With his pathological urge to reinvent himself, Drewe was one of a long line of con artists and fakers. London, like other major cities, had always been a magnet for dream peddlers. Over the years its detectives had seen some of the world’s great con men up close. In the 1920s, a Scottish scammer named Arthur Furguson discovered that it was child’s play to take visiting Americans for a ride: He sold Nelson’s Column to slow-witted souvenir hunters for 600 quid a shot, offered Big Ben for a £1,000 down payment, and fobbed off Buckingham Palace for a first installment of £200. When Furguson realized that Yanks made particularly easy marks, he set up shop in the United States. In 1925, he found a rancher willing to lease the White House for $100,000 a year. Later, less successfully, he tried to sell off the Statue of Liberty to a potential mark who got wise and turned him in. Furguson spent five years in prison but continued to ply his trade until his death in Los Angeles in 1938.
Then there was the Scottish con man Gregor McGregor, who lured hundreds of British investors and would-be settlers from London to the nonexistent country of Poyais in Central America. McGregor escaped with hundreds of thousands of pounds, leaving the settlers stranded in the jungle. A distinguished-looking British hustler named Limehouse Chappie, who worked both sides of the Atlantic, scammed passengers on ocean liners, and may have served as a model for the elegant card-sharp in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve.
The Bohemian-born con man Victor Lustig, who ran his scams with an American sidekick, engineered the sale of the Eiffel Tower to a group of naïve scrap-metal dealers. Lustig would eventually set his sights on the wide-eyed rubes of the New World. With his apprentice in tow, he hoodwinked the gullible in half a dozen U.S. states, ending up in Alcatraz. His death certificate listed his profession as “Salesman.”
The term “confidence man” was coined by a journalist at the New York Herald to describe the conduct of one William Thompson, a scammer and jailbird whose MO was a three-piece suit and a smile. Thompson would approach wealthy New Yorkers with a self-possessed air, strike up a conversation, and unleash an engaging line of prattle. “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” he would say, and the victim would cheerfully give up his timepiece. All well and good until July 7, 1849, when Thompson was collared on Liberty Street by an officer named Swayse just as he was taking off with his mark’s $110 gold lever watch. Thompson was returned to Sing Sing, where he’d learned his silken ways.
Eight years later Herman Melville adopted Thompson’s soubriquet as the title of his famously unreadable last novel, The Confidence-Man. Within a decade of its publication criminologists were reporting that 10 percent of professional criminals were confidence men. The sweet-talkers, they said, had taken over the sidewalks.
Professional bilkers often say that it is impossible to con a completely honest man, that the con man relies on the greed of his “vic,” on the poor fellow’s unbridled imagination and his wish to dream himself out of a jam. Social scientists who have tried to chart scammer pathology describe the con man as a combination sociopath and narcissist. Typically, he is impulsive, amoral, and uncontrolled, highly intelligent, detached, misanthropic, grandiose, and hungry for admiration. Alienated and often self-taught, the con man feels unique and superior until he is trapped. Then he claims to be a victim of circumstance or of an uncaring society. He tells police that he has been knackered by circumstance, that his bitterness is a function of society’s failures and the vagaries of fate. Then, on the way to the lockup, knowing that the game is up, he drops all pretense and declares that his victims deserved to be conned, that greed is a fox-trot and it takes two.
One such schemer, quoted in The Psychology of Fraud, a 2001 study published by the Australian Institute of Criminology, told his inquisitors that he felt entirely justified: “The [victim] had it coming. There’s no harm done. He can afford it.” Under questioning, he admitted that the pleasure of the scam was the point of it all. “When I score, I get more kicks out of that than anything,” he said. “To score is the biggest kick of my life.”
One of the more talented and famous con men was Ferdinand Demara, an American hospital orderly who assumed the identity of a doctor during the Korean War and performed a number of successful surgeries. With minimal education, he posed as a civil engineer, a sheriff’s deputy, a prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a lawyer, a Benedictine and a Trappist monk, a cancer researcher, and an editor. While he never made much money at any of these deceptions, he gained a short-lived respectability. A brilliant mimic with a hugely retentive memory, he studied textbooks to master the techniques he needed to perform each new character’s role. Demara, who was portrayed by Tony Curtis in the 1961 movie The Great Impostor, once described his motivation as “rascality, pure rascality.” Six feet tall and 350 pounds, he died in 1982 at age sixty after suffering a heart attack. He had two cardinal rules: First, always remember that the burden of proof is on the accuser, and second, when you’re in danger, attack.
John Drewe seemed to have mastered both rules.
Detective Higgs was beginning to wonder if Batsheva Goudsmid had been conned by Drewe, and if there might not be some truth behind her accusations that he was involved in selling stolen or forged art. For weeks she had been badgering the detective to arrest Drewe, berating him and the rest of his squad. These harangues had done little to endear her to Higgs’s men, serving mainly to reinforce the notion that she was off her rocker, but Higgs had come to feel that her hysteria might be justified. She had reason to think she was under attack.
