The Runner (7 page)

Counterpoising the idea of an inner man against the public claims of the Roman Empire,

Augustine invented the idea of interiority that writers and psychiatrists in the West take as the universal component of human nature. “In the inward person dwells truth.” For Augustine, lying is destructive of language, which is the basis of human solidarity. Telling the truth to strangers was part of the foundation of any human community. The seriousness with which Augustine

took his prohibition on lying can be judged by the fact that he did allow circumstances where killing and war were permissible, but never lying.

Telling lies was absolutely wrong, Augustine believed, because it created a conscious

split between one’s inner self and the representation that one makes of oneself in the world through language. A lie is a perversion of language that splits a person in half. The evil proper to lying is doubleness—lying divides the inner self and corrupts the medium with which the self connects to others and to God. The morally significant consequences of a lie therefore begin with their effect on the liar, rather than with their consequences in the outside world. Lying brings about a rupture between the speaker and God by corrupting the gift of language by which we are able to cultivate our inner selves, express our innermost thoughts and feelings, understand each other, and speak the truth, which is how human beings connect with God. Lies are the antimatter of truth, disintegrating the medium of language through which God can make his presence felt on earth.

One of the few later writers to embrace Augustine’s absolutist approach to lying was

Dante, who invented the eighth circle of his hell for liars. Murderers only made it to the seventh circle of Dante’s Hell; the ninth circle was reserved for traitors, who can be viewed as a species of liar who combines lying with the active betrayal of a benefactor. Yet most modern writers and thinkers who are not actively recruiting for some religious organization or another nowadays would feel inwardly squeamish at the idea of endorsing even the rather mild objections to lying put forward by Aristotle. Most modern people believe that lying is a normal human activity and that we would be hard-pressed to get through the day without telling at least one lie, the

consequences of which are often preferable to those of telling the truth.

One proof that is often given of the universality of lying is a possibly apocryphal story

about Koko the gorilla, who famously learned over one thousand hand signs taught to her by

scientists at Stanford University, and was said to understand over two thousand words of spoken English. After ripping a steel sink from its moorings inside her cage, Koko was said to have blamed the damage on one of her pet cats. We smile at this story because we are the children of Machiavelli and Nietzsche rather than Augustine. Rather than believing that the world is a

reservoir of truth available to us through language, we are more apt to believe that the truth is hidden from us and that language is a lie. Starting from a position of doubt, we struggle to get in contact with a reality that often eludes us.

VI. On the Run

Making a neat picture out of the mixed-up puzzle pieces of who James Hogue was and

who he claimed to be is a professional challenge that paled next to the mystery of what he was actually trying to do with his life over the twenty years that his path had intersected here and there with mine. The idea that his life was a mirror in which other people might see themselves more clearly was a myth that he encouraged and perpetuated in order to blind people to his ends.

Still, it was hard not to see his story as a kind of
Pilgrim’s Progress
in reverse, a cracked reflection of a life story that was shared in some way by his classmates at Princeton and with the lives of tens of thousands of other graduates of Ivy League colleges and ski-poster towns. In his story of isolation and imposture it might be possible to glimpse something that might not be ordinarily visible about the generic life that was shared by a particular group of people in a very particular moment in time.

What made his activity so baffling to those who studied it up close was the absence of the

spectacular payoff that one would expect from a stylish Hollywood movie—the stolen Matisse in his coat closet, the speedboat sheltering in a cove on the French Riviera, a bag of diamonds gone missing from a vault in London, the secret bank account in Switzerland. Hogue’s copper pots, his five sets of skis, and the stolen moose head hardly qualified him as a cinematic criminal. He was more like the hayseed Jay Gatz than the urbane young criminal who became Jay Gatsby His

seeming lack of ambition, his soft-spoken nature, and his habit of giving gifts led some people who knew him to insist that he wasn’t a criminal at all, and that he was instead an innocent person who went about things in the wrong way. His defenders correctly pointed out that Hogue showed no actual tendencies towards physical violence, although he did leave behind a record of threatening phone calls to women who in one way or another had displeased him, including a

shy, crippled violin student in Aspen, who played me the angry messages that he left on her answering machine.

