Episode Details

In 1970 novelist Clifford Irving decided to write the autobiography of Howard Hughes, the most reclusive billionaire on Earth, without ever speaking to him. His bet was that Hughes hated publicity more than he would hate a fake book. This episode traces how a Cornell graduate and published novelist living on Ibiza befriended art forger Elmyr de Hory, wrote the biography Fake about him, and absorbed a master class in how easily experts can be fooled before turning that lesson on McGraw-Hill and Life magazine.

We break down the mechanics of the con: Richard Suskind building an accurate factual skeleton from news archives, Irving practicing Hughes's handwriting from letters reproduced in Newsweek, a forged signature on a publishing contract worth $765,000, and checks made out to H.R. Hughes deposited by Irving's wife Edith in a Swiss account under the name Helga R. Hughes. We explain why handwriting experts validated the forgery, how Irving passed a polygraph, why the sunk cost fallacy kept the publisher doubling down, and how it all collapsed on January 7, 1972, when Hughes broke his silence in a phone conference with seven journalists. The episode ends with prison, the book The Hoax, the 2006 film Irving called a hoax about a hoax, and the University of Texas archive that preserved his papers.

• How friendship with art forger Elmyr de Hory gave Irving the psychological blueprint for the con
• Why Howard Hughes's silence made him the perfect target
• The Helga R. Hughes bank account and the linguistic loophole that moved the money
• How the forgeries beat Osborn Associates and a polygraph test
• Hughes's televised phone call, the confession, and Irving's lifelong commodification of his own fraud