Their job is made a lot easier simply because a lot of people are surprisingly gullible, with an unshakable belief in the inherent goodness of man.
A recent newspaper article was headlined CON ARTIST’S LATEST PLOY—TELLING THE TRUTH.18 It described the exploits of a man who became Man of the Year, president of the Chamber of Commerce (shades of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, whose bid for Jaycee president was interrupted by his first murder conviction), and member of the Republican Executive Committee in the small town where he had resided for ten years. Billing himself as a Berkeley Ph.D. in psychology, he decided to run for a place on the local school board. “That pays $18,000,” he later said. “And I thought I could parlay that into the county commission, which is $30,000. Then maybe state rep.”
A local reporter decided to check this man’s credentials from information the latter had supplied. Except for the place and date of birth, all the data were fictitious. (“Always mix in a little truth,” he told the reporter, offering this advice for free.) Not only was the man a complete impostor, as the reporter discovered, but he had a long history of antisocial behavior, fraud, impersonation, and imprisonment, and his only contact with a university involved extension courses he’d taken while serving time in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. “Before he was a con man he was a con boy. He was the kind of kid who would steal a Boy Scout uniform in order to hitchhike. He would tell people that he had hit the road to earn a merit badge. Later he joined the army, only to desert after three weeks. Then he masqueraded as a flier in the Royal Air Force. He persuaded people he was a hero. For two decades he dodged across America, a step ahead of the hoodwinked. Along the way he picked up three wives, three divorces, and four children. To this day he has no idea of what happened to any of them.”
When found out, this man was unconcerned, and stated that he knew that if he was ever discovered “these trusting people would stand behind me. A good liar is a good judge of people,” he added, a remark that probably had more truth in it than everything else he had said put together. His only embarrassment was that it was merely a local reporter who had found him out. Even so, he was able to dismiss the fellow’s investigative coup with the offhand comment, “I had an easy cover.”
Perhaps most remarkable in this account, although by no means unusual, was the fact that far from decrying this fellow’s outrageous program of deception, the local community he had conned so thoroughly rushed to his support. And it was not merely token support they offered. “I assess [his] genuineness, integrity, and devotion to duty to rank right alongside of President Abraham Lincoln,” wrote the Republican party chairman. Presumably, he was more swayed by the impostor’s words than by his deeds. Or perhaps he, and the rest of the community, could not come to grips with the fact that they had been taken in. As one commentator put it, “There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.”19
This of course makes life a lot easier for the con artist and the fraud. Our impostor saw the doors opening to him right away and began to make new plans to enter the political arena. “Name recognition is so important to a politician, and more people know my name than before,” he said. “I can run with this for years.” Most of us would be devastated and humiliated by public exposure as a liar and a cheat, but not the psychopath. He or she can still look the community straight in the eye and give impassioned assurances, on their “word of honor.”
IN A CASE that struck uncomfortably close to home, I was invited to speak about my research on psychopaths at a conference on crime in California, and was to receive an honorarium of five hundred dollars plus expenses. Six months after the conference, I still had not been paid, so I made inquiries and learned that the organizer had been arrested at a government meeting in Washington and charged with several counts of fraud, forgery, and theft. It turned out that he had a long criminal record, had been diagnosed by several psychiatrists as a “classic psychopath,” and had forged the documents and letters of reference used to obtain his job. Needless to say, I was not the only speaker who had not been paid. To top things off, shortly after my talk he sent me a copy—complete with editorial comments—of an article on the diagnosis of psychopathy. Following his arrest, he was let out on bail and has since disappeared.
Ironically, I had spent quite a bit of time with this man, at a luncheon held just before my talk and later in a bar. I detected nothing unusual or suspicious about him; my antenna failed to twitch in his presence. Would I have lent him money? Possibly. I do recall insisting that I pick up the bar tab. He wasn’t wearing a bell around his neck!
SUBCRIMINAL PSYCHOPATHS
Many psychopaths wind up in prisons or other correctional facilities time and again. The characteristic pattern is a lifelong bouncing from one job or another into jail and then back onto the streets, into and out of prison, perhaps into a mental health facility and quickly out, once the staff realizes they have on their hands a patient who is bound to make trouble and disrupt the institutional routine. The net effect in the typical case is that of a Ping Pong ball out of control.
However, many psychopaths never go to prison or any other facility. They appear to function reasonably well—as lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists, academics, mercenaries, police officers, cult leaders, military personnel, businesspeople, writers, artists, entertainers, and so forth—without breaking the law, or at least without being caught and convicted. These individuals are every bit as egocentric, callous, and manipulative as the average criminal psychopath; however, their intelligence, family background, social skills, and circumstances permit them to construct a facade of normalcy and to get what they want with relative impunity.
Some commentators refer to them as “successful psychopaths.” Others argue that individuals of this sort benefit society. Just as they are able to ignore society’s rules, the argument goes, intelligent psychopaths are able to transcend the bounds of conventional thought, providing a creative spark for the arts, the theater, design, and so on. Whatever the merits of this argument, they are more than offset—in my view—by the broken hearts, shattered careers, and used-up people left in their wake as they cut a zigzag route through society, driven by a remorseless need to “express themselves.”
