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    Sherlock Being Catfished: A Memoir
    Sherlock Being Catfished: A Memoir
    Sherlock Being Catfished: A Memoir
    Ebook159 pages2 hours

    Sherlock Being Catfished: A Memoir

    By Joan Mellen

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    About this ebook

    Sherlock Being Catfished is a memoir of a self-induced hypnosis, brilliantly choreographing a pas-de-deux with an internet "catfish" and allowing us to see a sensitive, lonely woman succumb to a devilish entrapment helplessly yet altogether knowingly. The story conveys a thrilling level of consciousness, overwhelmed yet in full knowledge of what is happening and even why, enabling Mellen author to speak in a manner that transcends her personal experience, to the universal vulnerability of the human heart. As the scam unfolds, she makes connections between present and past - the work she has done and people she has encountered over her decades of research, investigations and writing. Sherlock Being Catfished is an undeniably unique and penetrating look at the world of internet dating, and how anyone, regardless of their prolific life's work and accomplishments, can fall victim to a romance scammer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrine Day
    Release dateJul 8, 2024
    ISBN9781634244848
    Sherlock Being Catfished: A Memoir
    Author

    Joan Mellen

    Joan Mellen is Professor of Creative Writing at Temple University, USA. She is the author of the BFI Film Classics on Seven Samurai and In the Realm of the Senses, as well as several works of biography, fiction, and literary criticism. Her latest book is A Farewell To Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination and the Case That Should Have Changed History (2005).

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      Book preview

      Sherlock Being Catfished - Joan Mellen

      Press on, nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb [truism]. And education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

      – Calvin Coolidge

      FOREWORD

      By Maryalice Yakutchik

      Caution is not a word that many would associate with Joan Mellen. As an author and university professor, her writing and teaching careers, both many decades long, exemplified the merits of risk-taking to her readers, students, among whom I am numbered, and colleagues.

      No matter how vexing the pursuit of truth, or unpopular its telling, Joan was not one to flinch in the face of the nemeses of nonfiction.

      Then, recently, she was catfished. Duped by a shoddy romance scam. Friends warned her, of course. So did her bank balk when the man who was pledging love shared news of a business catastrophe in Cuba and asked her to wire thousands of dollars to a female associate in Vegas.

      How, you might wonder, could someone who routinely cut through red tape and lies of government entities and operatives — not to mention the sad excuses of grad students — buy into such an egregious fiction?

      Why was Joan so eager to believe? So willing to give of herself, her money, her time, her future?

      Those are hard questions. The role that Joan herself played in being catfished exposes a harrowing vulnerability that left her gulping for breath and spiraling down — before it inspired her to write.

      In her brutal retelling, this cautionary tale is fresh. In examining herself, Joan mines an extraordinary character in the context of an unsavory subject. It was her habit as an author of biographies and history to imagine herself as others, if not to obliterate herself entirely.

      She was not of interest to herself. It was never about her. Until now.

      In these pages, readers will meet a generous and indomitable human spirit whose lifelong project was concealing herself. As if that’s not enough, she bears witness to a terrifying global phenomenon of deceit that has momentum and the power to wilt souls.

      Thanks to Mellen’s honesty, we emerge fortified, no longer available for the taking by catfishers nor anyone else.

      Maryalice Yakutchik, a career science journalist, was a student of Joan Mellen’s in the creative writing program at Temple University. Her work has appeared across the Discovery Channel, NPR, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other outlets.

      INTRODUCTION

      Now and then, over the years when I dwelled in the realm of Kennedy assassination research, strangers would want to know why I did not reply to their Facebook messages. These communiques included questions they assumed I could answer if only I chose to. The subtext was that there must be something very wrong with me. Or else time had passed me by, and not in a favorable way. Hostility to Facebook could only mean lack of relevancy.

      Early in my career as a writer, I had decided to write a biography of Jim Garrison, who believed that the CIA had some role in the murder of John F. Kennedy. Surely, these inquiring minds concluded, the Agency must have broken into my house, stolen files, hacked into my computer. As far as I knew, it had not.

      I had run into a few CIA-connected types. Among them was a dashing soldier of fortune, Cuban operations, named Gerald Patrick Hemming. Gerry sported two uncles who were friends of CIA counter-intelligence Chief James Angleton. On the day in 1999 when I met Hemming at his home in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a few miles from Fort Bragg, he solemnly advised me to buy the most expensive security system that I could afford.

      Hemming

      Hemming’s reputation was for physical violence, and that he could fire machine guns simultaneously from both hips. He was a witness I feared. I asked a CIA contract pilot named Carl McNabb whether I would be in physical danger should I meet with Hemming alone. McNabb laughed.

      At the address Hemming had shared with me was a small one-story house. Inside was a rangy man at least six feet seven inches tall. His muscles had gone slack, but his voice remained rich in bravado. Bored, disabled from a heart ailment, and housebound, he retained a gleam in his eye. He had watched a documentary in which I had been interviewed about detective story master, Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, and he had liked it. So he agreed to this meeting.

