Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life - Softcover

Vogel, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 074321708X ISBN 13: 9780743217088

Publisher: Scribner, 2005

Synopsis

A frank and intimate portrait of a charismatic, larger-than-life underworld figure, as told by the daughter who nearly followed in his footsteps.
"Do unto others before they do unto you," John Vogel used to advise his daughter, Jennifer. By his account, the world was a crooked place and one had to be crooked in order to survive. A lifelong criminal, John robbed banks, burned down buildings, scammed investors, plotted murder, and single-handedly counterfeited more than $20 million. He also wrote a novel, invented a "jean stretcher," baked lemon meringue pies, and arranged for ten-year-old Jennifer to see Rocky in an empty theater on Christmas Eve. In his reckless pursuit of the American Dream, he could be genuinely good. When it came time to pass his phony bills, he targeted Wal-Mart for political reasons.
In 1995, following John's arrest in what turned out to be the fourth-largest seizure of counterfeit bills in U.S. history, he managed to slip away, leaving his now grown daughter to wonder what had become of him. Framed around the six months Jennifer's father ran from the law, Flim-Flam Man vividly chronicles the police chase -- stakeouts, lie detector tests, even a segment on Unsolved Mysteries. In describing her tumultuous life with John Vogel, Jennifer deftly examines the messy, painful, and almost inescapable inheritance one generation bequeaths to the next.

About this title

About the Author:

Jennifer Vogel worked as a writer and reporter in Minneapolis for seven years before moving to Seattle, where she was editor in chief of The Stranger. She moved back to Minneapolis in 2003.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 3: We moved to a remote farmhouse

I have no recollection of Dad from before I was three. The years prior are shadows cast by scraps of paper, secondhand stories, photographs. I have a picture of him in a pressed suit and tie, riling the fat, tiger-striped cat splayed on my lap; we're both laughing. I can't tell whether it's day or night. I can't tell whether he's getting up from the sofa or sitting down. And no matter how hard I look, I can't decipher whether our interaction is genuine or staged for the camera. There are stories to suggest that he doted on me during the earliest years of my life, that he thought me the most beautiful baby ever born, despite my Eisenhower-size forehead. I'm told he proudly wheeled me around the neighborhood in a stroller, stopping for anyone who wished to rub my chin and spit out a coo-chi-coo, and that he toted me to work with him at the lightbulb company where he was a door-to-door salesman. I'm told also that I adored the attention, so much that I insisted on being held very close to the chest. Any embrace deemed less than intimate drew long, piercing wails. Apparently, I wished to remain a baby forever. I refused to walk, though I could rattle off fairly complex sentences. I continued to suck from a bottle even after Nick, my junior by over a year, had moved on to a sippy cup.

It was at three that, in blurs and flashes, I began recording events to memory. That was the year, 1970, that Dad moved me, Mom, Nick, and Liz, just an infant, from Minneapolis to an abandoned sheep farm near Annandale, Minnesota. The farmhouse had long been vacant and the kids from town considered it either too spooky to approach or the ideal partying spot, depending on their age. Leaves had piled like snow against the wide front steps and many of the windows were broken out.

The house was three stories tall with a dormered attic at the top, but it had the feel of a much larger place. It stood imposing on a hill, surrounded by old oaks that had stopped growing just as they reached the roof's peak. Built along straight lines, the house was almost perfectly square if you took into account the double-decker wraparound porches. The porches were picketed with spindly pillars that grinned menacingly at anyone who approached the front door. In summer, the porches were encased in rusty screen, but in winter, you could walk right off the floorboards and land on your back in the yard. Inside were six bedrooms, a mammoth fireplace made of big round stones, and a grand oak staircase that started on the third level and wound down like a spine until it splayed elegantly to meet the main floor.

Mom and Dad spent months repairing the farm. Dad opened an account at the hardware store in Annandale. Trucks laden with lumber and windows and stacks of paint cans motored slowly up the long driveway. The deliverymen appeared genuinely pleased that my parents were putting such care into the old place. They stepped from their trucks and looked the house up and down, shading their eyes with their hands in salute. Sometimes they whistled and shook their heads. Dad stood on the gravel in his shorts and loafers with no socks, one hip chucked out, talking with the men. He was tall and thin and tanned brown. He waved a lit cigarette as he spoke. The men laughed on cue.

My parents stood atop tall ladders with scrapers in their hands for entire afternoons and sometimes into the dark, when it wasn't safe to stand atop tall ladders. They hammered into place bright new pieces of wood and shaped fields of carpeting with razor blade knives. They replaced the broken windows and painted the entire structure gray with white trim. Dad insisted on yellow doors for accent. The house began to look beautiful, as though it'd never been haunted at all.

My family, however, was no match for the farm. We were too small and loosely bound together to inhabit such an expansive property. We may as well have been vagabonds who'd accidentally happened upon it, dragging in our meager belongings, playing house among the ringing echoes of families much grander and heartier. We moved furniture and toys and clothing into the most desirable rooms and left the others empty. It was easy to disappear among the vacant caverns, to get yourself into trouble without anyone knowing.

