The Intriguing Chronicles Of Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., “The Great Imposter”
Some people are so extraordinary that it doesn't feel like they could possibly have achieved all they claim to. And while it's hardly impossible to find someone with an enviable set of accomplishments under their belts, it's also true that many people will either exaggerate or outright fabricate what they did to build their confidence.
However, one rare person managed to be a total fraud and staggeringly impressive all at once. Although his web of deception was sophisticated enough to be a marvel on its own, he genuinely racked up some truly incredible accomplishments that make it unclear why he bothered with the scam at all. Today, he is known as The Great Impostor, and this is his story.
He blended in anywhere until he became famous
By the time of his death in 1982, Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. was 60 years old. And as The New York Times reported, the majority of those years saw Demara live as someone else entirely.
Of course, who that person was depended on what situation he had gotten himself into. But while he eventually became too famous to keep up his wide variety of false identities, Demara would live to see himself go down in history as "The Great Impostor."
He managed to make his dishonors intriguing
By that point, Demara would have lived to see his exploits adapted to film. He would be played by Tony Curtis in the 1960 movie The Great Impostor, which delved into all the con artistry he pulled throughout his life.
These typically took the form of jobs he wasn't qualified for. But what made his story so incredible wasn't just his diabolical social engineering skills but his unexpected aptitude for the jobs he secured. There was a reason it took so long to discover him.
From a young age, he learned the wrong lesson
According to Robert Crichton's book The Great Impostor: The Amazing Career of Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Demara was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on December 12, 1921, and experienced his first brush with the law in fifth grade. Convinced that Demara had told on him for misbehaving, a boy gathered his friends with the intention of beating him up during the lunch break.
Their descriptions of what they would do to him were graphic, but after he snuck back home, he didn't appear worried. As they learned, that was because he had fetched a large dueling pistol and brandished it at the boys. This led to a call to the police, who confiscated two pistols and took him away.
A vicious cycle begins
Although this criminal act would have inspired more of an uproar nowadays, Demara's consequences were short-lived. Rather than being reviled upon his return, Demara found that his brazen actions led him to be welcomed as a hero among his peers.
Crichton quoted him saying, "I remember it felt good to be one of the guys. I had never felt like I belonged anywhere." However, the incident taught him that the only way he could belong was to behave badly.
What could have been his redemption
As a result, Demara went from one of his school's best students to its worst. And while this impressed his peers, it embarrassed his parents so much that they had him transferred to St. Augustine's Catholic parochial school. But while this angered him so much that he protested with a vow of silence, the mother superior shocked him into obedience with nothing but a kind, silent embrace.
This not only inspired him to change his behavior but drove him to become a studious and passionate altar boy. The church had given him comfort and could have made a profound change in his life. As he said, "I decided right then that I had some special, sacred mission, and I made up my mind to become a very devout boy."
A sudden hardship blended his old and new ways
When Demara came home one autumn evening, he learned that his family would have to move out of their home. Although he wasn't sure how his father lost all of his money, he can be understood in retrospect as a victim of the Great Depression.
The circumstances he lived under after this occurred seemed to combine Demara's earlier mischievous nature with the more pleasant demeanor he developed at Catholic school. And that set the stage for what would turn out to be a lifelong pursuit.
The origins of a con artist
As author Maria Konnikova told Business Insider, "His first con was tiny. He conned a chocolate shop in his hometown into giving chocolates to his entire class when he had no money to pay for them." Much like his earlier brush with the law, this incident wasn't taken terribly seriously by authorities.
But as Konnikova said, this incident started him on a path from which there was no turning back. Not only did he find a way to get what he wanted, but his methodology seemed more thrilling than what was possible through a more honest lifestyle.
A drifting young adulthood
According to The New York Times, Demara ended up running away from home as a teenager and joined an order of monks. However, the pious lifestyle that once seemed attractive to him during childhood now made him feel as though he was missing out. Nonetheless, he would come to regard his time there as the happiest period of his life.
Still, he eventually left the monastery and joined the U.S. Army. However, he seemed to quickly tire of that lifestyle and went AWOL before joining the Navy instead. Of course, that didn't interest him any more than the Army did, and he went AWOL yet again.
A series of countless false identities
As Crichton wrote in The Great Impostor, Demara assumed a wide collection of aliases throughout the years that followed. Throughout his career as an impostor, Demara demonstrated his keen intellect and impressive memory by convincingly taking on various distinguished roles.
After all, he was able to keep all of his identities straight long after abandoning them. When police later rhymed off aliases like Martin Godgart, Dr. Robert Linton French, Brother John Payne, Dr. Cecil Boyce Hamann, Ben W. Jones, and Dr. Joseph C. Cyr, he told them they had missed some of his identities.