Yet the portrait of Hogue as a gentle, misunderstood loser is belied by the length of his

criminal career and his lack of remorse for his crimes, which included offenses against property and institutions that destroyed the fabric of trust that binds people to each other. His goal was not money or diamonds or twenty-four-karat gold watches. He wanted to make other people’s lives his own. To say that Hogue was smart enough to have acquired university degrees or a house in Telluride by legal means misses the point of acquiring these particular trophies in the way that he did. He stole because he was a thief, a role that allowed him to move in circles into which he might not have otherwise been accepted while exposing the hollowness of the distinctions and accomplishments that adhere to the privileged status of others. Fraud provided him with a sense of superiority that was essential to his feeling of well-being. His story was a throwback to a time when masquerades of race and gender and class were more practical in some ways than they are in our information-glutted age, when an officer in the Mountain Village police department could gain access to chapters of Hogue’s life simply by typing “James Hogue” into Google. Yet there is also a sense in which Hogue’s singular quest, the way he went about his business, was itself a product of the information age. He was a hacker, for whom finding a shortcut through the thicket of requirements and pathways laid down by the operation of large systems was a life-affirming challenge that lessened his sense of isolation and provided him with a sense of purpose at the same time as it condemned him to a life that was impossible to share or sustain.

• • •

James Hogue was arrested on February 4, 2006, while surfing the World Wide Web on a

stolen laptop at the Barnes & Noble at the Foothills Mall in Tucson, Arizona. It was Saturday afternoon, and Hogue was spotted by an employee of the large bookstore chain who recognized the skinny fugitive from a wanted poster that was hanging near the employee lounge. Hogue had been under surveillance by federal marshals who had tracked his movements through Oro Valley and Oracle, Arizona, northeast of Tucson, where he had been staying at a rural compound owned by the Salentre family of New Jersey.

According to law enforcement and organized crime sources in New Jersey, the Salentre

family’s involvement in illegal activities centered around the trafficking of stolen goods in New Jersey, Arizona, Colorado, and elsewhere. Donald Salentre Jr. had been Hogue’s cell mate in a New Jersey prison where Hogue did time for his most celebrated fraud; Salentre Jr. had been sentenced for receiving stolen property. The marshals flew a helicopter over the Salentre

compound and spotted Hogue’s truck, the license plates of which had been switched with the

plates of a truck that belonged to Donald Salentre Jr.

When he was caught in the Barnes & Noble, Hogue had $1,200 in cash and appeared to

be preparing for a new life as doctor, with CD-ROMs on anatomy, clinical consultation, and the principles of internal medicine. He was arrested and brought to the Pima County Jail, where his first phone calls were to the Salentre family home in Trenton. Hogue contacted the Salentres soon after leaving Telluride. The tapes of his phone calls show Hogue as a family friend of career criminals who provided him with money, lawyers, and other resources while he was on

the run.

“They caught me,” Hogue announced. He asked if a family friend named Jeff would pick

up his truck at the mall where he had been arrested.

“Are you guys gonna bail me out?” he asked. Bail was set at $120,000. If he couldn’t

make bail, Hogue threatened to do something drastic. “I’m just gonna hang it up,” he said. While it sounded like a threat to kill himself, it was also clearly a message that he was feeling desperate. He would do anything, including flip on the Salentre family, in order to avoid doing time. Even five days in jail would be too much, Hogue suggested.

“I did eight and a half years!” the criminal on the other end of the phone laughed.

“Fuck, man. I’m really, really depressed,” Hogue said. He wanted the Salentres to get

money from his bank account in New York and send it to his fiancée, Irina, in Russia. In a

second phone call to the Salentre family he talked directly to his old cell mate.

