Deep Cover Presents: The JFK Papers That Weren't

Pushkin.

Hey everybody, it's Jake. I got a story for you today that I originally did for the show This American Life. It's a story about a guy named John Resnikoff, who is this brilliant expert at authenticating historical artifacts. He's a collector, but he's also like a detective. It's his job to discern the real from the unreal. And this is a story about John meeting his match in a man who is every bit as equal in the realm of deception.

I hope you enjoy.

John Resnikoff buys and sells relics and documents. He's got a sprawling office in Westport, Connecticut that's floor-to-ceiling history. Old documents hanging everywhere, signed by Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or John Hancock. He's got Abraham Lincoln spectacles in a file cabinet. And in the middle of the room, as if some movers just dumped it there, something that looks like an old school desk.

That's Abraham Lincoln's desk. And why is it sitting here? Good question. I need to get it restored.

By the way, $ 325, 000 if you're interested. In a back room, there's Annie Oakley's gun leaning up against the shelf where Ernest Hemingway's typewriter sits, alongside Franklin Roosevelt's chess set. It's like what you'd see if the Smithsonian had it going out of business sale. The strangest thing that he bought and sold recently was President Obama's old Jeep. It helped that Obama had mentioned the car in a speech at Chrysler.

And I put a little clip of that on a YouTube video. I don't do my best Obama impersonation. My first car was a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I loved that car.

It sold for a lot, though John wouldn't say how much. When the guy who bought it had it repaired, John asked if he could keep the spare parts. He stores them in a closet in his office.

I'm not kidding, right? So I guess these are struts. Yeah. Those are Obama struts. And in the bottom here, I'll grab a spark plug. There. There's a spark plug from Obama's car. I actually just sold one of these for $ 500 because it was Obama's. Sucker, right?

$ 500 for a spark plug? But five minutes in John's office and you realize people will buy anything connected to historical figures, assuming it's real. This business, especially the rare document business, can be risky. There are so many fakes out there. So John is a fanatic about authenticity. He's studied fakes to see how they're made. He owns a huge collection of forgeries he bought from another collector, and he uses it as a reference. He can sometimes even identify a particular forger. And part of his office looks like a lab on CSI. He's got a special high-powered magnifier called a ProScope and a video spectral comparator, a $ 30, 000 machine used to analyze ink. Johns called as an expert witness on handwriting in all kinds of court cases.

He's a go-to guy in his field for spotting fake autographs.

At the risk of sounding egotistical, everybody in the business who wants an opinion on pretty much any presidential person, the first person they come to is me. And that's a That's a big change in the 13 years.

13 years ago. That's when John's career all but collapsed in a scandal so deep and far-reaching that people are still arguing about what exactly happened. Even John himself isn't entirely sure. He made mistakes he didn't know he could make. Mistakes he didn't even suspect. And for years, he didn't talk about it.

Until now.

It all started in 1992. when John got a call from a guy named Lawrence X. Cusack III.

Very nice, very friendly guy, and he had some beautiful stamps that he was selling that were his father's, or his father's collection. And I remember it included some very nice illustrated envelopes from the 19th century. And I bought them in several batches and became very friendly with him. He seemed to be very educated, extremely well-polished, very well-dressed.

The two of them hit it off. They started to hang out on the weekends. John was engaged at the time, and Cusack, everyone called him Lex, had a pretty young wife. They'd all have dinner at an Italian place. To John, Lex was a kind of worldly older brother. They started confiding in each other.

In the beginning, he unraveled his military career, which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever heard.

John had a particular reverence for soldiers. His own dad had served in the Pacific in World War II, and John still talks about the time when he was eight and his father took out his army uniform, covered in medals and ribbons, laid it out on the family's ping pong table. Ever since, John had been sort of obsessed with the military. He never joined himself, but he was eager to listen to someone like Lex, who told him he'd been in the Navy, flying F-16s during Vietnam. Lex was quiet about it. John had to pry the details out of him. that he'd been downed in Cambodia and survived by hiding in a swamp, breathing through a reed.