He repeatedly posed as a monk
According to Business Insider, Demara's time in the monastery had taught him much about a monk's typical deeds and behaviors. And he applied that knowledge by sneaking into various monasteries and acting like he was supposed to be there all along.
In one case, he was even able to amass enough prestige to become one of the co-founders of a religious college. And this wasn't the only way that his lack of credentials failed to hold him back. Indeed, there was another major theme to his ruses.
He was several prominent educators
That list of aliases that police had obtained by the time of his 1956 arrest is notable for including a few names with doctorates. That was because Demara had a knack for impersonating college professors, often by using the names and credentials of real people.
For example, The New York Times mentioned that he became the dean of philosophy at a small Pennsylvania college through illegitimate means, while Business Insider cited him as teaching psychology at Gannon College in the same state despite not having a degree.
He talked his way into the other side of the classroom
Although he was able to convincingly talk the talk as a professor several times over, his status as a teenage runaway wouldn't have normally made him eligible to pursue his own post-secondary studies. As usual, however, Demara wasn't one to let a lack of qualifications get in his way.
As Business Insider reported, he studied law at Northeastern University and used yet another fake name to get in. It's unclear whether the threat of discovery or simple boredom led him to change identities so often, but he rarely seemed to stick to one for long.
The start of his biggest stunt
However, one of his identities would eventually become more famous than the others. And to Demara's credit, that had as much to do with what he accomplished under that identity as how he came to assume it.
During one of his stints as a monk, Demara found himself in a Trappist monastery in Canada, where he convinced people he was a monk named Brother John Payne. According to the Naval Military Museum, he met and briefly befriended Joseph Cyr, a doctor based in Grand Falls, New Brunswick.
Turning a crisis into an opportunity
As was his typical wont, Demara stole Cyr's medical credentials, and by March of 1951, he traveled within the Canadian province to the city of Saint John. There, he stepped into a recruiting office and joined the Royal Canadian Navy with the intention of offering his medical services.
Although the Naval Military Museum noted that Demara was first assigned to a naval hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada's involvement in the Korean War was such that he would eventually find himself transferred to the HMCS Cayuga destroyer.
How this was allowed to happen
As the Naval Military Museum explained, Canada faced a shortage of medical officers throughout the Korean War. While it was true that officials had the means to discover Demara's lack of formal medical training, this shortage meant they were too desperate to apply their usual verification rigor.
As such, his background remained unchecked, and Demara's stated medical credentials were taken at face value. A recruitment process that would have normally taken months was streamlined into just a few days.
How Demara stayed undetected
Although one might expect his lies to be exposed once he actually had to work as a surgeon on a warship, Demara was able to perform his expected tasks competently enough to deflect any potential suspicion.
According to Business Insider, part of the knowledge he demonstrated came from a textbook he had convinced another doctor to write for officers in the event that they were left without a surgeon. The Naval Military Museum added that he also relied on the help of his attendant and a robust stock of anesthetics and antibiotics.
Impostor as he was, Demara distinguished himself
Although this is normally a shaky foundation for such a tense role, Business Insider credited Demara with 19 successful (if minor) surgeries on 19 rescued Korean soldiers. At one point, he even extracted an infected tooth from the ship's commander, Captain James Plomer.
Moreover, some of the procedures he performed carried a serious risk of fatal results if he conducted them incorrectly. One instance saw him amputate a patient's foot, while another saw him remove a bullet from a soldier's chest. All of his patients survived.
Demara was too successful for his own good
According to the Naval Military Museum, these more high-stress surgeries were in the aftermath of a commando raid off the west coast of what is now South Korea. Demara's peers in the officer corps were so impressed by his diligent and calm performance that they recommended him for a medal.
Unfortunately for Demara, this gave his work enough notoriety that it became the subject of news reports in Canada. As a result, the real Dr. Joseph Cyr's mother read about wartime accomplishments that she knew her son had no involvement in.
"A very sad unmasking."
Once the real Dr. Cyr informed the Royal Canadian Navy that they had been duped, the admiralty sent a message to the Cayuga while she was defending the Korean island of Tae Wa-Do. Although the other officers onboard were more inclined to support Demara than believe the accusations against him, his extreme reaction suggested they were true.
As retired commander Peter G. Chance recalled in his memoirs, "'You don't believe me,'" he cried in his anguish. This was the beginning of a very sad unmasking." After Demara spent three days locked in his cabin while under the influence of barbituates, his fellow officers persuaded him to come on deck, where he surrendered.
