The Liar in Your Life by Robert Feldman

Author:Robert Feldman [FELDMAN, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PSY039000
ISBN: 9780446552196
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Cosmetic Deceit: Lies to Make Us Seem Richer, Smarter, Better

The town of Gerald, Missouri, population 1,200, has a local police force you can tally on one hand. Unfortunately, Gerald also has a drug problem, specifically with methamphetamines. In this, Gerald is not unique. Meth labs have been popping up in rural areas of Middle America with alarming frequency in recent years. And like Gerald, most towns don’t have the resources to deal with the problem. So when a federal agent arrived in Gerald and announced he had been sent to assist local law enforcement officers with their efforts against pushers and users, he was welcomed.

“Sergeant Bill,” as he came to be known around town, fit the image of the tough federal drug warrior almost to perfection. He was bulky and clean-cut. He carried a gun and a badge. He drove around town in a Ford Crown Victoria outfitted with sirens and a police radio. And he turned sour when asked to give out his full name, saying it could compromise his investigative work.

Sergeant Bill began participating in an aggressive series of raids not long after arriving in Gerald. He reportedly kicked open doors, ransacked private residences, seized property, and put suspects in handcuffs. He did all this without search warrants, claiming that federal agents weren’t required to obtain them. Sergeant Bill’s campaign began to attract the attention of local media, in particular his claim that federal agents can act without warrants. (For the record, they can’t.)

A reporter for the Gasconade County Republican, the local Gerald paper, began digging into Sergeant Bill’s story. It didn’t take long to uncover that it was all fiction. Sergeant Bill’s real name was Bill A. Jakob. He had no affiliation with any federal agency. He had a brief history of small-town law enforcement, and he had also worked, at various times, in the trucking industry, as a wedding minister, and as a security guard. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was an impostor.

He was certainly a convincing one, though. He fooled the mayor, the police chief, and the town aldermen. Even after Jakob had been revealed as a fraud, for a time some in Gerald clung to the belief that he was a federal agent despite all of it, that the revelations were just an elaborate cover story. There doesn’t, however, seem to be any evidence to support this conviction. In the fallout from Jakob’s fraud, several police officers lost their jobs, Gerald residents launched multimillion-dollar civil rights lawsuits, and Jakob himself faces a twenty-three-count indictment for impersonating an officer.

In earlier chapters of The Liar in Your Life, we have explored how frauds such as Bill A. Jakob can succeed. Liars have a powerful advantage when they seek to fool us. We are in many ways predisposed to trust, and this predisposition is often difficult to overcome. Indeed, it can be argued that it is actually easy to trick other people in the fashion of “Sergeant Bill.” But what about the reasons why Bill A.

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