Higgs called family court and was told that Drewe had indeed been granted custody of the children, and that Goudsmid was considered mentally unstable. They had based their decision, in part, on Drewe’s status in the academic and scientific communities.
Higgs pointed out that there were enormous gaps in Drewe’s story. “I can’t find any substance to this man,” he told a court official. “Something’s off.”
By early May, four months after the fire, Higgs still had no evidence that Drewe had a motive for setting the fire. The only strategy left was to put Drewe in a lineup and see if Horoko Tominaga could identify him as the stranger she had seen in the boardinghouse bathroom, a man of average height and weight, in his forties, with glasses and a mustache.
Higgs scheduled the lineup and arranged to have Tominaga flown back from Japan. When she arrived at the Hampstead police station, it was too late: Drewe had already come and gone. He’d complained that the lineup was stacked against him because he was the only one wearing a suit, and would therefore stand out. Higgs knew that if Tominaga had picked Drewe out as the perpetrator, he would have been able to challenge the police successfully in court. The detective was furious: The least his colleagues could have done was loan Drewe a pair of jeans and a shirt.
He rescheduled the lineup for the following week, but when Drewe arrived he was unrecognizable. He had cut his hair short, shaved off his mustache, and shed his glasses. Tominaga looked carefully at each man but could not identify the stranger she had seen in the bathroom. Without her testimony, the police had nothing to go on—not a shred of evidence linking Drewe to arson—and they sent her home.
Neither did the police have any evidence that Konigsberg had blackmailed Drewe. The investigation was stalled.
When Goudsmid heard what had happened, she called Higgs in a rage. “You had him and you let him go?” she sputtered.
But there was nothing Higgs could do. He only had the authority to investigate the fire, and Goudsmid’s suggestion that Drewe was being blackmailed by the landlord had been reduced to mere speculation. Whatever evidence there may have been of an elaborate con job had gone up in smoke.
22
A LOADED BRIEFCASE
Goudsmid wandered through Golders Green in a daze. She looked unkempt and could barely eat. She had lost her children and most of her savings to Drewe, and now he was threatening to take the house on Rotherwick Road. Detective Higgs had been her last hope, and sh
e was close to the breaking point. She went inside her home, got down on all fours in the living room with a Magic Marker, and made a picket sign that accused John Drewe of being a criminal. Then she drove to his country home and stood outside with her sign. A neighbor took pity and brought her a cup of tea. She felt as if she were going mad, but she was determined to fight until the children were back with her and Drewe was behind bars.
It would have been out of character for Goudsmid to back down. She was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, and her parents were both survivors. At age eighteen, like most Israelis, she was drafted into the army. Outside Tel Aviv, in former British army camps, in hundred-degree heat, she and her fellow conscripts trained to shoot. They went out with their Uzis and practiced on cardboard cutouts, peppering the silhouettes until they were exhausted. When Goudsmid’s mandatory tour of duty was over, she decided to stay on and signed up for the navy. She was focused and ambitious, and by the time she left the Israeli Defense Force she carried her training like a second skin.
Goudsmid had an air of imperviousness that could be misunderstood as intimidating. She had learned to be careful and observant, to question everything she saw. She noticed the most mundane detail, an unusual movement or suspicious package, a telltale accent in a crowd. But she had somehow let her guard down when she met John Drewe at a small get-together in London in 1980. An attentive man, he courted her vigorously. In restrospect, she could never quite explain this blunder, except to say that she was a recent immigrant, lonely, and several weeks pregnant by a former boyfriend at the age of thirty-four. She had no nearby family to speak of, and Drewe was a polite and well-to-do nuclear physicist who offered her his friendship.
On their first date, Drewe picked her up in a chauffered white Rolls. His driver wore a cap and uniform, and Drewe sat in back smiling and holding a bouquet of roses. He was good-looking, with short black hair and an athletic build, and he wore a well-tailored suit and a long coat.
“If you ever turn up in that car again, forget it,” Goudsmid told him. “I’ll never go out with you again.”
He laughed, folded her into the backseat, and took her to a very good restaurant, where they talked for hours. He was an adviser to the Atomic Energy Authority, he said, and served on the boards of several companies, including British Aerospace. His time was his own. He worked in his lab and at home, where he wrote for the specialty journals. She noticed that he had a scar, and he explained that as a young man he’d had a passion for motorcycles, and that he’d hit a patch of ice one winter’s night and slid across the road.
The next time they met she talked about her hometown, and told him how hard it was to grow up in a family that had been shattered by the Holocaust. Her parents had fled Germany and were now living in Holland, but less fortunate relatives had ended up in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. More than three hundred members of her extended family had died in the camps. After the war, her parents received compensation from Germany and passed some of the money on to her. She planned to use it to buy a modest apartment in London.
