On New Year’s Eve, four days into his trip, he joined a gang of his hostelmates and danced and drank until three in the morning, after which he swam nude in the ocean with a tall blond woman from Norway. The following day he snuck onto a private whitesand beach behind one of the more exclusive hotels and met a tall blond woman from Sweden. They, too, decided to go for a swim. “I stripped down to my faded navy trunks,” he wrote, “while Monica slipped out of everything.”
For the second day in a row, though, the relationship progressed no further than skinny-dipping. “I still mentally refused to believe that I was no longer married,” Longo wrote. When Monica presented him with an overt offer for romance, Longo told her, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
The refusal so startled the men from the hostel who’d joined Longo on the beach that one of them asked him, point-blank, “Mike, are you tutti-frutti?” He replied that he wasn’t. He preferred to select his dates, he said, rather than be assaulted by them. He was unsure, though, if the guys believed him.
The attentions of women, Longo wrote, were not at all what he wanted. According to his letter, he’d come to Mexico “to get through a period of grief,” quietly and peacefully. Instead, he “witnessed extensive drug and alcohol abuse, was essentially offered sexual exclusivity by four different women w/o prompting, was pressured to buy everything from cocaine to prostitutes, saw enough vomiting to fill a couple of barrels, and encountered the local police in their finest.” The police incident occurred when one of his hostel friends was forced to bribe an officer $35 to avoid arrest for urinating on a bush. (Cancún authorities, Longo wryly noted, “evidently have a great amount of sympathy for the local shrubbery.”)
He was miserable. Longo devoted paragraph after paragraph to a diatribe against the beach resort’s depravity. This section, written in a vigorous, sermonlike style, was the most explicitly emotive of his entire letter. Never for a sentence, though, did he acknowledge that stealing a car and a plane ticket, not to mention possibly murdering all four of his family members, three of them children, was the least bit morally hazy. The bush-peeing incident, he added, was his “last straw”—he needed to escape from his escape.
Some respite came when an older couple, schoolteachers from Britain, took a room at the hostel. They were the first married pair Longo had met since his arrival in Mexico, almost a week earlier, and he quickly befriended them. They played cards and chatted. The couple was on a yearlong tour of North, Central, and South America. They’d sold their home and quit their jobs to make the trip possible. Longo was enamored. “They were fulfilling the kind of life,” he wrote, “that MaryJane and I had often talked of doing someday.”
He joined the couple for dinner, and the discussion eventually came around to Longo’s profession. In his letter, Longo wrote out the entire conversation, at least as he recalled it. After Longo said that he wrote for the New York Times, the British man—Longo didn’t mention his name—commented that he’d always wanted to be a writer. “How,” he asked Longo, “did you decide that journalism was what you wanted to do?”
At this spot in his narrative, Longo broke away from the dinner story to deliver a succinct discourse on his history of lying. “I’ve always had a bit, well rather a lot, of trouble telling the unadulterated truth,” he wrote. “There’s been the little white lies, the avoiding-unnecessary-conflict lies, the sparing-other-peoples feelings lies, the wishful thinking lies, the for-your-own-good lies, and now the forthcoming lies that were just lies of fantasy.” He insisted, however, that he was unskilled in deceit and found lying to be neither enjoyable nor easy. “It’s not second-nature for me to look someone, even a stranger, in the eye & flat out lie to them,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, he proceeded to do an excellent job of it. Until his dinner with the British couple, he’d found that being Michael Finkel was relatively unchallenging. To most people he was simply Mike the journalist. Nobody cared to inquire much further; the only question he was repeatedly asked was, “How much do you get paid for an article?” to which he always replied, “I don’t talk about money.” Now, it appeared, his facade would really be tested.
He answered the man’s question about his decision to pursue journalism. “Actually,” explained Longo, “through school I never thought of getting into the journalism profession at all. I hated writing. Anything to do with writing instantly became my worst subject. But my teachers saw potential. No matter how much I hated it, something about the words on the pages showed some promise.”
