============= NEIGHBORHOODS ============= Be the first in your mark's neighborhood to become a blockbuster. It's time to fuss up the mark's neighbors again. Find a real estate agency that deals mostly with blacks or Chicanos. Posing as the mark, call the agency and invite a salesperson out to talk about the sale of the mark's neighbor's house. Don't hoke up your role with a lot of brotherhood stuff -- play it straight. Now, if the mark is a good, solid white citizen living in a neighborhood of same-minded bigots, you have a wonderful deal going for you. The kicker is, you give the salesman the mark's name and the neighbor's address. Obviously, you must pick the most rednecked, bigoted neighbor to be the fall guy for the black or Chicano salesperson. By the time the "mistake" gets straightened out who's going to believe the mark? Not only have you alienated his neighbor, but you have taken a big chunk out of his credibility and popularity. Black is beautiful, especially when it's the color of the mark's reputation among his peers. This stunt works -- a person I know used it. He's a professional ball player who went into a furniture store with his wife to buy living-room-and-den suite of furniture. The clerk was bigoted and exceptionally nasty. My friend calmly asked to see the manager, who turned out to be worse than the clerk. The black customer suddenly flashed his wallet full of green money, and both white guys blanched. No further words were exchanged as the married couple left the store. Two days later my friend called a black real estate agency. You just read about what happened next. =========== NOTARY SEAL =========== Possession of or access to a notary seal is vital to a trickster. To the average layperson and common lawyer, the mere fact of a notary seal on a document is like God's own rubber stamp. Many times you will need to have a document notarized as part of the scams explained in this book. Having your own seal kit is the obvious answer. Some firms sell real ones -- "official" -- on the black market. Some sell replica kits, which are not official. Avoid these -- some are so crude that they wouldn't even fool a politician. I know one trickster who had a seal kit custom made -- by a con in a California prison print shop. The con had been an engraver in civilian life and really knew his work. You can buy a blank die kit openly from any shop stocking seals. Corporations use them all the time, which may give you a tip right there about the value of seals. You can have a custom seal made by many of these companies. However you obtain it, get a notary-seal kit. The uses of it pay off the first few times you scam someone. In addition to the notary seal, you should also get a couple of other official-looking dies. Commercially and openly, you can obtain blank dies with state logos, or you can get one that looks like a U.S. eagle. All sorts of possibilities exist. ============= OIL COMPANIES ============= The soaring oil prices and lack of leadership got so bad late in 1979 that all the dedicated and honest congresspersons got together to protest big oil. But who is afraid of seven people! You remember the Great Gasoline Ripoff of 1979, when the oil companies raped the driving public both coming and going? Petroleum magnate Jimmy Slushslinger related this story: A regular customer pulled up to a service station and said, "Fill 'er up." As he was paying the bill, he said, "Oh gosh, all I have is a fifty-dollar bill. Sorry." The gas jockey replied, "No problem -- you can pay me the rest next week." Starting rumors at the inappropriate time is the something else to do. For example, if your mark happens to be a gasoline station owned by a major company, and a lot of citizens are in a gas line waiting for their semi-annual pittance of overpriced petroleum, you could walk onto the scene wearing oil-smeared coveralls and stroll down the line -- just out of sight of the real station personnel. Tell parked motorists that all fuel is gone. If anyone gets belligerent, use the "I'm a minimum-wage employee, but the boss said if anyone got angry to send the bastard to him, because he'll sure cool him off in a hurry." Don't wait around for the cooling-off period. Cut out a stencil that has the word ARAMCO on it, then spray it with white paint under the word STOP on all the stop signs in your town or near a large oil-company office building or refinery. Aramco, in case you didn't know, is the major oil cartel that works with OPEC to rob American citizens. During the 1979 oil-company blitzkrieg against the American public, a guerrilla fighter hit back. He cut a sliding door in the floor of his van. He had a three-hundred-gallon tank installed in the van, along with a small electrically operated pump and a twenty-foot hose. He drove in only to company-owned gasoline stations, parked over the main tank caps, then used a wrench to open one. He dipped in his hose, turned on the quiet pump, and filled his tank with three-hundred gallons of free tigers. Bruno Tannetto dislikes oil companies. For years he played credit-card bingo with them, pirated cards, counterfeited cards, and ran up huge debts and skipped them -- all in the name of guerrilla warfare against the oil giants. He also saved all the postage-paid return envelopes they used to include with his bills. Since he rarely paid, he had quite a collection of envelopes, which is when he really got his rocks off. Bruno