Hanif Kureishi: A Theft: My Con Man

In the early spring of 2013, about a year after Jeff had gone on his spree, a detective came to take a statement from me. The policeman had recently been to see Jeff, who lived in a grim bungalow out in semirural Essex, with his parents in a shabby place at the other end of the plot of land. The policeman called it a backward, churchy, semi-rural community, with very little worth selling. Greed was always understandable, he said, but Chandler’s behaviour was inexplicable. This man was doing well; he had come far for someone with his background. As a partner in his accountancy firm, his already large income would only increase. Why would he sabotage himself for a relatively small amount of dodgy money?

The policeman said Jeff seemed naive. A lot of people said that about him. He must have been led on by the Albanian girl he called his fiancée, and they had spent six or seven thousand pounds in one weekend at the Westfield shopping centre. Jeff had bought property in Albania, a hairdressing salon, a bakery and a restaurant, and put them in her name. Jeff had once been quick and smart, and a lot of people had told him that. But there is always a horizon to people’s intelligence, and they must bear that in mind, since it is their fate. But Jeff, with his James Bond omnipotence, couldn’t do that. There were no limits in the con man’s world, and perhaps he had come to believe he could do just anything, steal and steal, and yet feel free. However, where there is no prohibition there is no meaning, and nothing real is possible. You would, I suppose, begin to feel megalomaniacal and unconnected. In truth, Jeff was ultimately a self-deceiver, a seducer who had seduced himself, and a taker who had also been taken.

When the truth was discovered, Jeff’s colleagues and former friends, people who had worked with him for more than ten years, some of whom he had employed and many of whom he stole from, scattered and scurried away. Bewildered and devastated by his deception, by all they did not know, they denied any responsibility for this disaster. They had not noticed he was a madman. Hiding behind lawyers gives people a sort of agency, or symbolic power, but it also exposes how weak they are. They’re like people wearing a fright mask, and when it is ripped off you see the awful human fear beneath.

What shocks about a crime, I noticed, is not only the violation of limits, but the new knowledge of how insubstantial those limits were in the first place. Why, then, is it a relief and a disappointment when it turns out that the authorities, those we leaned against and even believed in, are themselves — and always were — foolish, perverse and dishonest?

*

Far from being an exception, a good man who inexplicably went wrong, Jeff was a monster created by the accountancy firm he partly built. As the necessary excrescence of the system, he embodied the Thatcherite ideal perfectly. Lower middle class, religious, a family man, self-motivated and hard working, he loved money more than he loved himself; he was a chancer, a corrupted wide boy, a charming crook who not only rose to the top of his profession, but destroyed everything around him. In the end, of course, the manic swings and crashes of bipolar capitalism had taken him too, but at least I understood now that far from being a maverick, an exception, the con man, the thief and liar, the man with the over-the-top interest rate, was the money world’s most representative figure. A lunatic at the centre of a corrupt, collapsing system, like the ‘mad’ child in a family, he was its essence, the symptom that spoke its truth.

This view might be right. But it might not be. It is a good, convincing story, and anyone would rightly be suspicious of such cohesion and all that it excludes. So, such a narrative is probably irrelevant. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Jeff and what sort of person he might be. Because he was no Machiavelli, plotting for advantage, power or wealth; he wasn’t focused, predictable or readable. It must be odd to have nothing about you that is true, so I wanted to know what it would be like to be false through and through, a man you could look at and see nothing. I had, eventually, spoken to friends in the press about this story and some of it had become public, though the behaviour of Jeff’s partners in the company had become disconcerting. However, I stuck to this thought: my money might have been stolen, but my words couldn’t be. Yet even after this, and after he’d been arrested but not charged, I heard that Jeff was still peddling investments and spinning stories, a mad novelist, and a far-out magic realist at that, who couldn’t stop making it up. I tried to get in touch with him, to ask him what he thought he was doing. He wouldn’t answer. Jeff was not a great Dostoevskian criminal or poet of destruction, he was not truly selfish or savage when it came to the violation of limits. There was no additional liberty in his impotent transgressions; the rules were still in place. What he did was a form of random evil in its most banal sense, but he did become good at it, successfully causing despair, hopelessness and ruin. Not everyone can bear to do that; not everyone would want to face the consequences, to reap such hatred. But Jeff lacked imagination, taking no one anywhere. He was a destructive monster, and he was nothing of interest.

*

Though a lot of people lost important things, this was only a minor tragedy. But it made people who heard about it nervous. They saw that anyone could be found out and taken, however defended they might be, because everyone is dependent on someone else, and there is always something unknowable about others. However, I was duped by a con man but learned more about women than I’d known before. Women were outraged by the wrongness; the women came through, and taught me to depend on them. You can be direct with a woman and she will appreciate it. The women rang the appropriate people; they wrote letters, they talked to one another, and knew what to do. They blamed the right people.

It is no surprise that we are all spellbound by crime and criminality. As children we are continuously taught right and wrong and morality; we are exhorted to obedience and are tempted by defiance. We are told that if we behave well we will be rewarded, but we soon notice that these rewards mostly benefit the authority rather than us. At the same time, we sexualise disobedience and never abandon its dangerous compulsions. This makes it more difficult, rather than easier, to be free. For adults, most of television, cinema, the newspapers and fiction is concerned with detectives, offenders and punishment. And for good reason. This is where we think about whether we should be good or not, and what the cost of crossing the line is, and what the — usually higher — cost of renunciation is. This is where we think about the relation between pleasure and happiness, and between pleasure and its price. After all, most authorities are experts in denial. Where might we learn what pleasure really is, and who will teach us?

*

Jeff’s fiancée, or his desire for her, might have been the detonator, but Jeff himself had become a little suicide bomb, devastating everyone around him. It turned out that Jeff stole from his friends — people he’d known since he was eleven — from the church his parents attended, from charities, writers, pension funds, and of course from his partners at the company he had helped build. The line he gave the victims, and the stories he told, his circuitous explanations, as the whole thing broke down were all the same. Painful conflicts between friends and colleagues broke out after Jeff’s crimes. People argued, let one another down, and fell out. I yelled at people until I had to lie down. Jeff taught me, I guess, the necessity of boldness and exactitude in speech. Where before I’d been evasive and vague, I had to learn to be precise, and ask for what I needed. Then, once this story came out in the press, many people wrote to me and to each other. Some could only get in contact anonymously, and many chose to be ashamed. People believed that because they had fantasised about becoming richer they had actively collaborated in their own downfall. It was as if, for this minor crime of greed, each person had been seduced, fucked, fucked over, and discarded. However, some of the victims continued to defend Jeff, calling him ‘innocent’ or ‘naive’. Of course, it was this facade of naivety which made him so dangerous and convincing. But there was also a part of him which was genuinely naive. It might have been the case that his sexual inexperience had made him hazardous, because he hadn’t understood what was happening to him when he met the Albanian woman. He thought he had to impress her. Or give her everything. I remember now that the first time I met him he opened his wallet in order to show me a photograph of the woman he called his fiancée. The picture was indistinct but I could see that it was, at least, a woman. This action seemed an incongruous, old-fashioned thing to do. I thought he was showing me that the successful man is one who is loved. Now I know it was the wallet, not the woman, he wanted me to see.