“So why,” asked the British man, “are you a journalist then?”
“I was in college,” Longo replied, “University of Michigan.” He said that he was working on a business management degree—in truth, he’d never attended college—when it struck him that he was not the type of person who would ever be satisfied with a desk job. He reevaluated his life’s goals and determined that he needed to explore the world. Travel was his true love. So, despite his dislike of writing, he changed his major to journalism. He assumed that he’d one day learn to tolerate and perhaps even love the writing part.
“Did you learn to love it?” asked the man.
“Nope,” said Longo. “I hate it, but I get to travel.”
Here, once again, Longo inserted a short aside into his letter. By this stage of the conversation, he wrote, his initial fears—that he’d be unable to answer the questions; that he’d be exposed as a fraud—had dissipated. “For the first time,” he wrote, “I was beginning to assume the role, feeling the part.” He found it strangely pleasurable.
“So how,” came the next question, “did you get to the point you are at currently?”
To answer, Longo whipped up an instant Horatio Alger tale. While in college, he explained, he earned extra money delivering newspapers. He’d be up at three in the morning, distributing the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. His work ethic impressed the bigwigs of the home-delivery trade, and upon graduation he was asked to manage the Detroit district of paper carriers—a job he once actually held. Soon, with a promotion, he was in charge of the entire Midwest. In this capacity, he was introduced to executives and editors at both papers.
He began writing articles, on a freelance basis, and sending them to a top editor he knew at the Times. “Low & behold,” he wrote, “I was now being published in The New York Times & Times Mag. on a consistent basis. The rest, as they say”—and he actually claimed to have said this—“is history.”
The British couple apparently believed him, for the conversation continued with a discussion of the various topics he had written about. Longo handled this part—speaking about the specifics of his writing career—with eloquence and ease, he wrote. And then, appropriately enough, for this happens to journalists all the time, the British gentleman mentioned that he and his wife had so many of their own fascinating stories to tell. All he lacked, alas, was the name of someone he could contact.
“I took the hint,” Longo wrote, “and offered to possibly provide him w/ a name & perhaps a kind word to my editor.” He gave the couple an invented e-mail address, [email protected], and they thanked him profusely.
Several other hostel guests happened by, chairs were pulled up, and the topic of conversation shifted. “I had successfully bluffed my way through my first round of personal questioning as Michael Finkel,” exulted Longo. Beers were ordered and consumed, and as the evening rolled on, Longo’s mind began to wander.
“I sat there half-heartedly joining, and half daydreaming of what the real life of Michael Finkel must be like,” he wrote. “I’ve learned enough in life to realize that no life or career is as fantastic as you might imagine, but I couldn’t help picturing how my life would have been if I had taken whatever steps the real Mr. Finkel took to attain the position that he now held.”
FOURTEEN
THE REAL MR. FINKEL absorbed this letter with no small measure of creepy fascination. As I read, I was struck by an odd feeling of detachment, thinking of Longo thinking of me. It was bo
th riveting and uncomfortable; I imagined it might be something like viewing an unauthorized, low-budget movie of your own life.
Longo’s impersonation wasn’t entirely untrue. I actually did earn an undergraduate business degree—I majored in finance at the University of Pennsylvania—and I did experience a revelation that inspired me to reject my studies and try my luck as a globe-trotting reporter. Longo’s dread of being tethered to a desk very much mirrored my own.
Less accurate, I feel duty-bound to admit, are the parallels between Longo’s sex appeal and those of his alter ego. I can state with certainty, and some sadness, that any time someone answering to the name Michael Finkel has been skinny-dipping with Scandinavians, I was nowhere around.
Utterly false, and provoking a wince from me each time he mentioned it, was Longo’s professed hatred of writing. I don’t feel comfortable claiming the opposite—that I simply love to write—though my relationship with the craft is so neurotic and thorny, and has extended over such a significant portion of my life, that love may, indeed, be the best single word to describe it.