collected a bunch of heavy rocks and boxed them up in a sturdy carton, which he marked, "Caution -- Geological-Core Samples" and addressed to whatever oil company he had the envelopes for. Using the envelope as the "postage," he mailed this heavy box first class to the oil company, which had to spring for the huge postal charges. He did this many times to several of the giants. Giggi Hilliard tells about a chap who played nasty to get an oil-company operation into some difficulty. The agent provocateur's mode was forgery, and here's what he did. While on a routine visit to the oil company's corporate offices, he swiped an internal memo from a desk while the secretary was out of the room. He had his printer create some blank memo sheets using the company logo. Then, using a safe IBM typewriter and following the style of the company original, the trickster wrote a very sensitive memo from one oil-company manager to another. The memo discussed the need for deep cover to prevent leakage of sensitive financial contributions to state and national political officials. He then leaked the memo to the press. "The idea behind this," Hilliard explains, "is to cause the oil company, or whatever mark you choose, to have to explain and deny. Nobody believes them anyhow, so you give that big business another credibility black eye. Great, huh? You can use this same tactic with any corporation, utility, or business. The list of sensitive topics is limitless. But always use real officials' names on the forgeries." Consult OVERTHROW (see section on Ma Bell) to obtain the telephone-credit- card numbers for the major oil companies. Use this information to you best advantage. Beware: Oil companies hire experienced FBI, CIA, and drug-enforcement people for their security staffs. The security and intelligence operations of the oil industry are as nasty and effective as anything the feds could put together, and they are not hindered with what few laws do restrict the federal law-enforcement people. You have no civil or human rights when the oil-company security and intelligence people go after you. When dirty tricking the oil companies it is crucial that you practice WYA, which means Watch Your Ass! Recently, a lady trickster called the wife of an oil-company robber baron and pretended to be a lowly cleaning lady at corporate headquarters. Telling Mrs. Oil Executive that she, the cleaning lady, was a good Christian lady who believed in the God-given sanctity of family and marriage, our "cleaning lady" revealed that she often had to clean fresh semen stains from the couch in Mr. Executive's office after "private, after-hours conferences" between the boss and his young secretary. That's all, just a simple telephone call from a simple, honest, God-fearing lady to a stay-at-home wife who's probably already paranoid about her executive-husband's extracurricular sex life. If more right-minded citizens cared about the moral decline among executives in the oil industry... By now you surely owe that friendly and cooperative printer a few glasses of lemonade for being your co-cospirator in a number of scams. Here's one more. Many of your area's prominent citizens should recieve a fancy invitation to attend a special local social function hosted by your favorite oil corporation. The invitation should read something like this: "Admit bearer and guest for the special Hollywood entertainment and buffet on [day and date]. Informal dress from [time] to [time] at [location]." Try to pick a Saturday or Sunday and mail the invitation only a day or so prior to the nonevent. This won't give the doubters, cynics, press, or anyone else much time to ascertain the veracity of the invitation. In the summer of 1979, after reading newspaper stories about how the major oil companies were raking in untaxed windfall profits ranging from 35 to 130 percent, Melvin Lierd decided enough was enough. "I had no mere dirty tricks in mind; my whole idea was to rip those bastards as much as I could, the greedy, lying thieves," Melvin muttered mildly. His plan was simple. He obtained credit cards from as many companies as possible and charged as many products and services as possible only from company-owned stations. "I ran up bills as high and as fast as possible. I had absolutely no intention of paying," Melvin explained. Asked if he got the cards in his own name. Melvin responded, "Nah, I got them in a fake company name. I run up as much as I can, then pay them each $5 or so, claiming it is only a token payment because we're a new company, but I will make the rest soon, blah, blah, blah. "The greedy bastards are so anxious to make money they'll just add on those outrageous interest charges -- usury rates, they are -- and drool at how much they're screwing me on financing. "I'll string them along for a couple of months; then, if they get serious, I'll simply dissolve my company and let them eat their bills." Do lawsuits bother Melvin? He rates lawyers and judges slightly below clam feces on his scale of respect, and he says, "Let them sue the company. It has no assets. Plus, they gotta find me. Let me tell you something, old son -- you have to use the law. There is no justice, so you use the law to suit yourself. How do you suppose the big oil companies and the big lawyers and the big judges and all the other crooked snakes got so powerful -- by using the law!" At last report, Melvin Lierd was draining the oil