10. James Hogue
A Princeton sophomore in 1991, Alexi Indris-Santana had all the makings of a big man on campus. His tales of growing up as a self-taught ranch hand in Utah and sleeping under the stars with his horse, Good Enough, won over admissions officials. He was taking six or seven courses a semester and earning straight A's. A talented runner, he had earned glowing local coverage before even arriving on campus, and the Daily Princetonian had asked three times for an interview so they could profile him as an up-and-coming track star. But running would also be Indris-Santana's undoing: at the Harvard-Yale-Princeton meet in 1991, a Yale senior recognized him from Palo Alto — where he had been caught masquerading as a high school student at age 26. The promising academic and athletic star, as it turned out, was actually James Hogue, 31, an ex-con from Kansas City, Kansas. He was arrested and charged with forgery, wrongful impersonation and falsifying records. He spent nine months behind bars and had to pay back nearly $22,000 in financial aid. But the Princeton hoax was not Hogue's last: in 1992, he turned up as a guard in one of Harvard's museums, and was arrested after just a few months on the job, charged with grand larceny for stealing gemstones worth $50,000. Violating his probation, Hogue returned to Princeton, posing as a graduate student though he was never enrolled in classes. He made headlines as recently as 2007, when he pleaded guilty to felony theft, having stolen about 7,000 items worth some $100,000 from Colorado homes over several years. He is currently serving a 10-year sentence in prison.
In July 1918, Bolshevik revolutionaries marched the Russian royal family — Czar Nicholas II, his empress and their five children — and their staff down to the cellar of the house in Yekaterinburg where they were living in exile and shot them dead. Two years later, a woman appeared claiming to be the csar's youngest daughter, Anastasia, and heiress to the Romanov line. Two brothers named Tchiakovsky, she insisted, had carried her out of the bloodied basement and into Romania and safety. Romanov relatives rebuffed the woman, Anna Anderson, as an impostor; a German journalist speculated that she was really Franziska Schanzkowsky, a Polish girl who had disappeared from a Berlin boarding house shortly before "Anastasia" had first turned up in a nearby canal. But Anderson found some supporters, including Maria Rasputin, daughter of the "mad monk" Grigori Rasputin, a close adviser of Nicholas II and his wife. Anderson's tale—which has inspired many books and, most famously, the 1956 film Anastasia starring Ingrid Bergman—was finally debunked in the 1990s, when posthumous DNA evidence proved she was not related to the royal family.
She was already involved in crime in her teens in late-19th-Century Canada, but Cassie Chadwick — nee Elizabeth Bigley — really kicked things up a notch after moving to Cleveland, where she bilked two unsuspecting husbands and ran a sham fortune-telling business. After serving jail time for forgery, Chadwick hatched her most famous con — convincing an associate of her wealthy physician husband that she was the illegitimate daughter of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, one of the world's richest men. Carnegie, Chadwick alleged, was paying her millions of dollars to keep silent about her ties to the eminent tycoon. Chadwick was able to borrow vast sums from banks and wealthy individuals on the basis of this claim, but the scheme collapsed when, in 1904, a businessman from whom she had borrowed some $200,000 called in the loan. Her promissory notes were revealed as forgeries, and Chadwick was hustled off to prison, where she died in 1907.
In 1817, a mysterious, attractive woman surfaced in a small village near Bristol, England. She wore a dark turban and spoke a language that was unintelligible to baffled locals. Though she was at first assumed to be a foreign peasant, the woman — with help of a Portuguese sailor who claimed to understand her dialect — managed to convince her hosts that she was, in fact, a princess from an island called Javasu. Princess Caraboo, as she became known, spun an engrossing saga about having been abducted by pirates, whom she escaped by jumping overboard and swimming to shore through the stormy English Channel. It was a fantastical tale, and Princess Caraboo quickly vaulted to fame. But it was, of course, too good to be true. After reading her story in a local newspaper, a woman outed Caraboo, noting that the phony Princess — whom the woman had employed as a servant — had entertained children by speaking in invented tongues. Princess Caraboo, it turned out, came from no more exotic a locale than Devonshire, England, where she was born Mary Baker, the daughter of a cobbler. Thanks to its sheer audacity, the stunt has earned a place in the scammer's canon; in 1994, it was turned into a feature film starring Phoebe Cates.
Of all the impostors on this list, Frank Abagnale may be the most well known — his years spent as a check forger, con man and faux airline pilot (don't worry, he never actually flew) were the subject of the 2002 film, Catch Me If You Can, based on Abagnale's autobiography by the same name. Born in 1948, Abagnale proved to be a wunderkind of a con man, posing as a pilot for Pan Am Airlines in order to bum free flights at just 16 years old. When authorities wised up to his frequent flying, Abagnale posed as a Georgia doctor for a year before masquerading as an attorney in New Orleans, although this last role wasn't entirely fake — Abagnale did manage to pass the bar exam.