I grew up in comfort and stability in Stamford, Connecticut, a fifty-minute train ride from New York City. Both my parents were from the Bronx—hardworking, left-leaning, strict but not unreasonable. My mom taught learning-disabled students in elementary schools; my dad was an executive in the insurance industry. They’ve now retired to Colorado. My younger sister, Diana, is my only sibling. She works for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guiding young offenders on meditative trips into the wilderness.
We were a family of readers. It was not unusual for the four of us to retire to the living room after dinner and sit together in silence, everyone with a nose in his or her book. I wrote my own books as well, their covers constructed of cardboard and wrapped in colored fabric. My mother still has two of them. I composed Avalanche! while I was still in elementary school, and its title page is indicative of my ambitions: “Written by Michael Finkel. Illustrated by Michael Finkel. Published by Minkel Publishing Company.” In a journal I kept at age eleven, I wrote that I’d made a critical decision—I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. (My backup choice was “mad scientist.”)
By the time I was in college, though, I had changed my mind. I worked on the university’s newspaper, and enjoyed it, but what I really wanted to do was earn money. Hence the business degree. It wasn’t until my senior year, in 1990, that I considered pursuing a job in journalism. The catalyst for this was the New York Times Magazine. I was enrolled in a writing class, the first I’d ever taken, and was given an assignment to compose a piece that fit the themes of a column that used to run in the Times Magazine called “About Men.” I wrote of undressing in my high-school locker room, and the mild trauma of exposing my delayed puberty to my peers. My professor liked it, and encouraged me to mail the essay to the Times.
A few weeks later, I received a phone call from an editor. He said, to my astonishment, that he wanted to publish my piece in the magazine, and pay me $1,000 for it. This came as I was applying for investment banking jobs on Wall Street. The modest wind-fall didn’t immediately change my plans for employment, but it did fund a postgraduation adventure: I spent the summer bicycling across the United States.
I went with a friend, and we pedaled nearly five thousand miles. We crossed ten states, starting in Oregon and finishing in Virginia, and camped out for seventy-four nights. The trip changed my life. When I returned home to Connecticut, I wrote an article about it, which was published in the travel section of the Times. I’d also realized, while perched upon my bicycle seat, that I no longer wanted to be a banker.
My first job in journalism was as a low-ranking editor for Skiing magazine, based in New York City. I appreciated the city, but every time I traveled to the mountains, I felt at home. In December of 1992, shortly before my twenty-fourth birthday, I resigned from my staff job at Skiing, with the understanding that I could still contribute articles to the magazine, and moved to the mountain-ringed town of Bozeman, Montana. It’s been my home for the last twelve years.
I haven’t moved, but I have traveled. For a while I wrote brief articles for Sports Illustrated on unusual competitions—hot-air-balloon racing; competitive skydiving; the world championships of pinball. Later, I began writing travel stories for National Geographic Adventure—rafting down a Central African river; skiing the Canadian Rockies; crossing the Sahara desert.
In March of 2000, on assignment for Adventure, I visited Haiti with a photographer and close friend of mine named Chris Anderson. We were working on a piece about hiking in the Haitian countryside. While there, Anderson and I spoke with many people who were so desperate to abandon the poor conditions in Haiti that they were willing to risk their lives by piling onto rickety boats and trying to cross hundreds of miles of open water to reach the Bahamas or the United States. This seemed like a vastly more significant story than an article about hiking. I wanted to document one of these journeys, and I wanted to do so in the most vivid way possible: by actually making the crossing on a refugee boat.
The New York Times Magazine agreed to publish the story, if I could pull it off. It would be a smaller piece inside the magazine, not a full-length cover feature, but this was good enough for Anderson and me. We flew back to Haiti.
