FAKE: An introduction

In late 1998 my life was kind of a mess, although you might not have recognized this if you'd met me then. On the surface, everything seemed to be going well. I'd recently graduated from law school and had a decent job. I was in a stable relationship, enjoyed relative material comfort, and had great group of friends I socialized with regularly.

The truth, however, was that I was bored to tears and was living paycheck-to-paycheck. I felt like I'd made the wrong career choice and I didn't see a way out.

Into my life stepped Ken Fetterman, a guy I'd known in the Army and hadn't been able to shake in the intervening years. Fetterman, the product of a difficult childhood spent in Camden, New Jersey, had somehow (after finishing a stint in military prison for possession of LSD) become a dealer of high-priced fine art. Entirely self-taught, he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of art and earned a six-figure income peddling antique paintings.

I was baffled by Fetterman's career path and, to be honest, somewhat impressed by what he'd made of himself, but I never thought his art trading was was anything I could ever get involved with. Until he showed me his eBay auctions, that is. In 1998 he'd begun selling art on eBay, and what he was doing looked easy, not to mention lucrative.

So I decided to try it, and on my first batch of paintings (which Fetterman dismissed as crap), I earned over $1000 in profit. I was hooked. I began spending my weekends trolling thrift stores and antique shops looking for art I could resell.

Fetterman, noticing my eagerness, began allowing me to sell some of his huge inventory of paintings in exchange for a share of the profits. Most of them were ordinary, and brought in a typical sum of one or two hundred dollars.

But some of them brought in shocking amounts. $1300 for a small pastel drawing of geometric shapes? What gives?

I quickly learned that buyers were looking at the signatures on the paintings and making assumptions about the artists who painted them, sometimes assuming a piece was by a particular artist even if I hadn't claimed it was. In fact, if the buyers spotted a signature they thought looked familiar, and thought I didn't know what it was, they went nuts, and got into a bidding war in the hopes of "stealing" a painting whose true value I did not know.

It didn't take long for Fetterman to spot this phenomenon and use me to exploit it. After awhile, I realized he was probably tampering with paintings, and in some cases adding signatures, and letting me, the "naive" seller, put them up on eBay.

When I caught onto this, however, it was too late. I was making thousands of dollars a month and already thinking about quitting my day job. I told myself that if I wasn't actually lying about the paintings, I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was just letting buyers make their own conclusions. Caveat emptor.

Indeed.

The stakes grew larger, and eventually, I was in so deep I lost any sense of right and wrong when it came to eBay. Which led me to do one of the most profoundly reckless and stupid things I've ever done.

In early 2000 I forged the signature of Richard Diebenkorn onto an early-1950s painting that resembled his work. I posted the painting on eBay and played dumb about it, doing my best to convince potential buyers that I was a hapless rube who'd unknowingly stumbled across a masterpiece.

It was a shameless ruse and it worked. The painting auctioned for $135,858. It caught the attention of the New York Times, which ran the story on its front page, as well as other newspapers, magazines, and television stations around the world.

Within a few days the world discovered that I was not a hapless rube, but an experienced eBay seller with a trail of unhappy customers. When eBay learned I'd bid on the painting myself (something Fetterman and I did all the time), it kicked me off its site.

Then the FBI took notice, and started laying the groundwork for the world's first federal prosecution based on "shill bidding" on eBay.

I cooperated with the investigation and pled guilty, agreeing to testify against Fetterman in exchange for a lenient sentence. Fetterman, on the other hand, went on the lam, and it took the feds over 3 years to catch up with him.

Meanwhile, stripped of my legal career, I began learning to program computers. Unable to find a job because of my notorious recent past, I started my own software company, HammerTap. Ironically, we made tools for eBay users, and developed the first eBay market research tool.

Within a couple of years I had 5 employees and robust sales, and this is when eBay discovered I was the wizard behind the HammerTap curtain. They threatened to sue me if I didn't sell the company.

Faced with no other option, I sold HammerTap and moved on. The feds finally caught Fetterman and sentenced me to probation in 2004, which was when I began work on FAKE, the book that tells the story of everything you've read in this post so far (in much greater detail, of course).

I decided to write FAKE for personal reasons, really. It was a chance for me, several years down the road, to sort through all that had happened and finally put things in perspective. Writing was a cathartic process, and was often unpleasant, but has succeeded in pushing me further down the path of coming to terms with what I did.

I wanted FAKE to be more than a tawdry tell-all. I wanted it, on some level, to have enduring literary merit, and this is what I strove for as I wrote. It was my one chance to write and publish a book, and I wanted to make the most of it.

This ambition was a source of great frustration because the writing I like best is characterized by rich, masterfully wrought prose, and I am not, despite my best efforts, an artful prose stylist. I do not write the sorts of beautiful, finely hewn sentences that make other writers sigh with envy. Not very often, anyway. I write simply and clearly. I write conversationally. My writing, while easy to read, is not poetic.

But when I let go of the notion of becoming the next William Vollmann, I realized that I do have my strengths. I have a strong, rhythmic, storytelling voice. My narrative flows and keeps the reader reading, and I have a good ear for dialog.

And, most importantly, I had a good story to tell.

I hope I've done it justice. I've gotten very good feedback from people who've read the story -- friends and strangers alike -- who've said it was "engrossing," and told me they couldn't stop reading it. If this indicates some sort of literary merit, so be it. I still can't read a paragraph without finding something I wished I'd changed ("why didn't I join those two sentences?"), but I'm nevertheless satisfied with the outcome.

I hope you like it too.