What really struck John, what blew him away, was when they visited the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Lex's sister-in-law had been admitted, so they went down for plebe weekend.

You know, very proud group of friends and family. And when Lex came out, he was in a completely white uniform, lieutenant commander's uniform, because he was a lieutenant commander, wearing the hat. wearing the Navy cross, wearing all the medals on his chest. And there's, you know, 3000 people there and they're all saluting him. And he's giving back. If you can imagine my hand going to my head, a perfect salute. And I'm like, wow, I'm with a war hero here right now. And this is my buddy.

A few months after they met, Lex got to talking about his father, also named Lawrence Cusack, who died in 1985. Cusack Sr. had been a distinguished lawyer. He'd worked for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York for many years, and he was personal counsel to John Cardinal O'Connor, the archbishop.

As Lex explained it, he had some pretty high-powered clients.

At one point, Lex revealed to me that his dad had worked for the Kennedys. And, you know, anytime I meet somebody who has any connection with anybody famous... I'm like, where are the papers? You know, the papers are valuable. Anything he signed would be valuable. And a conversation ensued on that. And he said he'd look.

A month or so later, Lex mentioned something else interesting.

Well, then Marilyn Monroe gets introduced into the equation. My father also worked for Marilyn Monroe.

And he.

Can you just describe how that all goes down?

Well, Marilyn Monroe had a New York residence too. And he said he did some legal work for her and indicated that there was a relationship that his father helped to hush.

When he tells you this, what's your reaction? That's pretty crazy news, right?

Yeah.

Naturally. Naturally.

And I think anybody would have this reaction. The dollar signs are coming in my eyes. I'm thinking, oh my God, this is a career maker for me. This is the treasure that I've been searching for my whole life.

And now are you starting to kind of tell him, can I see these papers?

I'm pushing him. I'm saying, go, go look for them. Where are they? Go get them. Go through the files. You don't know what you might be sitting on. You might be sitting on fortunes. Maybe it's hundreds of thousands. Maybe it's millions.

JFK and Marilyn Monroe. This was arguably the most storied love affair and cover-up of the 20th century. We've all heard the rumors about it for 50 years. But it's just that.

Rumors.

No one ever had any hard and fast proof. Until maybe now. He forced himself to be patient as Lex searched through his father's extensive and mysterious files. John can't quite remember how long he waited. maybe weeks or even months, until one day, Lex finally shows up at his office with a discovery in hand.

He brought in a briefcase into the office and I remember there was a document that I believe was on a sheet of stationery that was written in Kennedy's hand and it sure looked like.

Kennedy to me.

And it basically was written to Marilyn Monroe, and indicated some kind of payoff, he agreed to pay something or give her something or set up a trust, I think it was.

In other words, jackpot.

Agreement made this third day of March 1960 between John F. Kennedy residing at the Carlisle Hotel, New York, New York, Marilyn Monroe residing at 444 East 57th Street, New York, New York, witnesseth. Whereas a result of a relationship between Marilyn Monroe, herein referred to as MM, and John F. Kennedy, herein referred to as JFK, MM believes she has suffered irreparable harm to her well-being and to her professional life and career, and that such has been the cause of personal hardship and suffering which is not possible to measure.

MM shall never discuss nor reveal to any persons the specifics of the said relationship between her and JFK.

And there were other documents like this one. Lex kept finding them. Letters on Kennedy's U.S. Senate stationery, on White House stationery. There were index cards and personal notes. The documents prove JFK's relationship not just with Marilyn Monroe, but with other, sketchier characters as well.

This is a memorandum, and I'll read a little, shall I read some of it? Monroe will refrain from discussing her knowledge of any meetings or discussions of any kind which may have taken place at which were present JFK and Jeanne Conner. Who's Jeanne Conner? Sam Jeanne Conner.

The mob boss. Yes.

