So the fundamentals of Longo’s story were accurate. He did become Michael Finkel of the New York Times. But most of his tale could not be confirmed. In Mexico, he claimed, his internal life was chaotic—his thoughts, he wrote, were constantly grief-filled and frantic. But no one I interviewed said he appeared to be in anything less than the highest of spirits.
Longo himself, in his letter to me, admitted that his specialty was spinning phony tales around genuine details. “For me to be able to tell an untruth,” he wrote, “it has to have some basis in reality, something that I have experienced on some level of life, or at least be a topic of some familiarity.” That’s one reason he may have felt comfortable impersonating me: He was already knowledgeable about my work.
Longo insisted, repeatedly, that his arrest in Mexico had inspired him to change his ways, that he was no longer dishonest. This was another of his unverifiable statements. For now, at the early stages of what I could sense was going to be a protracted relationship, I decided to continue absorbing whatever Longo wished to say, without offering criticism that might scare him off.
Once Longo felt comfortable with me, I assumed I’d see more of the personality he had displayed in Mexico—the quick-witted charisma that had apparently charmed everyone he’d met. This was the nice-guy component of Longo’s character, the 92.88 percent that seemed to have mesmerized even his wife. First I would study this part. Then I’d search for the rest.
FIFTEEN
DURING HIS SECOND WEEK in Mexico, Longo finally met a woman he didn’t want to reject. Her name was Janina Franke. When she checked into the hostel, Longo couldn’t help but notice her: She had fluorescent pink hair, a large tattoo of a feather decorating her left shoulder, a ring piercing her right eyebrow, and (Longo observed when she returned his smile) a shiny silver stud in the center of her tongue. All this, noted Longo, ornamented a “very attractive” body.
But none of that interested him, he wrote. What he liked about Franke, who’d arrived from Germany, was that she hadn’t come to Cancún simply to drink beer and loll on the beach. She’d arrived, she told Longo, to explore the nearby Mayan ruins. And—here’s what really caught Longo’s attention—her plan was to photograph these ruins, in hopes of advancing her fledgling career as a professional photographer.
This was too big of an opening for Longo to resist. He informed Franke that he happened to be a professional writer, one whose travel pieces frequently appeared in the New York Times. He mentioned that he, too, had developed an interest in Mayan culture. Franke said that she disliked the feel of Cancún, and planned to travel down the coast to the town of Tulum, where there were fewer tourists and more ruins. Longo replied that he’d also become frustrated with Cancún and was hoping to find a more peaceful spot to explore. Franke said that her dream was to become a traveling photojournalist. Longo said that he’d been struck by a similar dream, and had made it come true. He hinted that he might be able to help her out. The next morning, the two of them were on the bus together, heading toward Tulum.
For a while, during the ride down, Longo was giddy. “I thought that perhaps this is how a life of adventure would be,” he wrote. “A journalist on a quest for that untold story.” He was impressed by Franke’s cameras, two Hasselblads and a Canon, and figured that she really was a photographer. (It had crossed his mind that she might also have been pretending.) He told Franke that he’d once been married but was now divorced; he said he’d never had any children. He spoke with her about a possible collaboration. Franke would take the photos, and he’d come up with the ideal story, something that the publications he wrote for would absolutely love, perhaps a piece that combined Mayan history and adventure travel.
At worst, he promised Franke, they’d sell the piece to the New York Times. This was only if, by some fluke, National Geographic didn’t leap at the opportunity to print it. Franke was elated by her good fortune. She even sent an excited e-mail to her mom about her big break.
Longo paused the flow of his letter at this spot to more fully explain his actions. “I didn’t feel as though I was misleading anyone, especially not Janina,” he wrote. Instead, he sincerely felt as though he were aiding her career. Without his prodding, he wrote, without the enthusiasm he instilled in her, her dream of photographic success would likely atrophy and die. “I saw myself as being the one to provide her w/ a new close-up lens, to draw her closer to her lifelong goals, giving her purpose and hope.”