giants at a rate far in excess of his own expectations. He has invited many of you to join him. Not content to live by the rule of "steal from them before they steal from you," Carl Bepp likes to add things to the oil-company stations' bulk tanks. He says that many of the additives described earlier in this book and elsewhere will work. But, he does have a sentimental favorite. "Once, some land rapists were drilling a noisy, sloppy gas well near the home of a friend of mine," he relates. "Since they were stealing from the land, I decided to steal some land from them. "One evening, when they were finished drilling for the day, I got some of that slimy, mucky gunk that the drillers had bailed out of the well. I took it to my most-hated oil company's very own station and dumped three two-gallon buckets of that gunk down into their bulk tanks." He said he has also used several gallons of refurbished solid wastes, known as sludge, as another additive for the oil-company products. ========== PARTY TIME ========== It's always fun to drop into a number of what I call olde phart bars -- the seedy downtown places where drunken men hang around from morning to evening, pouring down oceans of booze but never seeming to get falling-down drunk. The place stinks, and they stink. It's a great place to make up a guest list for your mark's party. Have a couple of beers and talk with the old duffers, unless everyone's uptight about a stranger being there. Usually, though, old pharts in bars are friendly. After a bit of social ice has been clinked, tell them about a keg party "you're" having. Obviously, you use the mark's name and give his address. Early Sunday afternoon is a good time to schedule the party. If you hit enough bars on Saturday and talk to enough old drunks, your mark should have a helluva wingding show up at his house Sunday afternoon, all hung over and roaring to get started again. Salud! Remember Donald Segretti, Richard Nixon's unofficial classless clown? Apparently, he could have easily written this book from memory. In any case, Segretti came up with a party "on behalf of" the late Hubert Humphrey, thought to be a threat to Nixon back in 1972. Segretti printed up thousands of invitations to a luncheon with Humphrey, set for 1 April in Milwaukee. He had the invitations distributed all over the black ghettos of that city. They read, "FREE! -- All you can eat -- lunch with beer, wine or soda. With Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Lorne Greene, Mrs. Martin Luther King." He gave a time and place, too. Of course, there was no lunch, no drinks, and no people there other than hundreds of hungry, thirsty, and highly irritated people. Should we say they were non-Humphrey voters? The next stunt demands that you or your personal agent arrive at a party thrown by the mark. Among your mark's other munchie dishes you should include a selection of candied laxatives. You can serve a commercial product, which is already adequately disguised as candy, or you can make your own by coating and/or coloring stronger constipation-relief medicines. Be creative with the disguise. The result of having people eat mittfuls of these bowel busters is breathtaking. Woolsey Newcomer and Enos Pomerene remember a party a number of years back in which a barrel of beer washed down the thirst of the folks gobbling bogus candy, which was really a powerful laxative. "The digestive hell began the morning after the party and lasted up to four days for some people," Woolsey recalled. "The guys had been stuffing those laxatives in their mouths and washing it all down with some draft beer. What a combination! We had some sick folks." Woolsey always wondered who had infiltrated the candy dish. A more subtle relation to the dish full of laxatives is to get a candy mold from a confectionery-supply house. These are usually in the form of little animals, Santas, etc. Molds for chocolate Easter bunnies are probably the most common example. You simply melt a little bit of real chocolate and a good bit of chocolate laxative together, fill the mold, and turn out some homemade candy with an explosive punch to it. Finally, if you know your mark is having a party any given day or night, that would be a splendid time to cause the utilities to be shut off or otherwise disrupted. Contemporary civilized socializers just can't handle disruption of modern conveniences like power and water, and they tend to remember the host/hostess (your mark) and identify him/her with the failure. It's a good, subtle, nasty trick. ======== PEN PALS ======== Men are fools when it comes to being conned by the game that proceded even prostitution. For example, if you could create a fictional lady, she could be as seductive as you wanted her to be. After all, to the mark she is an image brought on by the words you put down on paper or maybe use on the telephone. You want him to become her pen pal. As this scam progresses, you hope the emphasis will turn to personal matters. It's even more fun if the mark is married, because then he'll make a bigger ass of himself. Your fictional pen-pal lady must build a desire in the mark, by doing just what comes so naturally. The climax is an assignation setup in an exotic city as far away as reality will allow. Setting up this sting calls for teasing creativity and all sorts of facades like flowers, hints of gifts, Fredrick's of Hollywood apparel, bogus sexy Polaroids, etc. The