I mean, are you nervous holding these things in your hand for the first time when you're doing it?

I'm nervous on a number of levels. I was scared. I'm thinking that, you know, this is really dangerous stuff. How do I handle this? Is this too big for me? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do it right? And also what's going through my head is, oh my God, here it is, the Holy Grail. Oh my God, this is worth a lot of money.

In all, Lex unearthed more than 300 documents, a whole archive. And John, of course, considered that maybe, like the Holy Grail, it was too good to be true. So he set about authenticating the papers. He went to at least half a dozen experts in the field, not just handwriting experts, but people who specialize in Kennedy documents. But John didn't want the contents of the papers to get out. He wanted to protect their value. So he sent the experts only a few documents each, or sometimes portions of documents he'd Xeroxed. Excluding the juicy parts.

And each one, one by one, authenticated them and said they were real.

One of these experts was John's mentor and a giant in the field, Charles Hamilton.

And right away he looked at it. And this is, if you look at that book right there where it says The Robot, okay, that's all about John Kennedy's handwriting. So here's the guy that wrote the book. And he looked at it, maybe spent 10 minutes with it. This is authentic. and wrote a letter on it. And that gave me tremendous confidence.

John, isn't it possible that if you had come to him and said, look, the stuff that I'm giving you here is red hot. This, this confirms some stuff that the people don't want to believe in that. And some of it is, is, is, is kind of incredible that he might've said, all right, let me break out the magnifying glass and take a little bit of a closer look here. This is, this is huge when I'm about to do.

You know, that I won't concede, because I think the way in knowing how a handwriting expert looks at things, either it is or it isn't. So either it was his handwriting or it wasn't. What it said wasn't important.

So the papers were authenticated, and John laid the groundwork to sell them. He enlisted another dealer of historical papers and artifacts, a well-connected guy named Tom Cloud. to handle the actual sales. Lex would get most of the money. Tom and John would make up to 20%, which they would split evenly. They came up with a strategy. They'd quietly sell the documents to Tom Cloud's roster of wealthy clients, on the condition that they not disclose what they'd bought to anyone for a few years. Meanwhile, John and Tom would find someone to write a book about the archive, which would then lead to a movie deal. Once the book and movie were released, of course the value of the documents would likely skyrocket, and investors would be happy.

Everything started to fall into place. An acquaintance connected them with the perfect writer to publicize Lex's archive, Seymour Hirsch, the famous investigative journalist who'd won a Pulitzer for breaking the My Lai Massacre story. Hirsch, as it turns out, was already under contract to write a book about JFK's presidency called The Dark Side of Camelot. Cusack began sending copies of the documents in batches, and Hirsch started checking that the names and other details in the documents were consistent with his own research.

All of a sudden a document would come out and Hirsch would independently verify that there was a name of a doctor that injected Kennedy with painkillers for his back and that nobody knew this. And he found out the name of the doctor through somebody who he had interviewed. And it would be impossible for Lex to have produced that name or these names or the people who were co-signing the documents or advisors to Marilyn Monroe that were being verified along the way. There was more confidence. The confidence was building.

And this was something they could use to build investor confidence, too. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour Hersh is on board and has independently verified key parts of the archive. Hersh's book would come out in November of 1997. In addition, Hersh was working on a documentary about the archive in collaboration with ABC.

By the end of the summer of 1997, about 140 different investors had made purchases from Tom Cloud. The trust agreement between Kennedy and Monroe had a loan sold for $ 450, 000. At this point, the documents had already netted roughly $ 5 million. It was all going great. They were making a lot of money. John and his fiancée got married, Lex's wife was a bridesmaid, and John had a baby boy. Then, one day, John's in Cape Cod, and he gets a phone call.

August 22nd, 1997, sitting on the beach.

What happens.

Then?

I believe that's the day now. I could have it wrong. It's either August 22nd or August 27th. And I'd like to know what that date is so I could say that's the day that changed my life. That's the call I get from Cloud about Lex being sandbagged by Peter Jennings.