Nick and I were fascinated with the attic, painted white and honeycombed with closets. We designated one particular closet the Store because it had a Dutch door that split into two parts, a top and bottom. Nick was usually the storekeeper and I the skeptical customer. One afternoon, we were dickering over the cost of grass and rocks when I caught a glimpse through the nearby window of a white glob stuck out on the roof. I walked to the window, which was smudged and dirty and had a long crack at eye height. I pointed for my brother to look. The two of us peered at the mysterious white clump growing out of the roof like a mushroom. We jimmied open the window with a butter knife and crawled out, one after the other.

There was no wind, but I stuck close to the wall of the house, never before having been so high off the ground. After a little testing, I discovered that my feet clung to the warm shingles. I moved toward the white clump. My brother was already there, down on his haunches like a farmer examining corn sprouts, staring at it. He grabbed the clump rather suddenly with both hands and began pulling.

"It's underwear!" Nick declared. He stretched them out with some difficulty -- they were dried stiff -- and held them against his scrawny body approximately where a pair of underwear would go. They hung past his knees.

I moved in for closer inspection. The clump turned out to be a pair of extra-large men's Fruit of the Loom briefs. Streaked brown from rain and infested with seeds, they'd obviously been lying on the roof for some time.

"Yuck, put those down."

"I'm gonna wear 'em." Nick lowered the white-and-brown underwear as if to slip a leg into a leg hole.

"Don't you -- " I snatched them from my brother and flung them over the edge.

I could see everything from the roof: the expanse of our patchy yard and the gravel driveway where my red tricycle lay on its side; the dented plastic swimming pool in which I kept the turtle Dad had picked off the asphalt; the clothesline, where towels hung like dead geese; the buildings and broken-down structures that surrounded our house -- three decaying garages and an empty, rusting water tower. Beyond that, stretches of a two-lane road peeked from between dense trees. The blue water of Lake Sylvia glistened. I saw land crisscrossed with barbed-wire fence. I knew that through the pastures were trails, some obvious and some hidden, leading to milkweeds and raspberries and the foundation of a burned building. The foundation reeked of charred garbage, but if you plugged your nose and scavenged hard enough, you could find treasure. I'd once unearthed a tiny, golden ballerina.

A group of brown and white cows luxuriated under a tree in the pasture nearest the house. I bellowed "Mooooo," trying to get them to look up, but they just lay there staring into the heat and flicking flies with their tails. Grandma Margaret had delivered the cows one afternoon in a big red trailer. They'd clomped down the metal ramp and stepped nervously onto foreign grass. Grandma had stood there smiling, hand on hip, counting them as they exited while Mom poured feed and filled the water trough. The cattle were restless and frequently broke loose and ran through the yard. Usually, they made it as far as the road, then lost steam and stood around. Somebody always came to the house when the cows were blocking traffic or eating someone's garden, and Mom would round up whatever help there was and herd them back to the barn. Grandma thought a bull might impose order upon the unruly group, so she'd brought out a brute named Oscar. The cows assimilated Oscar right off, though, and the number of escapes increased.

Standing on the roof, I noticed that the sky was flawlessly, abysmally blue and fixed with white puffy clouds that looked like the clouds on the cover of a church bulletin I'd seen. A woman who lived down the road had taken me to a service. During the long sermon, the minister talked pleasantly about angels. They sounded wonderful, better than people; they had harps and wings and didn't have to worry. I asked the woman about them on the way back to the farm. She explained that people became angels when they ascended to heaven, which was a perfect place in the sky. Becoming an angel seemed to me the best anyone could hope for, floating up into the endless blue. I asked Nick if he'd like to become an angel. He said yes.

We were holding hands at the roof's edge when Mom came around the corner with a basket of laundry. She looked like a stick woman.

"Mom," I yelled, "we're going to be angels!"

My mother glanced around and up and, upon seeing us, dropped the basket of laundry. She stuck out one hand as if stopping traffic and ran off sideways. "You kids stay right there!" she yelled. "Don't move!" She disappeared into the house. Next thing I knew, Mom's face was in the open window. Then came her arms, then her whole body. She grabbed me and Nick by the backs of our shirts and dragged us into the attic. "Are you trying to give me a heart attack? You are not to play up here anymore!" Her face was red. I saw that she was shaking.

We sat at the bottom of the oak staircase, chins in hands, as Mom marched up with a screwdriver and removed the brown enamel doorknobs from both doors that led to the attic. She marched back down, past us, with the knobs in the pocket of her shorts. They clacked together as she hurried silently outside.

Dad wasn't home that day. For reasons yet unclear to me, he came home less and less often as the months passed. It got so his returns felt like visits, his departures shadows that kept his place at the kitchen table. By winter, he'd all but abandoned us. I remember seeing my father only twice after the snow covered the ground. One time, he and Uncle Tom showed u...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 074321708X
• ISBN 13: 9780743217088
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224