Jeremy Wilson<\/a>, born in Indianapolis in July 1973. It was the oldest document in the file, so they charged him under that name.<\/p>\nStill, 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is so much misinformation about me, no one can say with absolute certainty who I am,\u201d he said in an interview there late last month.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to give him some grudging respect,\u201d said Brian A. Clark, his cousin and also a victim, having had his identity stolen by Mr. Wilson in the early 1990s. \u201cHe\u2019s a proper villain. He\u2019s just got flair.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exploits of Mr. Wilson \u2014 if we can agree to call him that \u2014 have drawn comparisons to those of Frank Abagnale Jr., the notorious con artist whose life was chronicled in the 2002 film \u201cCatch Me if You Can.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt\u2019s always grandiose,\u201d Professor Schlesinger said. \u201cIt\u2019s always extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read the Remainder at NY Times<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He strolled into the police station in Chelsea on Jan. 4 wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, a \u201cWounded Warrior\u201d 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[13,74,1928,3986],"tags":[4451,4452,4453],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11665"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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