he were my anchor, always keeping me tethered only to the facts at hand. Yet one more thing I was going to miss when he was gone. “Maybe the passports were taken in just one location by a sophisticated scam artist?”
“Sure,” I agreed. “That’s also a possibility.” But I suspected that David’s new theory was more farfetched than mine.
Bob developed the idea further. “Have you thought of the possibility that these young men simply sold their passports to finance their trips, claimed they were lost, and applied for new ones?”
“I did, and so did the FBI. The State Department told the Bureau that none of these men applied for a replacement passport. Besides, if all they did was sell their passport, why have they disappeared for good?”
“Did you investigate whether these guys had more than one citizenship? They could be selling their U.S. passports and continuing to travel with their foreign passports.” Bob’s tone was per sis tent. He seemed unwilling to consider my speculations unless I could prove that I’d considered every possibility. I realized he was only doing his job, and so far it hadn’t reached the point where I found it to be irritating.
“No go. If any of them had a foreign passport, his entry into the U.S. with that passport would have been recorded, and it wasn’t. Therefore, the genuine Ward left the U.S. only once and never returned. His passport and identity were given to someone already in the U.S., or who had initially entered the U.S. with a different passport under a different name, and then took Ward’s identity. It is possible that either all the additional passports were delivered to that someone while he was already in the U.S., or they were brought into the U.S. with him. That is, if all these cases are connected.”
“Yes, but…” said Bob continuing to be the devil’s advocate. “To begin with, why does he need passports to steal identities? He just needs the bio details, Social Security numbers, and such.”
I had an answer to that. “Because a U.S. passport is the best way of getting a copy of your old Social Security card, a driver’s license, and many other personal documents. Once you have these documents, the passport becomes secondary in the identity-theft scheme, other than for leaving the U.S. with your loot.”
Bob wasn’t deterred. “Fine, but how do we know that Ward didn’t have yet another passport with an alias that he used to exit the U.S.? It’s not a big deal. If he managed to get eleven passports with aliases, he could get twelve.”
“I still think there’s some organization behind it,” I said, but with less conviction.
After we got off the phone, I decided to explore that direction. Was Ward the only solid name I had to look at? What about the others? I decided to stick with him, because chronologically he was the first to disappear. But the age issue made me more confident in my earlier theory that we had ourselves a case of identity thefts. All victims described the perpetrators as men in their late twenties or early thirties, but the young men whose passports were used were in their early twenties at the time the scams began. Although a victim doesn’t usually ask a purported business associate for a passport, in retrospect the discrepancy was too obvious to ignore.
I turned to my desktop. I wanted to see if there were any news items about Ward. Maybe he’d sold photographs to some magazine in India, or had been arrested after a bar brawl in Indonesia. With more than ten thousand daily newspapers published around the world, maybe he had done something nice, or not so nice, that had been reported. Ward had disappeared in the early 1980s, before most international news was routinely computerized, and had then resurfaced irregularly starting in the mid-1980s. Still, I might get lucky. Maybe Ward’s irregular resurfacing was intended to establish a “clean” alias between scams? None of the other aliases turned up again for more than the one scam.
I first ran a Google search. Nothing relevant. Then I tried the Dogpile search engine. Still nothing. Next I tried legal retrieving services and limited the search to newspapers and magazines. After scrolling down over hundreds of items, and just as I was about to give up, I got a hit on Albert C. Ward III. It was in a newsletter issued by the Jewish community in Sydney, Australia. A bigamous wedding was averted at the last moment last week, before Rabbi Applebaum was scheduled to celebrate the marriage of Mr. Herbert Goldman from the United