Cloud is Tom Cloud, Lex and John's business partner. ABC's Peter Jennings had interviewed Lex for a segment that would air on 2020.

Where did the collection come from? The answer lies with Mr. Lex Cusack.

John and Lex had been excited about the segment. They saw it as a kind of phase one of their media launch.

Were you aware at any time before your father died that he'd done any work for the Kennedy family? No.

What became clear very quickly was this wasn't just a puff piece hyping Hersh's book. It was an investigation. You might have heard something about it. It became huge news. What happened was that ABC had gotten wind of some suspicious inconsistencies in the archive.

What did you think?

For starters, one of the letters from Cusack Sr., which was dated 1961, had a zip code in the letterhead. Turns out, there were no zip codes in 1961. They weren't announced until 1962. So ABC hired an expert of its own, a former document examiner for the FBI. He did forensic analysis of the documents, scrutinizing the paper, the ink, the type. The examiner found that the typeface turned out to be something called Prestige Pica Selectric, which didn't exist until the early 1970s. And whoever typed these documents had also made corrections using a particular kind of liftoff correction tape.

And liftoff tape was not invented or placed onto the market until 1973, a full 10 years after President Kennedy was killed. So this is a blatant forgery by any standard.

Blatant forgery.

Jennings takes all this evidence and calmly and methodically presents it to Lex. Lex appears stunned, almost as if he can't process what Jennings is saying.

How do you explain that?

I really don't know.

I don't know.

This is a problem we grapple with often, is that are these the original documents? Are these copies that were made of the documents?

Are these....

Throughout the remainder of our interview, Mr. Cusack offered various explanations for the problems we showed him, but the one that he repeated most often was that the documents we had questioned might be later copies of originals.

What he meant by this was never clear.

Somebody might have put their signatures on those documents at a later time.

I'm not talking about the signatures. I'm not talking about the handwriting.

The documents themselves.

I'm talking about the typewriter technology.

It was not available at the time these documents were allegedly drawn.

There must be an explanation of why those documents exist, if in fact they were produced later.

Mr. Cusack, somebody has forged these documents.

I think quite a lot of the other experts will not agree.

I'm bound to ask you, Mr. Cusack. Did you forge these documents?

No, sir, I did not.

No, no, no.

By this time in the interview, there's a pregnant bead of sweat sliding its way down Lex's cheek. He looks desperate and trapped. If the camera panned out, you'd half expect to see him manacled to the chair. So this is what Tom Cloud tells John when he calls him on that day in August.

My heart dropped out of its spot in my body at that point, and it was, oh, no.

Here's the interesting thing. It's not, oh no, the papers are fake, or oh no, I've been duped by Lex. It's, oh no, we've told the truth, and now we're in for it because we've antagonized the Kennedys. the one family in America you do not antagonize, plus the mob and God knows who else.

This must be this very powerful family trying to prevent this information from coming out, and that there's no way that these are fake, that these are real, that Lex is a war hero, he He's an honest and good man, and this can't be, and this is a big conspiracy, and we need to get to the bottom of it.

The notion of a conspiracy might sound a bit far-fetched and frightening, but it also offered some assurances. At least in this scenario, the world as John knew it remained constant. The papers were still real. The choices he'd made were the right ones. And Lex Cusack was still his dear and trusted friend.

That's what I'm thinking. And, you know. What seems like minutes afterwards, it's a grand jury investigation.

John hired a criminal defense lawyer, and the two of them made a trip down to the U.S. District Attorney's office in Manhattan. They met with the prosecutor, Paul Engelmeyer. And even here, John didn't feel safe.

We went in. We went in for the proper session. I told my side of the story. I remember walking into Engelmeyer's office, and on his wall was a picture of of Kennedy on the beach in Hyannis. And that just in my mind was, oh my God, this is a setup. I'm going down because I've revealed the biggest secret of the last 40 years and they don't want the secret to come out. So somehow they're going to make it look like I'm a bad guy. He's working for them. You know, this is all conspiracy and all these bells are going off in.

