The ultimate conman conned by clever cops
What are the best stories — the ones we really love? We like novels to have coherence, but in real life, we prefer our stories to be a bit shambolic, with everything going slightly wrong. Chasing Phil is one of those tales.
It’s about the FBI’s fervent desire, in the late Seventies, to bring down Phil Kitzer, an impossibly charismatic conman who had scammed hundreds of people out of unimaginable sums of money.
two young agents, Jack Brennan and J. J. Wedick, had a lead on Kitzer and they knew that if they nabbed him, it would make their careers. So they decided to go undercover, pretending to be a couple of junior con artists hoping to learn the game from the Master. this is the story of that undercover operation.
the late Seventies was a more innocent time, but this made it easier for a man like Kitzer to operate. his technique was this: find someone who needs money badly. Offer them certificates of deposit (fake, like almost all the paperwork in this case) that show you’re loaded and able to lend them this money at the drop of a hat. take a small fee, typically 10 per cent of the money to be loaned. then scarper.
Kitzer was a genius at this. he had the psychopath’s ability to read weakness in others and adored the thrill of taking their cash. he then spent it on drink, girls, limousines and expensive hotels. No one had ever caught up with him.
Brennan and Wedick went into this with no experience of undercover operations. the FBI was running a course on going undercover, but neither of them had time to take it. they had to wing it and were forever an inch from disaster. the first time they met Kitzer, he said: ‘Christ! You guys look like a couple of Feds.’
as David howard says: ‘they were surely the first undercover operatives ever to be teased by their target for their uncanny resemblance to undercover operatives.’
But Brennan and Wedick had good instincts. they learned to listen more and speak less. Brennan was a spud-faced Irishman with an easy manner who laughed at everyone’s jokes. Wedick, from the Bronx, was sharper and liked to plan everything in detail.
Most importantly, Kitzer liked them both. there are many photos of them all, whooping it up in foreign climes as Kitzer took them on a whirlwind tour of the world’s shadier nightspots. he looked like a slightly worn-out version of Billy Bob thornton. all three of them had shirt
collars so huge, you half expected them to take off.
Howard spent three years talking to everyone and reading everything and he has produced an extraordinarily detailed, gripping account of this picaresque adventure.
Kitzer was utterly whimsical in his actions and had a tendency to say: ‘Right, we’re going to the Bahamas now,’ and off they would go. Poor Brennan and Wedick would spend days trying to find a working phonebooth in the Bahamas to tell their office where they were.
The story works partly as it’s a picture of a vanished world: a similar story now would be much more technological and not half as fun.
The weird thing is that the ultimate con artist, who could see through people the way you and I see through windows, allowed himself to be conned by a couple of coppers who looked so much like coppers, they couldn’t possibly be coppers.
For Jack and J. J., it all got very complicated. In a meeting of halfadozen conmen all chipping in ideas, they tried desperately to remember everything everyone was saying, but their minds simply locked up.
Back in Indianapolis, Jack halfjokingly suggested he should be hypnotised to see if that would help. A few days later, the FBI booked a hypnotist to search for the agent’s lost memories for the first time ever. And so Jack was hypnotised by a local psychiatrist in a bow tie.
When he woke up, his partner looked disappointed. Jack had only been able to remember one thing with absolute clarity: his own despair as he looked around the table at the meeting and thought: ‘Oh s***, I’m not going to be able to remember any of this’.