next to last thing you will do in this stunt is discontinue your post-office box or whatever mail-drop address you were using for his return messages. The last thing you will do is mail, call, or telegraph this final message, "Meet you at the Sin City Hotel, suite 625, tonight at 10 P.M. I'll have the tub and me all warm and wet." Naturally, only one of you will arrive, and he'll hardly be in the mood to start without "you." ======== PERSONAL ======== You can easily turn your mark into a fabled thief, according to former private detective Trowridge Bannister. You need a full-face photo of your mark, plus a furtive longer shot of the type usually taken by surveillance cameras. Take these pictures and your WARNING copy to a trusted printer to get some posters made. Bannister explains: "You make up posters warning mechants and customers to be on the lookout for the mark. Display his name and picture on the poster in a prominent location, along with the big headlines about this person's being a thief, shoplifter, or pickpocket. A small amount of copy could explain some brief history of your mark's criminal career. Make it sound realistic -- don't get cute. Sign the thing by the local community's merchants association or something like that." Bannister says the final step is for you to take these posters to various stores and carefully post them around the stores. Avoid being seen. Doing this in a large shopping mall or in a busy downtown area ensures tha thousands of local citizens will get your message about the mark. You could use the same tactic and mark your mark as a sex offender, child molestor, or worse...a pornographer. You can write horrible "news" stories about your mark and have your printer set them in newspaper style, complete with column-length lines and, perhaps, border rules and datelines. You should make the dateline a town in which your mark fomerly lived. In these bogus news stories, she/he could be the subject of almost any sort of exercrable activity, such as child molesting, sexual perversion, child abuse, killing kittens, starving and beating puppies, poaching fawns, self abuse in public, and on and on. Naturally, the more authentic you make the story, the better the scam will go when you send Xerox copies to the mark's employer, family, and friends. Have your mail postmarked from the mark's former city and include a short note from "a friend who thinks you ought to know the truth." During World War II, the British SOE made use of a harassing substance that became known as "Who, Me?" It was later adopted by the American OSS. Essentially, it was a tube of obnoxious-smelling liquid that would be squirted onto an enemy's clothing or body during some time that would not cause alarm, such as while she or he was sleeping or bathing, or during the jostling of a crowd. Exposed to the air, the liquid immediately gave off the pungent odor of strong, fresh human feces. The product was manufactured by Federal Laboratories near Pittsburgh under an OSS contract. It proved to be quite satisfactory and, as it was packaged, a user could eject one cubic centimeter of Who, Me? as a thin liquid stream at distances of up to ten feet. There was little danger of self contamination if it was handled properly. According to OSS records, two different formulas were used -- a fecal odor for the European theater and a "skunky/body" odor for the Pacific theater. The research-backed reasoning is that because the Japanese often used human wastes as agricultural fertilizers, they would not be as sensitive to the odor as the Germans. Both forms were found to be "noticeably lasting for well over a day, despite frequent washings." You probably want to know if you can buy surplus Who, Me? from your local army-navy outlet. No, but you can produce it yourself using the following formula: 919 g. mineral white oil 20 g. skatol 20 g. n-butyric acid 20 g. n-valeric acid 20 g. n-caproic acid 1 g. amyl mercaptan That will produce a kilogram of the fecal-smelling liquid. You could alter the amounts to produce as much or as little as you think you'll need. If you prefer the skunky odor, here's the formula on a relative-percentage basis: 65 percent mineral white oil 10 percent butyric acid 10 percent mercaptan 15 percent alpha ionone Another great pretender to aroma of woodpussy is 3-methyl-1-butane-thiol. It is easily obtainable in chemical-supply stores and smells almost as terrible as the real thing. If you are assertive enough to get the chemicals and mix up of a batch of composition, you probably already have the applicator selected and don't need further help. If not, use this as a lesson in becoming more self-sufficient. Happy squirting. If you're too insecure to become a home chemist, you could obtain some formaldehyde, which is popularly known as embalming fluid. This stuff is bad news. It stinks and cna burn your skin. According to some folks, if enough of it gets into the air it will vaporize. If this takes place in a room, that room will be cleared of all breathing objects for several hours. Being a liquid, formaldehyde may be squirted from any appropriate applicator. It is fairly devastating stuff, but you can get it in small amounts if you are involved in biological or chemical experiments. Sometimes, a white lab coat makes a good cover when you go shopping in a drugstore or medical-supply house outside your neighborhood or town. A bit more personal, but nowhere