Whipping Boy (39 page)

{Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images (bottom left)}

The roster of celebrities duped by the prince and the baron included (clockwise, from top left) Pope Paul VI, the Queen Mother, “Sir” Anthony Quinn, and “Sir” Sammy Davis Jr.

{New York Post(left)}

Before his fraud conviction in 2002, Brian Sherry identified himself as Colonel Sherry, Major Sherry, Sir Brian Sherry, Prince Brian, Graf von Sherry, and Colonel Sherry-Berwick. After completing his prison sentence, he shed the regalia and royal titles, founded a synagogue, and started calling himself “Reb Benzi.”

As the check to the left shows, welfare payments supported the administrator of the multibillion-dollar loan program.

Like his colleagues, Sherry came from nonaristocratic stock, as the document to the right confirms. My wife, noting that the future felon was ushered into the world by a man named Port and a woman named Sherry, said, “I guess Johnnie Walker and Dom Pérignon were out of town.”

Fraud is in the details. To give their scheme the air of legitimacy, the swindlers named their nonexistent Trust after a defunct financial institution. The real Badische Bank failed in 1935.

The Kingdom of Mombessa, the principal source of the Trust’s fictive assets, had no such backstory. As this fax from King Henri-François Mazzamba suggests, logos and letterhead had to be designed and tweaked before the $50 billion deed could be printed, signed, and witnessed.

Mombessa may not exist, but its capital does. That said, the only image I could find of the “City of Mondimbi” appears on a postage stamp issued by the Belgian Congo in the early 1930s.

{© Patrick Conner}

The “Cesareum.” My file box of search ephemera includes a mug shot of my roommate; a postcard of our dormitory; a 1971 cassette recording of
Jesus Christ Superstar
; a ski boot match safe; the sheet music for an anthem composed for Prince Robert’s sham order of knights; a Parker 45 fountain pen; a Sugus candy; a cigar box containing forty-year-old trinkets; a foosball man; the patch from my Aiglon blazer; my rank badge; the notebook my father filled as a ten-year-old (in 1920); letters I wrote while a boarder; a page from a Manila phone book; Sir Brian Sherry’s gold-embossed visiting card; and a replica of Augustus of Prima Porta, a gift from my son, Max.

This is probably the clearest graphic expression of the loan program Cesar pitched to his clients. None of the projects he represented received funding.

Self-styled knight of Malta, Robert von Badische (ageunknown) in 1998.

{Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

Self-styled knight of Malta, Maximilian Kurzweil (age four) in 1998.