6
SELF-MADE MAN
The idea of concocting the intricate
history of a work of art from whole cloth was no great leap for
Drewe, who had been inventing and reinventing himself since he was
a child. By the time he was a nervous thirteen-year-old thread of a
boy in short trousers and cap, he had mastered the art of
dissembling. He boasted that he was a descendant of the earl of
York though he had in fact grown up in a lower-middle-class home in
southeast England, the stepson of a coal merchant. He was quiet and
circumspect, with anxious eyes behind thin spectacles. He had a
scar running from his chin to his neck, and this was a sore point:
He told the other boys that he’d been accidentally scalded by
boiling water. (Later, he would claim that he had been wounded in
battle.) He was clearly an intellectual, above the norm. He had few
friends, and it seemed he liked it that way. He was never bullied.
Even in those tender years, from thirteen to fifteen, he was
withdrawn. There was a controlled grief about him that made the
other children keep their distance.
In the summer, he and his only real friend, Hugh
Roderick Stoakes, would play long games of whist, an early version
of bridge. Drewe (still John Cockett at the time) would deliver
speeches to an imaginary audience and tell Stoakes that the two of
them were fated to be “heroes for the future.” They rarely talked
about girls or football or pop music. They preferred to listen to
the funeral march from the second movement of Beethoven’s
Eroica, imagining the mourners’ silhouettes against a
darkening sky. They traded horror paperbacks, and Drewe kept his
collection next to his advanced chemistry and physics tomes and his
copies of Conrad, Kafka, and Joyce. His room was clean and neat,
with reams of paper stacked next to a typewriter on which he
composed complex mathematical equations and theories.
Even as a boy, Drewe was drawn to the rigors of
science. He loved the precision and control and discipline of
scientific endeavor. His math skills were sophisticated, and he
could assimilate information quickly and accurately. By his early
teens he was reading up on quantum mechanics and cold fusion. He
plumbed the philosophy of science and pored over Vogel’s
Textbook of Practical Organic Chemistry, a university-level
text. Stoakes suspected that his friend was uncomfortable with
purely conceptual matters, but he could see that Drewe was able to
devour buckets of hard facts, and was quick to pick up the gist of
an argument. He had a pigeonhole mind, an uncanny ability to locate
and isolate relevant data from massive amounts of
information.
In their late teens Drewe would pour tea for his
friend from a Georgian pot when he visited, and they would chat for
hours about physics, ballistics, and weaponry. He showed Stoakes a
yellowing document that illustrated how to build a homemade nuclear
bomb, and they discussed Einstein’s unified field theory. He was
quiet and reticent until they talked science, and then he would go
on for hours. Hard science provided a necessary jolt, he said, a
rush of sheer intellectual joy. It was his calling. He was
determined to be a pioneer, to crash through boundaries. He gave
Stoakes a paper he had written that appeared to break clear of the
fundamental laws of physics. Stoakes thought it read like science
fiction.
The boys enjoyed an extended adolescence. Sometimes
Drewe pretended to listen, but Stoakes could tell he was somewhere
else. Occasionally he would short-circuit. Stoakes remembered these
moments with absolute clarity, because Drewe’s temper tantrums
could be terrifying, like thunderclaps. The softness would vanish
as though it had never been there, his face would contort, and he
would speak in staccato bursts through gritted teeth.
Drewe did reasonably well at school and got through
his ordinary level exams, the earlier and less rigorous of two
standardized tests in secondary school subjects, but he seemed to
have little patience for his teachers, who seemed increasingly
resistant to his obvious talent. His family expected him to become
a lawyer or a professor, but he was determined to make his own way
in the world. He’d had his fill of academia and wanted to run his
own ship without middlemen or explanations. When he turned
seventeen, he took an internship at the Atomic Energy Authority, a
clerical position that he must have felt was beneath him. His boss
was one John Catch, and he had an enormous impact on Drewe. Catch
would remember him as a “very clever” young man who had an
impressive knowledge of advanced physics, even though tests showed
he hardly understood the basics. Catch encouraged him to take
college-prep classes through the AEA’s part-time study program, but
Drewe dropped out, claiming that he already knew the
material.
Finally, at the age of nineteen, he resigned from
the AEA, changed his name, and disappeared without a trace. When he
resurfaced some fifteen years later, he had mysteriously acquired a
PhD and claimed he was a well-paid nuclear physicist who did
consulting work on high-level technology. At various times, he also
claimed to have been a professor, a historian specializing in the
Nazi era, a consultant for the Ministry of Defence, an army
lieutenant, a weapons expert, and in his off-hours, an expert hang
glider.
Drewe’s life during those fifteen years remains a
mystery. Although Stoakes did see Drewe a few times during that
period, he had for the most part fallen out of touch with his
friend—which didn’t seem to affect Drewe much. Drewe would make use
of Stoakes’s name regularly in his con.