My head During this period, things got pretty dark for John. He began taking medication to reduce his anxiety and to prevent panic attacks. Still, he was paranoid. He became convinced that something terrible would happen to him, that his car would blow up when he turned the key. And all this time, John is rehashing the Peter Jennings interview and the inconsistencies with the documents, the typeface and the zip code, the liftoff correction tape. What explained all that? First chance he got, he confronted Lexx.

We met somewhere, I don't remember where, and he was holding his hands in his head. He didn't know what to do. He'll just give all the money back. Of course, he had spent most of the money then. Where did these come from if they're not real? How could they be? I did it, he said.

I did it.

It just got carried away.

He's confessing to you, I forged these documents.

He didn't say exactly that. He said, I did it. I'm the one who did it. And I said, what are you talking about? How could this be? How could this possibly be? What are you telling me? And then he recanted. He said, no, you know, I just said that because it was a moment. I didn't really do it. I don't know what this could be. Maybe it's a conspiracy.

I don't know what he was saying.

I don't remember. But he was equivocating.

What especially bothered John was something else completely. During the 2020 segment, Peter Jennings had reported that ABC could find no evidence that Lex was a retired naval officer.

I mean, that was a big thing for me, the military thing. You know, if he was this military hero, these can't, you know, my, in my mind, these can't possibly be non-authentic.

When you confront him with this, what does he say?

Um, on one hand he says, well, it was just kind of a story that got carried away. On the other hand, he said, well, there are, there are things that I can't talk about. Like the indication to me was, okay, he was, you know, MI5 or that it really was real, but he was like some kind of covert agent and he couldn't talk about it. It seemed believable.

Before you scream to yourself, how could he be so stupid? Consider that John's realization about Lex meant dismantling everything he understood about himself. John's entire career was based on knowing the real thing when he saw it. He could judge the authenticity of stamps and signatures and documents. And most importantly, people, especially friends. In other words, John was no dupe.

No way.

And not only was there a lot of money on the table, these documents were going to make his career. So while it might sound crazy that he'd believe that Lex was MI5, it made even less sense that John himself was a sucker.

I would hang on anything that would be a thread that would be, yes, see, I was right. Here's the record of him being a covert agent for the CIA in military clothing, or whatever would happen that would make this whole thing, the whole nightmare, end.

John's lawyer told him that he had to clear his name, and the only way to do that was to secretly record Lex. He needed to get him on tape discussing their earlier conversation, where Lex confessed and then recanted, because that would show the prosecutor that John was innocent. After all, Lex wouldn't be confessing and making excuses if John were in on the scam. John at first refused, arguing that Lex hadn't done anything wrong. His lawyer insisted.

He said, well, you don't have to do it if you don't want to. But tomorrow, if you don't do it, it's fine, but you need to get a new lawyer. I can't help but think that you know something. I can't help it.

I'm sorry.

So John did it. His lawyer hired a private detective to wire John's office with a hidden microphone. He and Lex talk for an hour. They're both tense and emotional. Lex leaps from topic to topic, offering one wild, half-baked explanation after another while John tries to pin him down.

The thing that I can't get out of my mind What's bothering me that I kicked out of my mind is when you came here, what was it, three days after that?

Yeah.

Okay, but you're sitting here.

I know.

Okay, you're sitting here and you're telling me that you're guilty, that you did everything, that everything's fake.

You gotta listen.

I'm listening to you.

I am. I'm listening to you. I'm telling you, I'm looking at my son's picture.

I know.

John, I know.

I'm looking at your son's picture.

I'm looking at you.

Okay, but you're... I mean, you don't realize how close I.

Feel to you.

Lex tells John he only confessed in order to protect his father's reputation. He didn't want anyone thinking his father had forged the documents, or that his father was somehow connected to the mob.