Longo was not delusional. He never actually believed he wrote for the Times. In moments of excitement, though, he did appear to think he could fool not only tourists in Cancún but also magazine editors in the United States. Perhaps, by using Franke’s photos and the byline Michael Finkel, he could publish a real article. He would mail all the materials from Mexico, and with a bit of luck, he’d receive a paycheck. This would ease his financial concerns.
“You never know,” he wrote. “With even mediocre writing combined w/ excellent photography, we might just be able to pull it off. My teachers always said that I had untapped talent, now was my chance to drill down and see what came out. And besides, at this moment I truly did feel like I may have been leading the life of a true travel writer. I think that my visual perception even began to make a transition from everyday sight to artistic interpretation of everything in view. I no longer saw just a busload of people, I began to peer beyond the faces to look into the history behind the wrinkles, or pained expressions. I didn’t just see another lonely guy walking down the highway w/ a guitar. I wanted to know how his life transpired, what promted him to learn to play the instrument, and what motivated him to get up early this morning, pick up his music maker and head out for the long stretch of highway…. Icouldn’t wait to get started. There were creative juices flowing that I wasn’t aware were ever there in the first place. I was even anxious to get off the bus to find a store where I could buy a notepad, or paper of any sort to begin my new career.”
They left the bus in Tulum, but before rushing off to purchase notebooks, they needed to find a place to stay. January is a popular month for Mexican beach holidays, and all of Tulum seemed booked. After being turned away at several places, they hit upon some luck—one last cabana, a stone’s throw from the Caribbean, was available at a low-budget spot called the Santa Fe. They took it. The room was rustic: concrete floor, bamboo walls, palm-thatch roof. No furniture, no toilet, no electricity; nothing at all, in fact, except one not-particularly-large bed.
Franke set her luggage down, looked about the cabana, and said, matter-of-factly, that the arrangement was fine. Longo nodded his agreement, but inside he was panicked. He’d married young, and was inexperienced when it came to women. “Outside of MJ,” he wrote, referring to MaryJane in his usual style, “I had never even slept in the same room w/ a single female, much less the same bed.”
He had come to Mexico to grieve, not to flirt—the whole reason he’d teamed up with Franke, he wrote in his letter, was to keep other women away. Now he’d ended up in an uncomfortable situation. But he was able to convince himself that everything was fine. He and Franke were nothing more than business associates, working together on an important assignment. So Longo, too, set down his bags.
They took a walk on the beach, and while they strolled, Longo was plagued by troubling thoughts. “I couldn’t help but think how much I longed for MJ to be walking next to me,” he wrote. He envisioned holding his baby daughter, Madison, on his shoulders while she pulled at his hair. He could almost see Zachery and Sadie racing ahead of him, scrambling on the dunes. “Instead,” he wrote, “I was walking side-by-side w/ a woman that I hardly knew, who had no inkling of the thoughts in my head at this moment.”
The walk ended with a dip in the sea. Once in the water, Franke became bouncy and playful; “the spring inside her personality,” wrote Longo, “was evidently freed.” Longo responded to her overtures, he said, with quiet standoffishness. He told her that he wasn’t looking for that kind of relationship. Relax, said Franke. She didn’t want a rel
ationship either. All she wanted was a little fun. To demonstrate, she removed the top of her bathing suit. “My barriers,” Longo wrote, “began to lower.” Then Franke asked if he’d help her apply some sunscreen. Longo acquiesced.
They practically sprinted back to the cabana. “If there was an opportunity to stop,” Longo wrote, “I didn’t take it.” They fell into bed together.
In his letter to me, Longo attempted to explain why his love-making was not immoral. “There was fundamentally no sin against any matrimonial vows,” he wrote. He was technically correct. Longo had rented the cabana on January 8, 2002, three weeks after his family had been murdered and one day after they’d been buried. At the funeral, which was held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where MaryJane had grown up, there were only two caskets. Zachery and Sadie, who’d been sunk with rocks beneath the Lint Slough Bridge, were placed in one; MaryJane and Madison, who’d been stuffed in suitcases, were buried in the other.