There is no official record of Drewe until shortly
before he and Goudsmid set up house in Golders Green, where he soon
found a ready audience for his tales at one of his favorite pubs,
the Catch-22. Located across the street from the Golders Green
police precinct headquarters, the pub was named after the
quintessential antiwar novel, but it had become a second home to an
assortment of military types, a watering hole for army buffs,
uniform aficionados, private bodyguards, veterans of the Special
Forces, and off-duty detectives. The Catch was run by an easygoing
ex-paramilitary man. Regimental ties hung from the wall behind the
bar, along with various battle emblems and group photos of
soldiers. In the muddy Guinness light, with Queen and Elvis on the
jukebox, the regulars traded war stories and argued about rugby,
cars, and politics.
One spring evening not long after his visit to the
gallery with Myatt to inspect the Bissière, Drewe stepped out of
his house in his blue overcoat, briefcase in hand, and turned onto
Finchley Road, past Danny Berger’s garage, on his way to the Catch.
He looked like any other well-dressed businessman heading for a
pint after work. In fact, he was still at work. He was
always at work, always on the lookout for a new “legend,” a cover
he could use for his game, a thread he could weave into one of his
stories. It was part of the con man’s job, and Drewe was a patient
sort. If tonight he came across someone whose name or story he
could sew into the quilt, all the better.
At the pub, Drewe was greeted by several of his
mates. When he’d first arrived a few years earlier, he stood out as
something of a loner, but he had since become a familiar face, a
little odd perhaps, but an interesting fellow nonetheless, with a
background in nuclear physics and an uncle or cousin or some sort
of relative who had invented the hovercraft.
Terry Carroll, a Catch regular who lectured in
computer technology and digital systems at the University of
Westminster, remembered Drewe striding into the bar for the first
time. “Instantly you knew someone was in, that the lights were
on,” he said. Drewe was six feet tall, intense, and clearly
intelligent. He was accompanied by a friend of Carroll’s, Peter
Harris, a veteran of the armed forces with wild red hair and an
improbable stew of wartime tales. Harris introduced him to Carroll
and suggested that the two probably had a lot in common.
Carroll had studied physics and gone on to work in
the field of artificial intelligence. Drewe said he had studied
abroad, at Kiel University in Germany, and then in Paris, where he
had taken to the streets during the May ’68 demonstrations.
Subsequently, he had worked at the city-sized atomic energy
research complex in Harwell, near Oxford, where he’d made
substantial and lasting contacts with the police and with MI5.
Those contacts were useful in his current line of work, which
included consulting for the Defence Ministry.
Carroll said that he too had worked at Harwell,
back when he was a young physicist analyzing various materials with
the use of neutron beams. Harwell was so enormous that most
employees knew only a small fraction of the layout, but Drewe
recalled the place as vividly as if he’d been there the day
before.
Whenever Drewe spotted Carroll at the pub after
that first night, he greeted him warmly and bought him a beer.
Usually he dominated the conversation. He liked to talk about
defense technology, and said he was developing a handgun that could
fire a thousand rounds a minute. On a good night, he sounded like
Ian Fleming on Dexedrine. He told Carroll that once, after a
meeting at the Defence Ministry had gone late into the night, he
was accidentally locked in the parking garage. Fortunately, he had
recently been demonstrating the effects of a powerful explosive
called pentrite, and he had a small supply on hand. With it, he had
blown the garage door off its hinges.
Carroll found the story amusing and a little
strange, but he didn’t ask for details. He knew quite a bit about
pentrite from his own army training, and it was obvious that Drewe
was well versed in detonators, boosters, and initiators. The man
was an all-rounder, he thought.
Drewe never forgot a name or a face, and seemed
able to retain every last stray piece of data. He could recite
Newton’s laws of motion, Maxwell’s equations, and the principles of
quantum mechanics. Carroll envied his ability to remember it all.
Drewe explained that he compartmentalized information so he could
call it up for use whenever he needed it. It was effortless, he
said, like pulling documents out of a filing cabinet. He could
remember every room he’d been in, every nuance of every story he’d
been told, every twist and turn. No bit of information was trivial
to him. He was a data sponge, a Hoover of books, journals, and
news.
“John was able, almost at will, to drop in
important parts of the history of physics from memory,” Carroll
recalled, “and in doing so to convey the impression of a much
greater understanding of the subject area in which he purported to
be expert.”
Drewe created an entire informational universe from
other people’s lives, storing potentially useful morsels and
retaining details of the quirks and professional habits of each of
his acquaintances. He would look them straight in the eye with his
flat, unwavering stare, listen intently, and come away with flakes
of character and personality, pieces so small his marks hardly knew
anything was gone.
“He was like a shark that doesn’t bite but rubs up
against you and takes away little bits of your skin,” said one such
acquaintance.