Though, maybe his.

Father did fake some papers for whatever reason.

People are going to.

Think my father's a mob lawyer. My brother's going to think he was a mob lawyer, and that he forged the stuff to protect himself. Lex seems genuinely confused.

The only thing Lex essentially admits lying about is his Navy career. He tells John it was more or less a joke that got out of hand until a number of people, including Lex's own wife, were under the impression that he actually fought in Vietnam. The thing barely hangs together. As for the crisp white lieutenant commander's uniform that John had seen him wearing that day in Annapolis.

Lex didn't want to comment for this story, so all I have to go on from him is the TV footage and the wire recording. There, Lex mostly comes across as pathetic. He doesn't show any of the smooth cunning of the Hollywood con man. Instead, his genius, if that's what it is, is his lack of finesse. If he's conning John, then his disguise is the pitiable friend who got in over his head, and he plays it very, very well. So well that after the secretly recorded meeting, John says he didn't feel relieved or justified. He felt awful.

There was an Irish pub like on the street over from my office, and I remember drinking three Guinnesses in like 10 minutes, and I'm not a drinker. I was like, wow, what did I just do?

Is there part of you still believing that This guy could be a decorated Navy officer who has the real documents and I'm betraying him.

I think there's still like, I don't know why, but like a one one hundredth of one percent part of me that still thinks that.

John says the real aha moment for him finally came when an FBI agent told him point blank that Lex had never served in the military. In other words, Lex's best move, whether by luck or design, was that he hit John's Achilles heel. He passed himself off as a decorated soldier. So Lex's deepest betrayal wasn't the JFK papers.

It was claiming he breathed through a reed in Cambodia. Lex was convicted in federal court of mail and wire fraud and served nearly 10 years in prison. He got out about three years ago. Seymour Hersh's reputation took a temporary hit, especially after he testified at trial that he'd quote-unquote misstated things regarding his independent verifications. John was cleared of any wrongdoing, but his life didn't just bounce right back.

His business suffered. He had to resign as president of the Professional Autograph Dealers Association. an organization he founded. His marriage fell apart. The JFK papers nearly ruined him. And it's not surprising. He's had a hard time trusting people since.

You know, I definitely have trust issues in my life. There's no question that I have trust issues because of this. I uh, is Lex my friend, uh, because I'm such a great guy or is it because I was a foil in his, in his plot to take over the world? Uh, or, and then I'm thinking, you know, is this person really my friend? Who's really my, who really is my friend, another person in my life. And I do do that.

And I feel terrible and guilty about when I'm distrustful, and I shouldn't be. But it's there, and I have to temper that.

All the time.

But in a weird way, he's thankful too. His paranoia made him better at what he does. It was after the Cusack fiasco that he threw himself into studying fakes and forgeries and made himself so good at spotting them. When I showed John a copy of one of the Cusack documents, he started to analyze the handwriting all over again.

It was a document from an archive that had fooled so many experts, and that some people in the field, even to this day, argue is real. He turned the paper upside down, just as his mentor Charles Hamilton taught him to do. So you aren't distracted by the actual letters, you just see the lines, the curves, and the dots.

Now the J's were always different, but look at the jack, for instance, upside down. And just look at the way the spacing and how it's inconsistent and bouncy. It's very, very good. The forgery is very, very good. I have no idea how they were made.

No idea.

That to me is the big mystery, you know, in my life. I don't know how he did it. I don't know how they were so good. I have no idea. Or if he did it. I don't even know that he did it. Maybe somebody else did it and he pushed them forward. How hard is it to pull off?

How hard is it to pull off what Lex pulled off?

I don't think anybody has ever done that in the history of our field as successfully as he did for the amount of time that he did. And how was he able to do that? Sheer genius, I'd say. Sheer genius.

And perhaps Lex was a mastermind. But then again, we all want to think we can only be fooled by genius.

Deep Cover Presents: The JFK Papers That Weren't

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