A surprising lack of consequences
According to the Naval Military Museum, the Royal Canadian Navy found the ruse so embarrassing that they declined to prosecute Demara in favor of sweeping his scandal under the rug as quickly as possible. As such, he was honorably discharged and given rehabilitation, as well as back pay and service credits totaling slightly under $1,000.
With that, the only remaining move was to shuttle Demara out of Canada, and he was subsequently driven to the United States Immigration Office in Blaine, Washington. Yet Demara faced no punishment there either, as he had no outstanding warrants in the United States. After some routine questions, he was released.
Demara becomes even more brazen
Since this was only the latest in a series of incidents that saw him get away with being an impostor, Demara saw no reason to renounce this activity. In fact, he only became more daring in who he passed himself off as.
As Crichton noted in The Great Impostor, one of his identities was Ben W. Jones. Demara's deception skills were sophisticated enough to get this identity to work at the Huntsville Prison in Texas and to allow him to ascend to the rank of assistant warden.
Demara became too arrogant
Considering what he had already gotten away with by this point, it was likely hard for Demara not to think he was essentially untouchable. Yet, while he was clearly a skilled con artist, his overconfidence while working at this prison led him to become sloppy.
According to Business Insider, he became boastful enough to show a magazine article about some of his exploits to one of the prison's inmates. This started a chain of discovery that led the prison's leadership to oust him from his position.
Justice finally comes for him
Although Demara inexplicably wasn't prosecuted for this deception either, investigators in the Maine State Police finally caught up with him by 1956. By then, he had already taught at a junior college in the Pine Tree State before becoming a teacher on the remote island of North Haven.
And while his gregarious nature and clear intelligence had already impressed his colleagues as much it impressed the others he had fooled throughout his life, the state troopers already knew who he was. They're the ones who had his (apparently not exhaustive) list of aliases at the ready.
He seemed hurt and unsurprised all at once
As Crichton wrote in The Great Impostor, Demara appeared as wounded by the presence of police as he had been when he was confronted on the Cayuga. However, some of his first words to the investigators saw him ask what had taken them so long to discover his activities.
He remained conflicted after he was apprehended, confessing that he hated most of all to look ridiculous. He also both laughed and cried when he saw he would be led away by boat, saying, "This is the first time they ever called out the fleet. I've never been more flattered."
A laundry list of charges
According to The New York Times, Demara's transient lifestyle of con artistry had earned him a list of charges ranging from fraud and forgery to theft to embezzlement to resisting arrest to vagrancy to public drunkenness.
But while Crichton described Maine state trooper James Milligan as estimating that Demara's crimes were enough to put him in prison for 50 years, he turned out to be overly optimistic about the impostor's sentence. According to the Naval Military Museum, Demara only spent six months in prison following his arrest.
Crushed under the weight of his own fame
Although Demara found his identity theft and con artistry hard habits to break, he also found that he would never truly be able to enjoy the success he once had. Although he had long demonstrated his aptitude for crafting believable identities and backstories, there was one thing standing in his way.
The New York Times described him as standing at six feet tall and weighing 350 pounds, which gave him a rather distinct look, especially for the time. And since he had become so notorious, he was too easily recognized to dupe as many people. As a result, he started living under his own name in 1959.
His gregarious image
For those who knew Demara while he was inhabiting his various identities, he was a charming and larger-than-life personality. That extended to his public image once he was exposed, as he cheekily described himself as being motivated by "Rascality, pure rascality."
Looking back at their voyages together on the Cayuga, Peter G. Chance remembered Demara as an affable man who was always the life of the party despite never drinking or smoking. Before their final confrontation, Demara had also once treated Chance's infected toe.
His hidden darkness
However, Demara's real personality was more complex than this, as he would become despondent and guilty when he was found out. According to the Naval Military Museum, this was especially true before his discharge from the Canadian Navy.
As he told Chance, "I'm so sorry. I had hoped that we could have been together until the ship returned to her home port. I would have just left at that point." And these morose feelings only deepened after he had to retire his false identities.
A guilty conscience made him even sadder
Although Demara couldn't seem to help himself after a lifetime spent as the Great Impostor, the impact his actions had on others seemed to haunt him. This was especially true towards the end of his life when he reflected on his actions.
As his doctor, Dr. John J. Zane, told The New York Times, "He was about the most miserable, unhappy man I have known. Over the past few weeks, all he said was he wished he could die and go to heaven."
He was troubled but proud
Although his impersonations left Demara conflicted, he also had a great deal of pride in his handiwork. Crichton wrote that when Demara was confronted with his various identities, he identified certain personas as some of his best and notably said he wasn't ashamed of assistant prison warden Ben W. Jones.