For several days, Longo and Franke worked almost nonstop on their magazine article. They hiked jungle paths, explored underwater caves, and even woke before dawn to beat the tourists to the ruins (“so as to have an unviolated scene that would allow for a more clear expression of art”). They saw monkeys and iguanas and, one time, an alligator. They climbed Mayan pyramids. Franke snapped photos; Longo took notes. “We worked as a well-oiled photojournalist team,” Longo wrote.
He seemed to enjoy the role. It made him feel important. “I wasn’t just another person, paying the entrance fee,” he wrote. Instead, he’d arrived “to put into words the things that others experienced unknowingly.” He filled dozens of pages in his pocket-sized notebook with what he termed “literary snapshots.” In group settings, he was often completely at ease speaking with people about his career at the Times. “It seemed natural,” he wrote.
There were periods, though, when he found it difficult to be Michael Finkel—when “reality came crashing down,” as he put it. The worst moment occurred while sitting on the beach with Franke, staring out at the water, waiting for sunset so the light would be better for her to take photos. “Flashbacks of a horrific scene replayed on the film of my mind,” he wrote, though he didn’t divulge anything more specific. He ran from Franke and began to weep. He felt an overwhelming sense of guilt; he kept repeating the phrase “I’m sorry” out loud, over and over. His emotions, he wrote, seemed to shift with every incoming wave: “I cried, I was angry, I was resentful, I was hurt, I was lonely but I wanted to be alone.” More than anything, however, he was confused. “Do I keep playing this role, do I escape to a new destination?”
He decided to return to Franke and stick with the role—“at least temporarily,” he wrote, “until I found some enlightenment.” They continued to work on the assignment. He joined Franke on a trip to a monkey preserve, then to another set of Mayan ruins, then to an area of deepwater pools called cenotes. He’d brought a stack of DVDs with him to Mexico, and sold several of them to tourists in order to pay for the excursions.
Longo felt increasingly uncomfortable. He was pretending to lead a life he could never really lead. He was aware that everyone he spoke with was being deceived. He no longer wanted to touch Franke. “The costume,” he wrote, “seemed too weighty.” He wanted to properly grieve, to begin what he called “the process of repair.” But he didn’t know how.
On the evening of January 13, after a day of snorkeling in the cenotes, Longo joined a small gathering at a cabana where some young Britons were staying. One of the guys was a music producer, and he was playing a few of the CDs he’d helped create. Candles were lit; beers were drunk. A joint was passed around. After a while, someone noticed a bright light outside, shining through the slits in the cabana’s bamboo walls, moving back and forth. It seemed odd.
A moment later, the cabana’s door was kicked open and a half-dozen men, guns drawn, rushed inside. They pushed everyone to the floor and snapped on handcuffs. A flashlight swept from face to face, then stopped on Longo’s. Two men grabbed Longo, one on each arm, and escorted him from the cabana.
Outside were several more men, also carrying weapons. At first, Longo wrote, he thought it was a drug raid. Then he was brought to the person who’d apparently directed the operation, a stocky, athletic-looking man with a thick mane of black hair and a sort of movie-star suaveness about him. He was unarmed. He held what appeared to be a sheet of paper in his hands—it turned out to be a photograph—and glanced from the paper to Longo several times.
“Are you Christian Michael Longo?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Longo, not bothering to attempt a lie.
“I’m Dan Clegg,” the man said. “Special agent with the FBI.”
SIXTEEN
THERE WAS A TIME, just after I’d handed in my article on the cocoa-plantation worker, during which I convinced myself that what I’d written was true. My story made the point that life in West Africa was exceedingly difficult, but by blurring the distinction between poverty and slavery, as a few humanitarian agencies seemed to have done, the situation was made worse. Using the word “slavery” might gain people’s attention, but it could also provoke a boycott of West African cocoa, which would only increase the level of poverty.