near as dangerous, is to dip your fingers in warm water, come up behind you mark, and as you deliver an ear-shattering sneeze, fling the water on the mark's neck or back. This works well with backless dresses, at the pool, or almost anywhere, for that matter. Escape may be a vital concern here, depending on your mark's sense of humor. If your mark is one or both members of a young couple, Dana Bearpaw had a policy of calling the parents of one or both. Playing the role of an older, irate neighbor, he would shout, "Look, I don't care how much [description of carnal activity to be left up to the discretion of the caller] your son/daughter engages in with every male/female/whatever every damn night. Just keep them out of our backyard when they're doing it. If you're any kind of a parent you'll talk to them about all this." Parents usually take this sort of thing to heart...which causes all sorts of communications and credibility problems with their youngsters. If you want to endear your mark to his/her neighbors, go to the local library and consult the street-address or cross-reference city directory to learn who your mark's neighbors are and their phone numbers. If you can't find such a directory in a more rural area, just drive and list names from mailboxes. Later, call some selected neighbors using your mark's name and be sure you identify yourself as a close neighbor. Then, launch into something like, "I want to come over and talk to you about [Communism, homosexuality, child pornography, drug legalization, busing, whatever]. I want you to sign a petition demanding fair treatment under the law for [whatever topic you've chosen]." Be pushy and really work to make your mark's reputation a deserved one. Many times women are certain their men are out somewhere adding significantly to the statistical rate for sexual infidelity. When one lady had absolute proof of her man's bombastic bedding habits with other ladies, she devised a scheme that would guarantee his sticking around. On one rare night when he was in their bed, his mate waited until he had fallen into his usual deep sleep, then gently applied one of the new superglue products to both his penis and his leg and held the two together for the short bonding time so well advertised on television. No elephant, tractor, or pro footballer could break that bond. It took the delicate skill of the family physician to make the separation, a move matched that afternoon by the vendicted lady, who also cut out on her very sore ex-man. =========== PHOTOGRAPHY =========== Ask any competent photographer who also has some sense of humor, about composite photographs. They're easy to make -- the tabloids used them for years. It's a photo where someone has been added to a group, someone's face has been used on the body of another person, or an entirely new photograph is created simply by using composite parts. This is a very useful dirty trick and one that bears the stamp of approval of the CIA and the FBI. Unless you're competent in photography, including copying, darkroom technique, and minor retouching and airbrushing, or unless you have a very trusted friend who will help you, you'd best forget this one. However, done well, the uses of composites are limited only by your imagination. Here are some examples passed along by some of the sources of this book: o A "photo" showing the mark leaving a motel room with a person of the opposite sex. o A "photo" sent anonymously to the police showing the mark or the mark's vehicle engaged in some illegal activity -- like poaching, dealing drugs, or corrupting the morals of minors. Be sure the license number of the vehicle of visible. o A "photo" showing the mark's spouse nude and in a compromising pose with a companion -- human, animal, or whatever. o A "photo" showing the mark in a compromising situation with a person of the same sex could be sent to the mark's employer. This will surely mark your mark a gay who will live in infamy. Like other topical areas in this book, this one is strictly a technical suggestion. You will have to furnish the motive, rationale, and application for your own photographic nastiness. ======== POLITICS ======== As public jesters from Jerry Rubin to Jerry Ford to Hunter Thompson to Frank Rizzo to Nobody have discovered, any fool with twenty-five dollars and twenty-five signatures can run for public office. As Rubin asks, "What better way to make fun of the political system than to run for public office?" He's right. It gives you a legal platform to attack and ridicule the institutions and people who deserve such attention. If you have either sophisticated or totally rustic local media, and know how to manage and manipulate media people, you will get oodles of free publicity. That isn't very difficult, as many people demonstrate daily. Neil Mothra, who understands politicians, came up with this stunt. If your mark is a candidate or political VIP, if his coterie doesn't know you, and if it's a very hot, shirtsleeve day, you're all set. Slip into the meeting or reception area, walk briskly up to the mark, and offer politely, "May I take your coat, sir?" The impression is that you are going to hang it up for him. It will be best if you are dressed up or in some form of institutional-looking uniform. You simply take the coat away with you. If you also have the person's wallet, you must do what you think is best and most honest to all concerned. One