The New York Times taken as a whole is an awesome thing, but it’s also special on a granular scale when you find certain writers there who you recognize are doing especially superlative work. I think about the first time I read the late, great David Carr and the brilliant obituarist Margalit Fox, how cool it was to “find” reporters turning out such copy.
The crime writer Michael Wilson is another Times journalist operating on that special level. His last column was a fascinating piece about an otherwise bright man taken to the cleaners by psychics, when, of course, he should have known better, but we all should know better about so many things. Wilson follows that up with an amazing posthumous profile of jaw-dropping con man Michael Forman, a Zelig on the make, who crossed paths with Abbie Hoffman, Otto Preminger and Annie Leibovitz, among others, while committing crimes, lots of crimes. It’s a beauty.
The opening:
The woman on the telephone had news. Michael Forman was dead. She asked a reporter if there was any known next of kin.
Mr. Forman was a career criminal and con artist who had been in and out of prisons and jails as recently as last year at age 73. The woman, calling this month from the Brooklyn Center care facility, had come across columns about him in this space in her search for relatives, and asked if the reporter had known Mr. Forman very well.
No. But peeling back the layers of his life last week raised another question: Did anyone? Not his ex-wife and two children. Not his fellow admen of the 1960s. Not the promoters of Woodstock, working with him behind the scenes before the concert. Not scores of jailers. Not the woman whose picture he carried in recent years, telling friends and relatives she was his Russian ballerina girlfriend, less than half his age. Not his neighbors, near the end, in the Manhattan flophouse he called home.
To take a pass at something like a life story of Michael Stephen Forman is to sift through a mix of strange-but-true fact and preposterous fiction, each constantly seeking to upstage the other. His journey from suburban executive to swindler is told by those close to him at one time or another, men and women alternately charmed and repulsed by the born salesman and, in their words, sociopath.•