Con Man
Weird little movie.
I was a freshman when he got pinched, but I didn’t know Hogue, at all. To my knowledge I never met the guy and I didn’t even know anyone who did know him; his picture in the paper didn’t look familiar to me. He ran track, he wasn’t my year, we just moved in different circles (I did recognize some of the people from his year in the documentary, but only by name). But I know how preoccupied the entire campus was with it. Everyone had a “Free James Hogue” t-shirt — everyone. Professors had them. You still see them at Reunions now and again.
This is why I rented the movie — I remember how big a deal it was and how we were all interested in it, but for all that it affected me personally it might as well have been happening at Yale. But the movie felt incomplete to me, and the artsy parts at the end with Hogue wandering around on a vacant lot in Colorado seemed…artsy for artsy’s sake. A lot of things got skipped — not that Moss is required to explore every aspect of Hogue’s life, but a big part of the interview segments is Hogue’s classmate saying she knew he would “do it again,” which he totally did, like two years later, at Harvard, at which time he upped the ante by stealing shit from a museum or something, and then he came back to Princeton!
Last I heard, he was awaiting sentencing on grand larceny charges…again…and all that happened after the movie got made, but there was more material there that Moss could have gotten into, whether he could track down Hogue or not (and he eventually did). I liked the movie for the memory-lane aspects, but for people who aren’t going to recognize the dorms and some of the other people in the freshman facebook, the Wikipedia entry is probably a better record.
Anyone with an update on Hogue’s sentencing can post it in the comments.
Tags: movies
Don’t have any info about his sentencing, but do know that HBO’s “Real Sports” did a segment on him within the last year or so. The interviewer was Bernard Goldberg, who hated every second of covering this segment. The growing frustration on Goldberg’s face while interviewing Hogue ranks very highly on the untintentional comedy scale.
No Ocean’s 13 review? ;-)
No info on the sentencing, but something very similar to this just happened at Stanford, and it’s been a huge deal in all the local papers. I couldn’t really tell if she was opportunistic, delusional, or just desperate, or a bit of all three. I wonder if someone will make a movie about her?
I was going to post the same thing about “Real Sports”! I think I remember less about the subject covered than I do about Bernard Goldberg. But anyhoo, Sars, if you have On Demand you can probably catch the Real Sports segment and see if it included any stuff the movie missed.
Alexis (fitting moniker for this thread, heh): I also remember a big flapdoodle about ten years ago over a Harvard undergrad who had a very sad story in her application essay about growing up in foster care…what she’d neglected to mention was that she’d killed her mother with a candelabra. (I think. Now I have to look it up. It was some crazy Clue-ish instrument, I’m pretty sure.)
I seem to recall a lot of media coverage of the fact that Harvard punted her, technically because she’d lied on her application but really because the whole situation was so creepy. Anyone else remember this?
My bad: it was a lead candlestick, and she never matriculated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Grant
Hogue was sentenced to ten years in a Colorado state prison last month for stealing wood and shit. He was about to go on a trip to get a Russian bride and was already planning to pose as a doctor.
http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_6162692?nclick_check=1
On Demand didn’t have it, but! I was able to download it as a podcast, and you weren’t kidding about Goldberg. Wow. He was so personally offended by Hogue, it was kind of funny, especially the editorial comment on Hogue “stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down”…which actually is completely accurate, if the shit in Steph’s link is to be believed.
Because he STOLE a STUFFED BEAR. He’d already gotten busted umpteen times, and he stole…a stuffed bear. Not going to gank some cufflinks or a couple of pens, oh no. Going to steal a conspicuous item three times his size. It’s so crazy, it’s almost awesome; I feel like there’s no point in sending him to jail, really. Just put a wildlife tag in his neck and turn him loose, and every now and then go find him and return all the stuff he stole and make sure he’s not sleeping with any minor girls, because seriously, when he gets out in 2017, he’s going to show up at Columbia pretending he’s a 39-year-old architect and we’re going to have this same conversation.
Seriously. I mean, who else needs a secret room for 80 pieces of stolen wood. Why do you need 80 pieces of stolen wood? But the same can be said about the stuffed bears, moose antlers, medical books, bicycles, red-silk high heels, rare wood, copper pans, power saws and champagne.
Okay, so I get they champagne but the red-silk high heels? Were they in his size or just, you know, whatever they had on display?
Of course it’s in the Mercury News because of the fraud he perpetrated at Paly High as some awesome track star. That’s the one real thing about him it seems, the boy could run.
Given that the Mercury News piece came out just two days ago, this is a pretty timely post, Sars.
Don’t forget the Viagra. Stuffed bear, red heels, champagne…Viagra. I don’t want to know what was going on in that storage locker at night, I just really don’t.
The timeliness is totally random; I really had been looking for this movie for years, finally found it on Netflix, and they happened to send it last week. I’m glad I can get closure. Heh.
Here’s more on the Stanford faker:
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=5120
I feel a little sorry for her, but not too, considering she’s clearly a very good liar and set up the whole thing more cleverly than delusionally.
“Seriously. I mean, who else needs a secret room for 80 pieces of stolen wood. Why do you need 80 pieces of stolen wood? But the same can be said about the stuffed bears, moose antlers, medical books, bicycles, red-silk high heels, rare wood, copper pans, power saws and champagne.”
Is anyone else thinking kleptomania, at least for the stealing? Because that’s the only thing I can think of, that would reasonably explain the random items. As for his various con jobs…
Which episode of the podcast was it?
It’s an episode from July…and I don’t remember the date, but they also aired it as part of their year-in-review episode, and that one’s dated 12/26/06. Also a good segment in that one about the downfall of the downhill gold medalist from ’84.
Once you get past the “look how great I am attitude” of Bryant Gumbel, “Real Sports” is a really, REALLY terrific watch.
Wow. What waste. Just think about what he could have accomplished if he had actually gone about everything the right way.
Jim is a compulsive thief, a brilliant person, and someone who just walks to the beat of a different drum. There are people who walk along the edge of legality, normally trying to push the boundaries from the inside out. Jim walks on the other side of the fence, looking for the boundaries by pushing in. I think that he gets off on the thrill of the con, then quickly gets bored. He starts to take things because he doesn’t really care, has a bit too much ego and thinks that he probably won’t get caught, and doesn’t care a whole lot if he is caught. His ability to run was diminished over the last few years because of some painful medical problems in his legs (think extreme shin splints). This made him even more bored.
We all push those boundaries, I think. No? You disagree? How about when you get in your car and drive– ever slide through a stop sign, go through the intersection because the light was not red but instead little pink, or speed just a bit on the highway? It’s a delicate balance, trying to go fast enough to be breaking the law but slow enough to not cause a cop to pull you over… Our goal is to get somewhere a little faster; Jim’s goal is to see if he’s going just inconspicuous enough to not get noticed.
No, he didn’t think that he would be a doctor and I sincerely doubt that he would have tried to pose as a doctor. There would be too big of a risk of physically hurting someone, which isn’t his bag. He was studying to gain the knowledge to help his Russian fiancee pass her boards in the US.
Creepy that they taped me talking to him while he was in Tucson… Oh well, I guess I should have expected that.
Hogue would forthrightly tell you, these are my principles–then add, if you don’t like these, I have a few others. In short, he was a typical con man. How he was able to pull this off, though, due to the age factor, is still remarkable.
–Jack Payne
http://www.sixhrs.com
[…] me — the “identity con,” I suppose you might call it. Sometimes, as in the case of James Hogue, it’s identity creation; other times, it’s identity conspiracy, a flimflam of hope, a […]