Rather than refer to these individuals as successful psychopaths—after all, their success is often illusory and always at someone else’s expense—I prefer to call them subcriminal psychopaths. Their conduct, although technically not illegal, typically violates conventional ethical standards, hovering just on the shady side of the law. Unlike people who consciously adopt a ruthless, greedy, and apparently unscrupulous strategy in their business dealings but who are reasonably honest and empathetic in other areas of their lives, subcriminal psychopaths exhibit much the same behaviors and attitudes in all areas of their lives. If they lie and cheat on the job—and get away with it or are even admired for it—they will lie and cheat in other areas of their lives.
Two BUSINESSMEN ARE walking together, each carrying a briefcase. “We’re only morally bankrupt,” says one. “Thank God,” says the other.
—From a cartoon by Bill Lee in Omni, March 1991, p. 84
I am certain that if the families and friends of such individuals were willing to discuss their experiences without fear of retribution, we would uncover a rat’s nest of emotional abuse, philandering, double-dealing, and generally shoddy behavior. These rat’s nests are sometimes made public in dramatic fashion. Think of the many high-profile cases in which a “pillar of the community” commits a serious crime—say, murder or rape—and in the process of investigations by the police and news media the perpetrator’s dark side is revealed. Many such cases are vividly portrayed in books and movies, and the shocked—and titillated—public asks, “Where did they go wrong?” and, “What made them do it?”
The answer, in most cases, is that the culprit didn’t just suddenly “go wrong.” Individuals who frequent the shady side of the law stand a good chance of slipping over the edge. In such
cases, the crime is simply a natural consequence of a deviant personality structure that has always been present but that, because of good luck, social skills, cover-ups, a fearful family, or friends and associates who conveniently refused to see what was going on, had not previously resulted in a criminal act that came to the attention of the justice system.
Think, for example, of John Gacy (Buried Dreams), Jeffrey Mac-Donald (Fatal Vision), Ted Bundy (The Stranger Beside Me), Diane Downs (Small Sacrifices), Kevin Coe (Son), Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi (Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers), David Brown (Love, Lies and Murder), and Kenneth Taylor (In the Name of the Child), to name but a few of the more sensational cases that have been described in books and have become well known.
We now diagnose most of these people as psychopaths, but the crucial point here is that their disorder and its behavior did not suddenly appear full-blown out of nowhere. They were the same people before they were caught as they were afterward. They are psychopaths now and they were psychopaths before.
This is a disturbing thought, because it suggests that the cases that come to the public’s attention represent only the tip of a very large iceberg.
The rest of the iceberg is to be found nearly everywhere—in business, the home, the professions, the military, the arts, the entertainment industry, the news media, academe, and the blue-collar world. Millions of men, women, and children daily suffer terror, anxiety, pain, and humiliation at the hands of the psychopaths in their lives.
Tragically, these victims often cannot get other people to understand what they are going through. Psychopaths are very good at putting on a good impression when it suits them, and they often paint their victims as the real culprits. As one woman—the third wife of a forty-year-old high school teacher—recently told me: “For five years he cheated on me, kept me living in fear, and forged checks on my personal bank account. But everyone, including my doctor and lawyer and my friends, blamed me for the problem. He had them so convinced that he was a great guy and that I was going mad, I began to believe it myself. Even when he cleaned out my bank account and ran off with a seventeen-year-old student, a lot of people couldn’t believe it, and some wanted to know what I had done to make him act so strangely.”
IN THE APRIL 1, 1990 edition of The New York Times Daniel Qoleman wrote about Robert Hogan’s work on managers and executives who display the “dark side of charisma.” Hogan, a psychologist at the Tulsa Institute of Behavioral Sciences, described “flawed managers, whose glittering image masks a dark destructive side” and who “act as if the normal rules don’t apply to them. But they climb the corporate ladder quickly; they’re outstanding at self-promotion,” he said. “While they muster a charming performance, it’s a snake’s charm, like J.R. Ewing on Dallas.” Referring to psychologist Harry Levinson’s work on healthy and unhealthy narcissism in managers, Hogan noted that unhealthy narcissists have an almost grandiose sense of certainty and a disdain for subordinates. “They are particularly good at ingratiating themselves with their seniors but brutalize their juniors,” he is quoted as saying.
A CORPORATE PSYCHOPATH
The following case study was kindly provided by Paul Babiak, an industrial/organizational psychologist in New York:
Dave is in his midthirties. He has a B.A. from a state college, is married for the third time, and has four children. He was brought to Babiak’s attention as a “problem employee” by his boss during an organizational study of a major corporation in Colorado. He had done extremely well on interviews, so his boss was surprised when things started to go wrong.
Dave’s boss discovered that the first major report he produced included large amounts of plagiarized material. When confronted, Dave brushed aside the concern, commenting that he considered it a poor use of his time and talents to “reinvent the wheel.” He frequently “forgot” to work on certain uninteresting projects and on at least one occasion sent his boss a memo saying that he was unwilling to take on additional assignments.