Drewe was always attentive: He would open the door for her and make her dinner and put his coat over her when it was cold. He phoned her at least once a day and surprised her with flowers and the odd bit of jewelry. It was a relief having him around. One summer day he picked her up and took her to Sussex to hear Mozart at the centuries-old Glyndebourne opera house. During a long intermission they went outside and picnicked. She told him she was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby, and he promised to help in any way he could. A few months before she was due to give birth, he suggested that he move in with her so he could help her through the difficult times. She wasn’t sure whether she was in love with him, but his caring presence was no small comfort, and she thought he might make a good father and provide a safety net for the infant.
Goudsmid named her son Nadav, meaning “generous of heart.” A year and a half after his birth, she and Drewe had a baby daughter, whom they named Atarah, the Hebrew word for “crown.” Drewe bought the children more toys than they would ever have time to play with, drove them to day care, and was gentle with them when they were sick. He was often the only father in the playground, where the nannies dubbed him “the professor.”
When Drewe asked Goudsmid to marry him, she said she needed time to think about it. There was something a little off about him, she thought. He claimed to be obsessed with her but seemed happiest when he was alone, working or reading in his room. Whenever she had friends over, he tended to stay in the background, pouring drinks and keeping the coffeepot going, but she could feel him hovering, and it always came as a relief when he disappeared upstairs. Finally she turned down his marriage proposal: The present arrangement was good enough, she said. Drewe continued to introduce her as his wife.
As she would later describe in sworn testimony, when Goudsmid bought the house on Rotherwick Road, Drewe persuaded her to put it in both their names, and to take out a mortgage for a good deal more than she had intended. He reminded her that they were about to receive £2 million from the elusive John Catch. When the money failed to materialize, he brought in several paintings, purportedly from Catch’s collection, and told her the profits from the sale of the works would make them rich.
One day she looked out the window and saw Drewe crouched in the garden with a vacuum-cleaner bag and a bucket of dirt that he was smearing on a Giacometti painting. When she asked him what on earth he was doing, he said that the painting had been sitting in Catch’s vault for years and looked “too fresh.” Drewe was applying a traditional marketing technique that gave paintings a weathered look and made them easier to sell.
Goudsmid took little interest in Drewe’s work. Their relationship had cooled considerably since they first moved to Rotherwick Road. He was always busy, on the hustle, out and about to restaurants and fancy parties, and she was doing well enough with her own career. He once invited her to a soiree at the Chinese embassy, where he introduced her to the military attaché. It was a dull evening, and she had turned down subsequent invitations.
Drewe began making occasional deposits of thousands of pounds into their joint account, but he also dipped into it heavily, burning through as much as £12,000 a month and covering the frequent overdrafts in dribs and drabs. He explained the expenses as the cost of “entertaining business clients,” but she eventually stopped depositing her salary into the account. They often fought, and she asked him several times to leave. He refused, saying it was best to wait until the children were older.
Goudsmid and Drewe slept in separate rooms and rarely ate together. She would leave the house early in the morning and work late. When he returned from his business meetings, he would shut himself up in his room with his newspapers and books. He had dozens of books on the Mossad and MI5, on science, mysticism, and the occult, and a whole section on the kabbalah. He ordered reading matter by the box-ful and stored the overflow in the garage behind the Bentley.
By the time Nadav turned ten, he was a computer whiz, and Drewe began to spend more time alone with him. Goudsmid would see them in the glow of the terminal with piles of documents scattered around them. Drewe had a supply of scissors and paste, and a small box filled with rubber stamps and tools a lepidopterist might have found useful. Once, she surprised him as he was using a small paring knife on a document. He told her he had lost the receipt for one of John Catch’s paintings and needed to “reproduce” it.
He also told her he had inherited a dozen guns from his father and kept them in the attic. Once, at a particularly low point in their relationship, he brought a few of them down and polished them in front of her.
Around this time Drewe made a surprising confession: Some of his paintings had come from Catch’s German-born brother, a former director at I. G. Farben, the notorious German chemical company that made poison gas for the Nazi death chambers. The brother had been given the paintings in recognition of his services to the Third Reich. Goudsmid was shocked and disgusted, and in late 1993 she t
old Drewe she’d had enough. She’d been offered a job in the United States and was moving to California. The children would be going with her.
Not long afterward, Drewe emptied their joint account and moved out. He called her supervisors at the hospital and told them she was abusing the children. He circulated the notion that she was suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and she was temporarily suspended from her job. Family court forbade her from making contact with her children, but she fought the court order and was eventually allowed visitation rights with the children. She was certain that Drewe had brainwashed the kids and lied to them in order to keep them away from her. Now he was after the house, and she feared she would soon be homeless.
Higgs’s investigation became a lifeline: If she could get Drewe behind bars, family court would listen to her and give her children back. She had no doubt that Drewe had set fire to the house on Lowfield Road, and that he was capable of murder. In the past he’d hinted darkly at his work with Britain’s intelligence services, and claimed to have loaned the Crown his expertise in defensive weaponry and traveled abroad on behalf of the foreign service.
When Goudsmid threatened to go to the police and tell them about his art scam, Drewe said it was useless. He’d been promoted to the post of chief director of the powerful MI-10—an agency that was set up during World War II for weapons and technical analysis—and no one would believe her.
Provenance Page 17
