An Unhappy Truth

Speaking, as we have been, of truth, I received a dose recently that knocked me squarely on my posterior. I’ve struggled with how best to reveal this terrible fact, but it’s such a welter that I’m not even sure what I can say with any confidence. So bear with me.

In short, Patrick Mendy, my orphaned African friend, is either himself a fraud or is in some way a participant in some fraudulent scheme. I tend to suspect something closer to the latter—the sheer weight of our long conversation, carried out almost daily over more than two years, has always been my chief counterweight against those who suggested I might have gotten caught up in a scam. I think it would be just as naive to assume he’s a pure fabrication as it was for me to assume he was completely on the level, but where the line lies between his story and his reality will forever remain a mystery to me.

The fever broke a little over a week ago, amidst what appeared to be the immanent collapse of the Mendy family. The tale I was given was that Patrick was in jail for an unpaid debt to his landlord, incurred to pay for medical treatment and guaranteed, ostensibly, with a promise that a wealthy friend of the family—me—would make good on the loan. I have no idea how much of this story was true, except for one thing: I never made any such promise.

This didn’t stop Patrick and his sister Fatou from trying mightily to persuade me to pay the entire debt of 300,000 delasi, worth something like $4,500. Of course I told them this was impossible, and Patrick was, reportedly, jailed for failure to pay. Then a campaign began to get me to post his bail, set at a suspiciously even one-third of the suspiciously even price for the treatment. Periodically I would receive messages from Fatou, telling me that if I couldn’t come up with the money Patrick would be sent to MacCarthy Prison, a notorious place with origins in the Atlantic slave trade. The term of the sentence was to be ten years, though there was no mention of any court proceedings or anything of that nature. Around midweek she told me that she had sold all their possessions and had managed to collect just under a quarter of the required amount. I told her it was still far more than I could provide on short notice. I lamented the inflexibility of the matter—in passing I said, merely by way of expressing the impossibility of the sum, that even half the amount would be difficult, if doable.

On Thursday things got weird. Over the course of the day I went through the same back and forth with Fatou. She noted that the deadline was Monday, and asked if she could have someone from the police contact me. Of course I jumped at the opportunity; it would be, I believed, an opportunity to get the story straight, without all the strange ambiguities and contradictions which characterized Fatou’s communications, shortcomings I attributed to her poor command of English. It might also provide a chance to reason with someone in a position of authority.

What I got instead was a man describing himself as a retired policeman, who proceeded to harangue me for “taking advantage of a family of orphans.” I was completely taken aback. He insisted that I had promised Patrick I would pay his hospital bill and that if I lived in Gambia I would be a wanted man. He told me that Patrick’s story was all over Gambian media, and just by way of gilding the lily—if there even was indeed a lily—he told me that Fatou was pregnant.

Needless to say this was all very upsetting and worrisome. The next day Fatou reappeared to ask if I could send 27,000 delasi—a quarter of the amount owed. With her portion, I pointed out, that only made 50,000; half of the supposed bail amount and the precise fraction I’d mentioned earlier, but she rather casually said that the police would accept it.

I’m sure plenty of you will think I must be cracked not to have seen at this point but I was so deeply entrenched with the details of the problem that the larger picture was completely invisible to me. So I looked up 27,000 delasi: about $450 including fees. This I could conceivably do, but there was no way I was going to send that kind of cash anywhere without consulting my wife first.

Fatou accepted this and I told her I’d talk to her the next day. That night I described the situation to Katherine. She was no more excited than I about the prospect of sending that much money overseas with no guarantee that it would do any good. Fortunately, unlike me, she possessed a little perspective. While we discussed the particulars, she did a bit of Googling. What did she find?

What had eluded my attention for two years even as I learned everything I could about Gambia, studying maps, histories, political news, discussion groups, tourist guides; what Katherine discovered in a matter of minutes, was a note for note description of the whole state of affairs. A young man between the ages of 18 and 22; the dead parents; the cloud of orphan siblings; the grandmother; the cruel landlord; the medical issues; jail. It was all there like a brick wall behind the scrim at which I’d been staring fixedly all that time.