Babiak interviewed other employees in the department and began to sense that Dave was the source of most of the department’s conflicts. Co-workers gave him numerous examples of Dave’s disruptive behavior. For example, he was told that shortly after joining the department Dave got into a yelling match with his boss’s secretary, then stormed into his boss’s office and demanded that she be fired because she had dared to refuse to come in on Saturday (with no notice). Her version of the incident was somewhat different: Dave had been rude and condescending to her and was upset that she would not drop everything to cater to his requests. Dave was frequently unprepared and late for staff meetings. When he did show up he could be counted on to deliver a verbal tirade. When his boss asked him to control his outbursts, Dave responded that in his opinion fighting and aggression were necessary forces and that people needed them to advance in life. His boss commented that he never seemed to learn from the feedback he received, never acknowledged that he had done anything wrong, and always acted surprised when given feedback, insisting that he had never been told that he had done anything wrong before.
Dave’s co-workers were consistent in their descriptions—they found him rude, selfish, immature, self-centered, unreliable, and irresponsible. Virtually all reported that they initially liked him but over time grew to distrust him, and they said that they knew the stories he used to gain their cooperation were lies. Still, they went along with him because they didn’t want to “call him” on his fabrications. Some employees who claimed to be “wise to him” said that virtually everything he said was a lie and his promises were never to be believed.
During his meeting with Babiak, Dave described himself as a hard worker, a strong leader, a “team builder,” honest, intelligent, the guy responsible for really “making” the department. In fact, he suggested that his boss leave the company and he take over. (His boss said that Dave had made the same suggestion to him directly.) He also commented that his real boss was the president of the corporation. He came across as quite egotistical, but not necessarily concerned about how others felt about him. His attitudes and choice of words left the impression that people were mere objects to him.
In checking Dave’s credentials several discrepancies turned up. For example, his major field of study differed from resumé to application form. A third document, a letter, listed still a third field of study. Babiak brought these to the attention of Dave’s boss (who had never noticed), and he sent a memo to Dave asking him for an explanation. Dave sent the boss’s memo back with the erroneous degree crossed off and a fourth variation written in! When confronted, he grew defiant and then brushed off the concern with a comment that there was nothing wrong in claiming different majors for different purposes, since he’d taken courses in all the subjects he’d mentioned.
Armed with evidence of improprieties in Dave’s expense account, Dave’s boss went to his boss with complaints about Dave, only to learn that Dave had been complaining about him from the start. After hearing the “other side” of a lot of stories, the executive suggested a test of Dave’s integrity. They agreed on some information to be conveyed to Dave by his boss the next morning. This meeting took place as planned and Dave subsequently called the higher-level executive for a private meeting. At this meeting, he relayed the “information” about his boss, all of it distorted. This convinced the executive that Dave was a liar and was trying to undermine his boss. Surprisingly, however, subsequent action against Dave was blocked by several members of upper management.
What interested Babiak most about this case was the fact that while those closest to him were convinced of Dave’s manipulations, irresponsibility, and lack of integrity, those higher up in the organization had been convinced—by Dave—of his management talent and potential. Despite clear evidence of dishonesty, they were still “charmed” by him. His ranting and raving behavior were excused as part of his creative, almost artistic, bent, while his aggression and backbiting were seen by those people as “ambition.” Dave’s abilit
y to manage the discrepant views of these two groups of people led Babiak to seek a more systematic evaluation of his personality.
Not surprisingly, Dave received a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist. His personality and behaviors made him different from the typical “problem employee” seen in organizations.
Dave has actually been quite successful from an organizational point of view; he’s had two promotions in two years, received regular salary increases (despite a negative performance evaluation by his boss), and has been included in a corporate succession plan as a high-potential employee. Babiak also sees him as successful from a psychological point of view, owing to his ability to manipulate upper management into believing his view of things for more than two years. This is especially notable when we realize that his peers, subordinates, and immediate supervisor saw him exhibiting behaviors and traits that researchers normally ascribe to psychopaths.
RICH FEEDING GROUNDS
There is no shortage of opportunities for white-collar psychopaths who think big. The business pages of every major newspaper routinely contain reports of investigations into shady money-making schemes and deals concocted and operated by con artists and scam masters. These reports cover only a small number of the thousands of lucrative opportunities that exist for a fast-talking psychopath with a head for numbers and the social skills to move easily in financial circles. For these individuals, the potential for profit is so enormous, the rules so flexible, and the watchdogs so sleepy that they must feel they have found paradise. A few recent examples, one modest and the others far less so, illustrate the scope of the watering holes available to, and certainly used by, enterprising psychopaths:
• An article in Forbes headed SCAM CAPITAL OF THE WORLD described the Vancouver Stock Exchange as “infested with crooked promoters, sons of crooked promoters and sons of friends of crooked promoters.” Local newspapers continually report a litany of scams, swindles, phony stock promotions, and blatant hype designed to boost share prices on the Exchange. Penalties for being caught are often laughable, and they certainly do little to dampen the wild and voracious scheming. If I were unable to study psychopaths in prison, my next choice would very likely be a place like the Vancouver Stock Exchange.
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