It took us several weeks to gain the trust of a boat captain, but we eventually managed to secure passage on a twenty-three-foot craft named the Believe in God. It was made of scrap wood and powered solely by two small sails. The boat could comfortably fit maybe eight people. Including Anderson and me, forty-six were aboard. A bucket served as the toilet. To prevent the boat from becoming top-heavy, everyone but a few crew members had to serve as human ballast. We spent our time packed into the boat’s hold, where the heat was stifling. Within a day, almost everyone was seasick, and several people were so dehydrated they were barely conscious.
In a nod toward safety, I carried with me, hidden in my pack, an emergency radio beacon. Triggering it would send a distress signal, via satellite, to the U.S. Coast Guard. There wasn’t nearly enough fresh water on board the boat, and by the second day of the trip I was terrified that we’d all die of thirst. Before I set off the signal, however, a Coast Guard ship spotted us. The Believe in God was heading straight for a shallow reef—our crew had neither maps nor navigation equipment—so a Coast Guard dinghy was dispatched to warn us. Officers looked into the hold, and the trip was over. The Haitians were handed over to Bahamian authorities and then flown back to Haiti; Anderson and I returned to the United States.
The Times Magazine concluded that this would be a cover story after all. When it was published, on June 18, 2000, I received a good deal of attention and praise, as well as some criticism—for the stupidity of the stunt; for thinking I could imagine how a Haitian migrant really felt. I was also given another assignment by the magazine, to write about a homicide in Kentucky. Then I covered the violence in the Gaza Strip. After that, I became a contract writer for the magazine, and was sent to investigate the illegal market for human organs, and then to write about child slavery on the cocoa plantations of West Africa.
The rest, as they say, is history. I was fired by the Times, contacted by the Oregonian, and informed about Longo. I was humiliated by what I’d done and bewildered by the identity theft, and from this strange coupling emerged an irrepressible fixation. I was obsessed with learning all I could about Longo. But to begin rebuilding my credibility, I needed to be sure that whatever I wrote regarding Longo was scrupulously accurate.
This created a problem. My chief source of information—Longo himself—had promised me, over the phone and in person, that every word he spoke or wrote to me was the truth. “I’ll be completely honest with you,” Longo had said, “if you’re completely honest with me.” I swore the same. Yet soon after we made this pledge, Longo also admitted, in his letter, that he was an habitual liar.
I tried to resolve this contradiction as best I could. To substantiate his Mexico story, for example
, I interviewed several people who’d vacationed in the Cancún area with Longo. Tom Taff, a fifty-two-year-old from Minnesota, had stayed at the same lodgings as Longo for four days and spent time with him on a guided tour of Mayan ruins, where they passed an hour together chatting atop a pyramid.
“He seemed intelligent,” Taff said. “Nice, clean-cut. He said his name was Michael Finkel and that he worked for the New York Times. He said he was writing an article on Mayan mysticism. When he told me his name, I thought, hmm, that’s a Jewish name. He didn’t look Jewish. But I have seen red hair on Jewish guys. And he seemed like a journalist—he was taking notes, constantly writing. He talked about his other stories. I believed him. He said he was single. He said he had to do too much traveling for his job to have a long-term relationship.”
Tom Dunstan, a twenty-three-year-old from Britain, hung out with Longo socially for several days. “He introduced himself as Mike and said he worked for the New York Times,” Dunstan told me. “He was having a fine time with us; we were smoking joints and drinking booze, diving off cliffs in the jungle. I have photos of him and me with our arms around each other. He was totally cool—I really enjoyed his company. I wanted to stay in touch with him. We talked a lot of politics. We talked about women quite a lot. He said that he used to have a wife. I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘I got rid of her.’ She was cheating on him, he said. You’re not going to think, ‘I’ll bet that guy killed his family.’ He was well-spoken, polite, obviously intelligent. It made perfect sense to me that he was working for the New York Times. He had a good sense of humor. He’d point out chicks like we all would, but he was a perfect gentleman. He always bought drinks for women. He was very respectful.”
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