“Somebody could kill eighty people and not get this bullshit,” Hogue fumed. “I mean,

shit, there’s no way out of this.” He wanted Jack, the Salentre family bagman, to come out to Colorado and arrange for his assets to be transferred to Irina. “If I can’t get out of this, I’m gonna hang it up,” he said. “That’s why I need Jack to come down here, you know. Tell him it’s

desperate.”

When the family got hold of Jack, however, it turned out that the bank account had been

frozen. Hogue then turned to his nephew, Brian Patrick, the person he was closest to in his extended family. While Jim became a scam artist and an impostor, Patrick was studying

community ecology, a branch of biology; he specialized in beetles and spiders. With his

inquiring mind and prankish disposition, Patrick offered a plausible version of the life that Hogue might have led if going straight had been an option. Their exchange revealed some of the family weirdness that had helped to shape Jim, as well as some of the plans that had been

interrupted by his arrest in Tucson.

“So you got caught, eh?” Patrick asked. “Hanging out at the Barnes & Noble?”

“Yeah,” Jim admitted.

Patrick laughed. “I expected you’d be a little more sneaky, Jim.” Hogue allowed that he

hadn’t been sneaky enough.

“I heard you tried to call Grandma,” Patrick said. Hogue said that he had tried to call his mother, but that he hadn’t been able to get through. “You know Grandma, you called collect and she wasn’t gonna take those charges,” Patrick snorted. “So let’s cut to the chase here. Are you calling for something, or are you just calling to say hi?”

When Hogue didn’t answer, Patrick tried a different tack. “Did you hear Betty died?” he

asked, referring to Hogue’s full sister. Jim had heard the news.

“You know I’ve been going over to Russia, and I have a fiancée over there,” he added.

What he wanted was for his nephew to call Irina and tell her that he had been killed in a car crash. Patrick tended in practice to emulate the behavior of his father’s straight-arrow parents, and was not enthusiastic about lying to his uncle’s fiancée—a real person, whom Hogue met on a trip he took to Russia with a few other men from Telluride, who had joined together for the purpose of finding wives. “Well, this might be one of the better times to come clean,” Patrick suggested.

“I don’t know how long I’m gonna be here, and I just can’t keep her tied up like that,”

Hogue objected. “You get where I’m coming from, right? It’s kind of a moral dilemma.” When

Patrick suggested that his fiancée might show up to the funeral or want to visit Hogue’s grave, his uncle showed that he had thought things through. “No, she can’t get a visa,” he said. Then he lowered the ante.

“Well how about a coma?” he asked hopefully.

Patrick laughed. “A Google search on you comes up now like you wouldn’t believe,” he

said.

“Yeah. I understand,” Hogue answered.

Unwilling to give up on his fantasy, Hogue then called Salentre back. “I’m gonna have to

have somebody tell her I died in a car crash, or I’m in a coma or something,” he said, hoping to convince his old cell mate to call Irina.

“Tell her you’re being detained right now,” his ex-cell mate dryly suggested.

“No, no, no. That never works.”

“She’ll write you letters then,” Salentre teased. “I’m not gonna tell her you died,” he said.

“I’ll tell her that you won’t be seeing her for a while.”

“That’s worse than anything,” Hogue objected. Salentre’s patience was wearing thin.

“Where’d you find her, in a mail-order catalogue?” he asked. Hogue answered that he

had met her in Russia at a party.

“Oh, yeah?” Salentre asked. “Well, that’s the least of your problems right now.”

“Damn, I wish Jack would get here and get those credit cards, start running them up,

maxing them out,” Hogue said. But the opportunity to run up bad debts on his personal credit cards was long since past. A few days later, he was flown back to Telluride in a sleek private jet belonging to the governor of the state of Colorado. Except for the fact that he was shackled and handcuffed, and dressed in an orange prison shirt, the flight was exactly as Jim might have imagined it. The beard he had grown in jail was neatly trimmed for the flight. He never said a word, preferring to keep what remained of his tattered mystery intact. Once or twice, he took a few sips from a bottle of Nestle water. For most of the flight, he pretended to sleep, occasionally peeking out at his captors.