      Hemming’s mode of discourse was to test people by mixing truth with disinformation. He declared that of all the people connected to the Kennedy assassination, the one he feared most was Bernie.

      Bernie? Bernie who?

      Just Bernie, he said, and the subject was closed.

      It would be years before he would tell me whom he was talking about, Bernardo de Torres Alvarez. Many writers avoided Hemming because he had rendered himself an unreliable witness. How could I — how could anyone — distinguish between what was true and what was invention? That I had never heard of Bernie led me to conclude that this was sheer fantasy. I turned out to be wrong.

      Hemming had another side, of course. His sheer zest for life and wit made him fun to be with. He told me that during his incarceration for drug trafficking he learned to cook pork fried rice. When I visited, he stood at the stove creating his specialty. Then he did the dishes. He was funny, outrageous, and not at all threatening. When he talked about his pursuit of a JFK witness named Sylvia Odio, well-known to researchers, he was even sexy.

      Sylvia Odio

      Name a figure whom you admire, he said. I chose the figure I hoped would be the subject of my next book, Colombian priest Camilo Torres Restrepo, who had left the priesthood to join the ELN only soon to be murdered, betrayed by the leader of the guerrilla group. Hemming claimed to know who Camilo was. He told me he had learned a lot about Colombia when he had been imprisoned at Gorgona off the Western coast of Colombia. Bats hung from the cement walls and when you dared venture outside snakes slithered at your feet (hence the name Gorgona Island).

      If you conclude that all this was more Hemming fantasy, you would be wrong. Years later at dinner in Miami with Hemming’s closest friend, aviator Howard K. Davis, or Davy, – as Hemming called him – told me that they had been on a humanitarian mission in Central America only for Hemming suddenly to disappear. He was found to be drug trafficking. Then, at Hemming’s memorial service, his brother Robert confirmed that Gerry had been imprisoned on Gorgona Island which until 1982 had been an active prison for drug traffickers.

      * * *

      My standard response to all intimidation attempts meant to frighten me because of my study of the intelligence services was inspired by Jim Garrison himself. He was expressing his astonishment at Bobby Kennedy’s open hostility to his efforts to expose who had murdered his brother.

      As soon as you learn something, Garrison said, shout it from the rooftops. Only this will keep you safe. Your antagonists will have nothing more to fear from you. Had Bobby Kennedy revealed what he knew about the circumstances of his brother’s death, and no one doubts that he knew a lot, at the least he might have saved his own life.

      To square the circle, Hemming was a Garrison suspect for a while. When Hemming offered boldly to join his investigation, Garrison turned him down, unimpressed by Hemming’s clever doubletalk. He penetrated the smoke that Hemming sent his way in the form of a long list of suspects, none of whom had anything to do with the assassination. Coincidentally, they all emanated from the West Coast.

      Running for the presidency in 2023, Bobby’s son and namesake did not believe it worthwhile to ask me what I knew about his father’s relationship to the Garrison investigation. Nor did I value talking to the anti-vaxxer. Not wanting to know the facts about an unsavory historical event was a familiar response from people curious about the assassinations of the 1960s but not open to facts. By our time, draped across several generations, this narrow mindedness had grown to epidemic proportions. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was ready to trade on the Kennedy name, for what it was worth, but apparently had no interest in knowing what the Kennedys were actually about. I tried to interview one of his sisters, Kerry Kennedy, but when the word Cuba came up, she terminated the call. As many of the Miami Cubans well knew, Bobby was implicated in attempts to murder Fidel Castro, and knew the name Lee Harvey Oswald. Bobby even had a CIA aide search in Canada for Mafia-connected assassins who might be available to participate in such a scheme to eliminate Castro.

      * * *

      One day in the early spring of 2023 (for a sense of that soft welcoming season, for which there is no word in English, think of the film Early Spring by Japanese film master Yasujiro Ozu), my life ground to a halt.

      Sherlock with Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1969.

      Feeling neglected in a research field crowded with men, at loose ends because I had just retired after 50 years of university teaching, I unearthed from the moldy attic of Facebook a batch of unanswered messages. Nearly all were from men with queries about Garrison and the JFK assassination. Some invited me to appear on their podcasts or in documentary films whose shelf life had come and gone.

      At first, I did not notice that among these messages was one that had nothing to do with Garrison or the Kennedy assassination. I had no idea that I had entered a world that is commonly known as catfishing, or that $15,000 of my money would soon be in jeopardy.

      Sherlock with New Zealand novelist Maurice Shadbolt, Toronto, Canada, circa 1999.

      Sherlock with novelist Samuel R. (Chip) Delany, New York City, 2006, at the book party for A Farewell to Justice, at the Century Association.

      I

      HOOKERS

      The term catfishing derives from the practice of an American fishing village that had been exporting cod to China. The cod were arriving

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