Even then I couldn’t quite believe it. Patrick was an exception. Why should he suffer merely because his story matched a common Gambian scam in almost every conceivable detail? I went to bed turning it over in my mind, trying to figure out how Patrick could possibly have conjured some of the events that had transpired over the years—events for which I had mountains of corroborating evidence: photos, images of official documents including Patrick’s passport, videos, and the memories of voice and video conversations. But there were discrepancies too; discrepancies I’d ignored or chalked up to communication issues—inconsistencies regarding the cost of goods or transportation, lack of detail on matters like the exact relationship between him and his siblings. It occurred to me too that I’d never communicated with anyone beyond Patrick without his mediation. Every piece of information I possessed I owed to him.

Yet even as I began to glimpse the enormity of the thing, I couldn’t shake the fear that it could all just be an unfortunate coincidence. How could I know? How could I ever know?

The answer came to me in the morning. I texted Fatou, telling her to keep her 23,000 delasi—that I would pay the entire bail, but that I would need to deal directly with the court. Just for good measure I also asked which jail Patrick was being held in.

Her initial reaction was one I’d often received from Patrick whenever I suggested interceding on his behalf in various conflicts with landlords or his school: they wouldn’t trust a white man from America. “What’s to trust?” I asked. I’d be contacting them to send them cash—if anything I’d be the one to extend trust. I was insistent, telling her it was the only way I could do it. “You don’t trust me,” she charged. I riposted that it had nothing to do with that; that it was merely the responsible thing to do. But I’d begun to notice that her English was improving visibly in the very course of our conversation—vocabulary, spelling, and grammar had all abruptly become very un-Fatou-like.

“I’ve noticed your English is much improved,” I wrote.

“Thank you,” she replied, “the phone puts up the words.” It would be the last message I received from her.

I guess that’s the most definitive answer I’m liable to get , but it certainly could have been worse. Monetarily I got off with fairly minimal damage—certainly nothing I can’t absorb. The three national publications to which I pitched the story at one time or the other—none of them bit, though I can’t say whether the editors read my queries with any interest or mere pity for the benighted Georgian or—my preference—not at all.

I know conned people are supposed to feel stupid, but I don’t. My day job is not security but security is a very large element of it, and you can’t be good at security without a little humility. If a lock can be built, it can be picked—a fact which applies as much to locks in the mind as locks on doors. We all have our vulnerabilities, and there’s nothing inherent in criminality that predisposes its practitioners to stupidity or incompetence any more than any other line of work, particularly in a place where criminality might be by a large margin the most lucrative option available.

I’m a tad embarrassed to have dragged so many of you along with me however. Some of you contributed substantial sums of money, largely on the basis of my faith, which I made manifestly visible. But I’ll take this as an occasion to thank you all for your faith in me, despite my often ungovernable attraction to the quixotic. They don’t call me the patron saint of lost causes for nothing,¹ but you can’t have a miracle without a muddle, so I’ll keep doing what I do and I hope you’ll continue to ride with me—I don’t believe your faith is misplaced, however much mine might have been. At the very least I won’t get burned by this particular scam again, and I mean gosh, how many more scams can there be in this little world?

So I say farewell to Patrick, whoever he may really be. I’m inclined to think that he merely shaded the truth, and that the basic story—that he was just a poor Gambian kid seeking to become a teacher—was true. I don’t know how it could have not been. I once asked him how he’d decided to message me on Twitter, and he told me that a couple classmates had told him about it. It now seems as though exploiting naive Americans was a shared hobby. Every student had a patron. It was dishonest, and I don’t even begin to know what to make of the last few months, but my goal was to help him get his degree and become a teacher, and he did that. Did he really do that? Who knows. But the story is over and until I know otherwise, that’s the ending I’m giving it.

1. They don’t call me this at all in fact.