Youth is fleeting for everyone but Frederic Bourdin. Nicknamed "The Chameleon" by the French press, this 35-year-old claims to have taken on as many as 40 false identities over his career. A fatherless child with a distracted mother, Bourdin was an outcast as a youth and begin to impersonate orphans as a way of getting attention. His story was always the same — he only wanted a family and a place to be schooled. In the beginning, his identities were always fictional; Bourdin would spend time creating a name and a back story for each character he assumed. But faced with imprisonment after another one of his stories unraveled in 1997, Bourdin assumed the identity of a missing American boy named Nicholas Barclay.
Despite the fact that he had a heavy French accent and didn't match the boy's appearance — Bourdin's eyes are brown and Barclay's were blue — Barclay's family bought the deception, bringing Bourdin back to the United States, enrolling him in classes and never questioning that he was their long-lost teenager. They discovered the ruse only after an investigator working for the TV show Hard Copy interviewed the boy in preparation for a story on his miraculous reappearance and noticed all the discrepancies.
Bourdin served six years in prison for the deception, only to return to Europe and continue to impersonate orphans. As recently as 2005, the balding 31-year-old was still trying to pass as a teenager. However, after another brief prison sentence, this chameleon now seems content in his own skin. He's married with a daughter and has become a minor Internet celebrity; his video blogs can be found on YouTube.
Ferdinand Demara, or "the Great Imposter" as he came to be known, has a very impressive resume — the only thing it lacks is his real name. Under a series of stolen identities Demara worked as a civil engineer, a zoology graduate, a doctor of applied psychology, a monk on two separate occasions (Trappist and Benedictine), an assistant warden at a Texas prison, philosophy dean at a Pennsylvania college, a hospital orderly, a lawyer and a teacher — among other professions. In 1957, TIME Magazine described him as an "audacious, unschooled but amazingly intelligent pretender who always wanted to be a Somebody, and succeeded in being a whole raft of Somebody Elses." Perhaps his most impressive impersonation came during the Korean War while impersonating a doctor on a Royal Canadian Navy Destroyer. When several Korean combat casualties were brought on board, the responsibility of saving their lives fell to Demara, the ship's sole "surgeon." Demara, who allegedly possessed a photographic memory and unusually high IQ, ducked into his quarters with a medical textbook and emerged to save the lives of every single man, including one who required major chest surgery. News of his heroics eventually unmasked him, and the resulting media attention ultimately prevented him from continuing his fraudulent lifestyle. Impersonation is considerably more difficult when the entire country knows your face.
Darius McCollum isn't the most efficient imposter on this list, but he's definitely the most persistent. McCollum has been arrested 26 times for impersonating various transit employees, including famously driving a New York City subway train while only 15 years old. Suffering from Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, McCollum has been obsessed with trains since he was a child, having memorized the city's subway system by age five. Born and raised in New York and confined there by parole restrictions for the majority of his adult life, McCollum is unable to escape the object of his obsession. He has become a minor cult figure, inspiring plays, documentaries and songs. Despite perhaps knowing more about trains than any employee, the New York City Transit Authority has refused to hire him because of his past convictions, and with no treatment for the disorder that drives him back to the tracks, McCollum's 26th arrest might not be his last.
Before Will Smith, there was David Hampton. In 1983, in a long-running con that would later inspire Smith's role in the 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation, Hampton inveigled his way into the lives of New York City's upper crust by pretending to be the neglected son of actor Sidney Poitier. Hampton would hang around the Columbia University campus, getting unsuspecting people to house him, give him money or otherwise help him. Hampton even once reportedly showed up at the home of actress Melanie Griffith, where he stayed up talking until 4 a.m. with actor Gary Sinise. Hampton would often go to restaurants and pretend that Poitier was meeting him just to get free meals and lavish attention, only to later act as if he had been stood up. But Hampton's undoing came when he was caught by Osborn Elliott, former Newsweek editor and dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, in Elliott's home in bed with another man. Elliott alerted authorities and the jig was up. No charges were pressed, but Hampton was forced to pay $4500 back to people whom he had swindled and stayed with.
Even though 48-year-old German national Christian Gerhartsreiter has lived in the U.S. since the 1970s — without having filed a single tax return and going by a number of aliases — his lawyers are still trying to get the false identity charge against him dropped. It's an uphill battle: the man otherwise known as Clark Rockefeller has been passing himself off as a member of the industrialist dynasty for years. And really, that's the least of his worries. After abducting his then 7-year-old daughter Reigh Boss from a Boston street in the summer of 2008, Rockefeller now faces charges of assault and kidnapping as well. Rockefeller's lawyers are claiming mental distress caused him to snatch his daughter that day, injuring a social worker in the process; a rough divorce in 2007 had left him limited to just three supervised visits with his child a year. But investigators say that Rockefeller, who was caught in Baltimore after a week on the run, is a person of interest in the 1980s disappearance of a California couple. His trial is set to begin May 26.
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