Drewe often boasted to Terry Carroll that he had a
pilot’s license, that he loved flying helicopters, and that he was
an accomplished hang glider. Carroll thought it would be nice to
surprise his friend with a private visit to the Concorde, and on a
clear day the two men drove out to Heathrow in Drewe’s Bentley. On
the giant airliner, at the pilot’s invitation, Drewe took the
controls in his hands. He looked as excited as a four-year-old with
a lollipop, and asked a variety of technical questions.
(Interestingly, Goudsmid would later tell police that Drewe had a
mortal fear of flying.) On the way home he expounded on various
theories of unmanned flight and drone weaponry, and Carroll noted
again that he had a sophisticated understanding of physics. Years
later Carroll realized that Drewe had simply memorized basic
concepts from physics textbooks.
Drewe quickly added Terry Carroll to his collection
of unwitting accomplices. The soft-spoken lecturer was developing
powerful intelligence-gathering software that could be applied to
various disciplines. Drewe told Carroll he was sure the Home Office
would be interested in the software for a newly proposed national
computerized fingerprint identification system, as would the
auction houses for an international database for art. Drewe said
that he could broker both potential deals. Soon he was bringing an
assortment of interesting characters to Carroll’s office: a group
of MI6 and Scotland Yard acquisition officers; a handful of Russian
and South African officials; a Chinese military attaché and his
computer specialist. Carroll couldn’t help but be impressed.
Another candidate for Drewe’s crew was Peter
Harris, the larger-than-life armed forces veteran who had
introduced him to Carroll. Harris was well into his fifties, a hard
drinker and smoker who had already lost a lung, and whose
appointment with oblivion was neatly stamped on his forehead. A
retired commercial artist, Harris supplemented his income by
working an early morning paper route and subletting his flat, most
recently to Carroll.
Harris’s friends would probably have pitied him if
he hadn’t been such a great raconteur. He claimed that in the late
1960s, while fighting in Aden in the British Army’s last colonial
counterinsurgency campaign, he had stood his ground after a sniper
shot one of his mates dead. Wearing the Tartan kilt of the Argyle
Highlanders, he had picked up his bagpipes and marched down a
bullet-pocked street playing “Scotland the Brave” and daring the
bastards to finish him off. Or so the story went.
It was questionable whether Harris had ever seen
combat, but the Catch-22 was a perfect venue for such yarns, with
its collection of armchair warriors and tin soldiers who enjoyed
the camaraderie of real fighters. Britain was filled with barflies
who lied about their war service. Many of the kingdom’s khaki
fantasists claimed to have served in the elite Special Air Service
(SAS), or as commandos during the Falklands War, or in the
bomb-disposal squads in Northern Ireland. Drewe also claimed to
have belonged to an elite military unit, one of several in the
British Army that operated covertly against the IRA in Northern
Ireland in the 1980s, relying on spies, “dirty ops” informers, and
army and loyalist death squads. Terry Carroll realized much later
that Drewe, who could reel off military commands, ranks, and lists
of weapons, probably got most of his information from spy novels
and military manuals.
Psychiatrists who treat serial war fibbers and
compulsive liars use the term “pseudologia phantastica” to describe
this pattern of habitual deceit. The lies often contain some
element of truth: A onetime army clerk, for example, might claim to
have seen hazardous duty during wartime. Fabricators most often
tend to be in search of some internal psychological gain rather
than a tangible or monetary reward. They want to be seen as
extraordinarily brave, important, or above average, somehow
superior to the ordinary citizen. The typical fantasist is not
delusional.8
Peter Harris and John Drewe both fit the pattern.
They were habitual exaggerators. At the Catch, they loved to talk
about their shared passion for all things military, about
calibration and cannons, missile velocities and the merits of the
old Lee-Enfield rifle. Harris wasn’t making everything up. His
service career was as an airman between 1947-1949. He knew about
guns, having worked for three years as a security officer for the
South African High Commission, and he was still a registered
firearms dealer, although the only guns his friends could remember
were replicas imported from Spain.
For his part, Drewe never let the facts get in the
way of a good story, particularly one that could help him sell more
fakes. He needed real names to attach to Myatt’s paintings, and
Harris was a fine addition to his roster. The self-described
“oldest newspaper delivery boy in Hampstead,” whose only artwork
was a framed certificate proclaiming, “I’ve visited every Young’s
Pub in London,” was about to morph into a wealthy arms dealer with
a large art collection. This new, improved Peter Harris would be
based in Israel and would have close ties to an ammunition
manufacturer in Serbia.
Piece by piece, document by document, Drewe
reinvented Harris. Years after his con had come apart, the police
were never certain whether Harris had wittingly posed as an owner
of Drewe’s fakes or whether he had been another of his marks. In
either case, his name figured large in Drewe’s provenance
documents, even after Harris died of cancer. Police suspected that
as he lay on his deathbed, barely able to talk, Drewe was feeding
him blank documents to sign.