And while his lawyer Melvin Belli noted a similar despondency in his moods to Zane, he characterized it a little differently. As he told The New York Times, "The strings all ran out on him. There was no way to channel or exploit his tremendous talents. But I never heard him say he had any regrets about anything."
A fascinating story
Considering the depths of his personality, the amount of success he had in his ill-gotten jobs, and the sheer number of fake identities he crafted for himself, it's hard not to be fascinated by Demara's story. And that sentiment was felt just as strongly at the time.
This meant that once Demara finally started living under his own name, it didn't take long before Crichton approached him to chronicle his life in The Great Impostor. And the race to turn that story into a movie was just as brisk.
A plumb role
Despite looking nothing like Demara, Tony Curtis captured his roguish charm in the film adaptation of The Great Impostor. Although some of the names of Demara's various identities were changed, and one could never hope to capture all of them in one two-hour movie, it follows some of Demara's most daring deceptions.
During one of his appearances on The Late Late Show With Tom Snyder, Curtis reportedly considered Demara his favorite role throughout a long career that also saw him play Harry Houdini and The Boston Strangler.
The adaptation left Demara unimpressed
But while one might normally consider it a point of pride to have their life story both chronicled and adapted to film while they're alive to see it, Demara seemed fairly ambivalent about either experience. And that was due to how he saw his story portrayed.
According to Zane's statements to The New York Times, Demara repeatedly insisted that both Crichton's book and the Tony Curtis film were "erroneous" in the way they depicted his life. But if Demara specified how, Zane didn't go into details.
He was only semi-retired
Although Demara was apparently not satisfied by how Crichton characterized him, that didn't stop him from seeing an upshot to working with him. And his correspondence with the author — as described by Konnikova's book, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It...Every Time — shows that old habits die hard.
As Business Insider noted, Demara repeatedly convinced Crichton to send him unspecified sums of money. Each time, he characterized these funds as supporting his efforts to "go straight." Although Crichton presumably knew precisely who he was dealing with, Demara proved that he still had his knack.
This is what makes con artists so insidious
For Konnikova, their effectiveness at turning on the charm, even to those who know who they are, makes con artists so fascinating and disturbing all at once. As she told Business Insider, "They are really good; they are really charismatic. Even if you know they're bad people, you walk away thinking they're good people."
As she added, "And it's really scary to see that happening — it's not pleasant because it really makes you realize that it's just so easy for people to fall for their lines." Yet even she made one interesting admission while discussing this seductive insidiousness.
Even after knowing everything, it's hard to resist Demara
As Business Insider noted, Konnikova's consciousness about the frightening reality of con artistry doesn't make her immune from being curious about meeting some of them. And that longing only gets more persistent in cases where that's no longer possible, as with Demara's.
In her words, "I totally want to meet Demara. That guy was so good." She went on to say, "His face was on the cover of magazines, and he was on TV; he still got away with it."
Konnikova isn't alone
The public's fascination with Demara was particularly strong in the late '50s and early '60s. And while Crichton's book and the movie it spawned captured a large portion of that fascination, Konnikova wasn't the only person drawn to the idea of meeting him.
Demara also appeared on an episode of the popular Groucho Marx-helmed TV show You Bet Your Life. And upon meeting him, one of the first things Marx said was, "It's always a pleasure to meet someone who is as crooked as I am."
The end of the road
After this burst of media attention, Demara's life quieted down, and he spent the last eight years of his life in Orange County, California. According to The New York Times, he initially worked as a Baptist minister after settling down there.
As Business Insider reported, he then worked as a chaplain at what was then called the Good Samaritan Hospital of Orange County in Anaheim. But while his fame wasn't quite as widespread as it had been in 1960, it hadn't entirely gone away either.
One last discovery or an old reputation catching up?
Although it's hard to know how genuine his final work was, Business Insider characterized Demara as trying to run his religious impersonation routine one last time when he arrived at Good Samaritan Hospital. Yet, if he was still trying to deceive people, it didn't work for long.
By that point, Demara was still too famous to effectively use a false identity. Nonetheless, the hospital's management allowed him to keep working there. According to The New York Times, he continued until he fell too ill to work in 1980.
A complicated legacy
Despite his well-earned reputation for being a con artist, there were those who still appreciated what Demara accomplished in some of his roles, even though they were secured under false pretenses. The same year he fell ill, many members of the Cayuga crew hailed him as a "lifesaver" during a reunion.
After he experienced a heart attack at home, Demara passed away at the West Anaheim Community Hospital on June 7, 1982. In the decades following his death, the question of why such a clearly brilliant man wasn't willing or able to apply his talents to an honest living remains a puzzling one.