Modern Crime: The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor

He strolled into the police station in Chelsea on Jan. 4 wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, a “Wounded Warrior” cap and military dog tags dangling from his neck. He said he was Jeremiah Asimov-Beckingham, a veteran of Afghanistan, wounded in combat, now working as an executive for an airline. He had come to the station to pick up his car.

His new BMW had been impounded, he believed, as evidence in a random crime. But it was a ploy. The police were hoping to lure a man suspected of forging checks in Cambridge, Mass., to steal $70,000 and the BMW, which they had tracked to a Manhattan garage. They put Mr. Asimov-Beckingham in handcuffs and charged him with larceny.

Investigators soon learned that the man’s name was not Asimov-Beckingham. He had never been wounded in combat, nor had he ever served in the military. New York detectives and Homeland Security agents found an Indiana birth certificate in his immigration file showing his name as Jeremy Wilson, born in Indianapolis in July 1973. It was the oldest document in the file, so they charged him under that name.

Still, his identity was a puzzle. He had spent 25 years stealing Social Security numbers and fabricating new aliases, leaving behind a thicket of confusing and falsified records. Six weeks earlier, he had been released from a federal prison in New Hampshire, where he had served six years for identity theft as Jeremy Clark-Erskine. But he had more than 27 aliases in five states. His birth certificate had been altered several times. Even his citizenship was in doubt. He had been deported more than once as an illegal immigrant. Now he is at Rikers Island, awaiting trial.

“There is so much misinformation about me, no one can say with absolute certainty who I am,” he said in an interview there late last month.

Further complicating matters, Mr. Wilson, 42, was now calling himself Jeremy Keenan and claiming to be the son of a famed Irish Republican Army leader, Brian Keenan, who directed the group’s bombing campaign in Britain in the 1970s and later played a role in the peace process for Northern Ireland. (Mr. Keenan died in 2008.) Speaking with a light brogue, Mr. Wilson said he had evidence to prove his claim and hinted that he himself had been active in the I.R.A. in the 1990s.

Whatever his parentage, investigators say Mr. Wilson is a professional impostor and a skilled forger. Though fraud has become an increasingly invisible offense in a digital world, Mr. Wilson has stuck with a decidedly old-fashioned approach, stealing checks and creating new personas, occasionally with accents and falsified papers, the police said.

He has portrayed himself as a Scottish-born D.J., a Cambridge-trained thespian, a Special Forces officer and a professor at M.I.T. He has posed as executives from Microsoft, British Airways and Apple, always with a military background. He pretended to be a soldier seeking asylum in Canada to escape anti-Semitic attacks in the United States. He once maintained an Irish accent so well and for so long that his cellmate in an Indiana jail was convinced that he was an Irish mobster.

“You have to give him some grudging respect,” said Brian A. Clark, his cousin and also a victim, having had his identity stolen by Mr. Wilson in the early 1990s. “He’s a proper villain. He’s just got flair.”

The exploits of Mr. Wilson — if we can agree to call him that — have drawn comparisons to those of Frank Abagnale Jr., the notorious con artist whose life was chronicled in the 2002 film “Catch Me if You Can.”

He fits the profile of scammers who derive as much pleasure from hoodwinking others as they do from reaping a profit, said Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The elaborate fictions these swindlers spin tend to inflate their own egos. “It’s always grandiose,” Professor Schlesinger said. “It’s always extraordinary.”

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