of the grandest tricks of all time happened in 1960, when a beaming crook named Richard Nixon was posing in San Francisco's Chinatown with a group of Chinese youngsters holding a large banner spelling out a slogan in native characters. The photo ran locally and was picked up by both wire services and network television and disseminated to the entire nation. The very next day, a worried staffer told canidate Nixon the Chinese banner had said, "What about the Hughes Loan?" It was a reference to the Howard Hughes cash payoff to Nixon's brother Donald, in the form of a "loan." At the same time, Nixon found out that thousands of fortune cookies had been passed out at the same rally, each containing the same message, this time in English: "Ask him about the Hughes Loan." The antics of Donald Segretti, court jester to the Committee to ReElect the President (CREEP) in 1972, should fill your imagination with enough fertilizer to devise tactics of your own, should you wish to advise a political candidate. For example, during the Florida primary, one of Segretti's raiders paid a young lady twenty dollars to streak naked outside Ed Muskie's hotel room, shouting, "I love Ed Muskie!" and "Father my child, Ed!" During a Muskie picnic, a Segretti trooper had a chemist mix up a batch of butyl percaptan, which is, as you know, a grossly foul, stinking mess. The after-action report to Segretti noted that among the guests, "everybody thought the food was bad." If the bigshot candidate is having one of those hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraisers, your candidate should hold a ninety-nine-cent, blue-collar special -- chipped-ham or bologna-and-cheese sandwiches. Blue paper plates and cups would contrast nicely with the power establishment's fancy eatery. The theme could be "Why pay a hundred dollars for bologna from [other candidate]?" Here's some further nastiness at the expense of three marks -- a politician, the Postal Service, and the citizen you've chosen. You secure a franked postal envelope from your political mark. Carefully steam and remove the original mailing-address label. Using a rented or public IBM electric typewriter, carefully type in the name of your citizen mark on an IBM address label. Stick this label on the envelope. The rest of this stunt depends on how nasty you are and how much revenge you feel you must squeeze from the mark(s). Some general suggestions for the contents of this envelope include: Heavily anti-Semitic propaganda for a Jewish mark; fanatical antireligious material for a religious sort; very explicit pornography for a very straight person; homemade Polaroid photos featuring closeups of dead pet animals -- roadkills and mutilations -- for sensitive animal lovers; Polaroid closeups of genitalia, both human and animal, for very proper people; and on and on. Most marks will blame all this on the person whose return address is on the envelope -- the political candidate. Congressmen (there are rarely Congresswomen) have postal franking privileges that allow them a lot of free mail. A longtime politician baiter, Ted Shoemaker, decided to help a least-favored Congressman. Obtaining a franked envelope from his own mailbox, Shoemaker had a printer duplicate the postage-free envelope. By the way, this is a serious federal crime. He also prepared a mailing in which the ultraconservative congressman announced his backing for abortion and legalized marijuana, saying, "Times have changed, and we old farts have to change with them." Further, the letter had the politician saying, "You get drunk on booze -- why not let the kids get high on pot? You cheat on your spouse -- why not let the kids get a little free fun too?" As you might imagine, the constituency was terminal Bible Belt. Shoemaker addressed, stuffed, and mailed a thousand of these messages, including copies to many media outlets. It only took two days for the old pol to claim fraud, but by that time the bogus letter had received lots of media attention, and more than a few old voters had made up their minds their good old boy was actually guilty of the whole thing anyway. Shoemaker says, "He may have gotten some sympathetic backlash, though. This kind of thing can backfire, so be careful." Barclay Skinner, the activist who championed women for membership in the National Jaycees, developed a frothing dislike for an especially weasel-like political candidate. This man's major credentials were that he'd served as a legal advisor for the Warren Commission, which tells you a lot about his lack of honor, intelligence, and integrity. Skinner hired an actor who was a real lookalike for this politician and had the ringer travel the state giving speeches and press conferences in the real politician's name. The actor made all sorts of oddball, controversial, and asinine statements. He insulted local leaders, heroes, and institutions. He came off as a real sphincter. Because the real politician was not really well-known either personally or visually, the impersonation worked well for the planned week. The real candidate found out about this and tried to stop it, but he was a week too late. He did not do well on election day. By that time, Skinner and his actor friend had faded back into the shrouded mists of heroic anonymity. "Ah, politicians, God's unchosen people!" Skinner beamed. Downloaded From P-80 Systems 304-744-2253 Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253