In 1993, Lawrence X. Cusack III forged 350 documents from, or relating to, John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States from 1961 to 1963. Some of the forged documents purportedly showed that Kennedy had dealings with organized crime (through Sam Giancana of the Chicago Outfit), tax evasion, bribery of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, payment of hush money to actress Marilyn Monroe for being Kennedy's lover, and a secret first marriage.
Cusack was the son of Lawrence X. Cusack Jr., the New York-based founder of the law firm Cusack & Stiles. Cusack Jr. was appointed as a guardian of the estate of Gladys Pearl Baker, Monroe's mother, in the 1970s. Cusack was employed in his father's firm from the late 1980s. He claimed that his father had advised Kennedy on numerous sensitive and personal matters and that he found the papers in the archives of Cusack & Stiles.
Cusack sold the papers through memorabilia dealers for between six and seven million dollars.[a] One of the collectors involved suggested showing them to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who was in the process of writing The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), a history of the Kennedy presidency and his assassination. Hersh began including information about the documents in his book and proposed a documentary to be released at the same time. It was during the checks of the documents by the NBC television network and then by ABC News in preparing the documentary that flaws in the forgeries led to their discovery. These included the use of a ZIP Code in a document purportedly signed in 1961 (the ZIP Code was introduced in 1963), and the use of a Prestige Pica font typeball that had not been invented at the time the document was signed. Other mistakes included the use of "lift-off" type to adjust a spelling error in Kennedy's name and where a written signature had removed a tiny part of the type underneath it, which had been made by using a modern plastic typewriter ribbon; these were not available in the early 1960s.
The forgeries were uncovered in mid-1997, while Hersh was still writing The Dark Side of Camelot, and he removed a chapter and some additional material that had been based on the Cusack documents. In September 1997, ABC confronted Cusack with the discovery of the fraud, but Cusack denied the accusations. Cusack was arrested and tried on thirteen charges of mail and wire fraud; he was found guilty on all charges and was sentenced in 1999 to nine years and seven months' imprisonment; he was also ordered to return the money to the people who had purchased the documents from him.
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