Constitutional Law

The Crimes of a Chameleon

 Never judge a book by its cover, as the adage goes. In the case of Frederic Pierre Bourdin, or “Le Cameleon,” as he would become known in Paris, the adage would aptly fit. In a piece for The New Yorker, David Grann, provides a detailed portrait of Bourdin’s decade of deceit. Bourdin would eventually admit to authorities, Grann wrote, that “in the past decade and a half he had invented scores of identities, in more than fifteen countries and five languages.” But, Grann’s article, “Annals of Crime: The Chameleon,” includes more than one story. One of the article’s stranger tales centers on the connection fostered, in part, by the Alexandria, Va., based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, between a Texas family whose youngest child went missing in 1994 and Bourdin. "His aliases included Benjamin Kent, Jimmy Morins, Alex Dole, Sladjan Raskovic, Arnaud Orions, Giovanni Petrullo, and Michelanglo Martini," Grann wrote. "News reports claimed that he had even impersonated a tiger tamer and a priest, but, in truth, he had nearly always played a similar character: an abused or abandoned child."

Full post as published by ACS Blog on August 13, 2008 (boomark / email).