This is precisely what I wanted to say. I’d cheated on the quotes, but I had captured the correct story. My article was true in spirit—it was a higher truth than that bound by mere facts and figures—and I was able to delude myself that this was all the truth that mattered.
I’d written the story in a highly stylized form, one I’d never before employed. It was composed as though I were channeling the thoughts of a young Malian boy. For example, when my main character left his home village, his journey was expressed this way: “He walked for 12 days. Then he reached a very wide path that looked to be made out of a wonderful kind of rock. He had never seen an asphalt road before…. Along the road, at tiny wooden stalls, people were selling things…. Youssouf wanted one of everything. But of course he had no money. Or, rather, he had a little. He had been paid two coins by one of the families whose fields he had worked in. It was the first time he had ever been paid, and when those two coins were pressed into his palm, he felt, well, he felt different. Like maybe he wasn’t a kid anymore. Like maybe he was an adult.”
The article was more than five thousand words long, all of it in this naive, singsongy voice. Somehow, the experimentalism of the story, the fact that I was already twisting so many journalistic conventions, made me feel as if it weren’t so terrible to have quilted several interviews together to create the story of a single laborer.
“It is truth,” I wrote in my journal, “just filtered through a sort of prism.” I knew what I’d done was against the rules, and I hid my actions from my editor at the Times, though I believed I could wheedle my way out of it in the unlikely chance I was caught. But then I did something impossible to defend.
One of the boys I interviewed was actually named Youssouf Malé, and that is the name I bestowed on the composite character. The decision to use Malé’s name was more or less arbitrary; I think I just liked the way it sounded, and the surname was the most common one I’d encountered. As it turned out, I made a poor choice.
I had traveled in West Africa with my photographer friend Chris Anderson, and he took pictures of many of the eighty or so people I spoke with. The Malian Association of Daloa had arranged the interview with Youssouf Malé; I bought him lunch, and we talked as we ate. Anderson was at the lunch as well, along with my translator. Malé spoke expressively, but at the time I didn’t think he’d become a major character in the story, and I mentioned this to Anderson. Also, the mealtime setting wasn’t appropriate for a portrait, and the light outside was no good, so Anderson elected not to take a photo of him. I had forgotten this when I selected the name of my character.
Once I’d finished writing the article, the photo department at the magazine naturally wanted a picture of Malé. When Anderson said he couldn’t provide one, some suspicions were raised at the Times. This w
as an opportunity for me to acknowledge my sins, but I’d already carried on the lie for more than a week, while my initial draft was being edited and buffed, and I wasn’t brave enough to confess now.
Instead, I amplified my deception. I always carry a point-and-shoot camera with me when I travel, and I told the photo department that I could furnish a snapshot of Malé. But in truth, I didn’t have a photo of him, either. I mailed a photograph of another boy who was part of my composite character—one named Madou Traoré. It was a brazen act, but that is what I did. The photo department was pleased. The picture I’d sent, they said, might appear on the magazine’s cover.
The article was scheduled to be published in mid-September of2001. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, which immediately became the focus of every American newspaper. My story was pushed to the back burner, and seemed as if it would never be printed. I’d begun to fret about the article and the photo, and was greatly relieved not to have to think about them anymore.
Soon after United States forces invaded Afghanistan, I was asked to cover the conflict for the Times Magazine. This was the most important assignment I’d ever been offered. I accepted immediately. On my way to Afghanistan, I stopped in New York to visit with the magazine’s editors. They informed me that my West Africa article had been revived. It was no longer a cover story, but it was going to be published in a matter of weeks.
Here was another chance to admit to my lies. But I also found out that the Times’ fact-checkers had finished inspecting my article. I’d known from previous assignments that I probably wouldn’t have to show the fact-checkers my notebooks—their practice was to double-check facts using outside sources or by telephoning me and asking me to read back what I’d written in my notes. I didn’t think they ever imagined that a reporter would purposefully circumvent the truth.
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