GUEST COLUMNIST: My friend Steve Glass, the con artist

As a "professional phone psychic," he explained, his job had been to extend the $4-per-minute calls as long as humanly possible. He would make up phony games with tarot cards, predict his caller's luck in life based on the weather, and perform other hocus-pocus to keep the meter ticking. Once, he said, as a caller was about to hang up, he made a last-gasp attempt to keep her on the line. "Why don't you read from the phone book?" Steve asked, in desperation. "I can predict your future by the way you read the names," he said. The caller took the bait, reciting from the white pages for 20 minutes. This is the type of rich detail that reporters dream of peppering their stories with. Steve had a knack for getting these cute anecdotes, and his journalistic star rose quickly. At 25, he had lucrative freelance contracts with Rolling Stone, George, The New York Times Magazine and Harper's (his story about psychic networks appeared in Harper's February issue). His provocative reporting for The New Republic caught the attention of Washington's media elite. Steve's articles seemed like textbook examples of New Journalism -- the narrative-based, creative nonfiction writing pioneered in the 1960s by Tom Wolfe and others. But Steve's articles were more than just New Journalism: They weren't journalism at all. One week ago, he was fired from his job at The New Republic for fabricating events and even entire articles. Last summer, I worked with Steve at The New Republic. I don't know why he did what he did -- no rational person could expect to get away with such a charade forever. He has gone into hiding since his dismissal, which suggests he did not throw away his career deliberately. Whatever his motives, the incident troubles me. Learning that a friend and colleague is a con artist is a bit like learning that a trusted broker has been robbing you: You feel shocked, sad, angry and betrayed. Steve was the toast of the office, always charming colleagues with tales from his latest journalistic adventure. Ironically, he was also the magazine's chief fact checker. While fact-checking my writing, he once admonished me for inverting a quotation I had taken from a politician's speech. I had not changed the meaning of the speaker's words, but Steve insisted I quote the words in the order in which the speaker actually spoke them. At the time, I was impressed that Steve could be creative and also hold himself to such strict ethical standards. What a sucker I was. The story that tripped Steve up, "Hack Heaven," is about a 15-year-old computer hacker named Ian Restil. In Glass' account, published in the March 18 New Republic, Restil broke into the database of a software company named Junkt Micronics and posted the salaries of its executives on its Web site, along with pictures of naked women. Instead of prosecuting the young tyke, executives at Junkt Micronics hired him. None of a long list of people "interviewed" by Glass really exist. Unfortunately for Glass, a reporter at Forbes Digital Tool -- the Web site of Forbes magazine -- tried to follow up on the story. When he could not confirm any of the facts, he called The New Republic's editor, Charles Lane, and threatened to write a story exposing the fraud. Lane did his own investigation. Reaction was swift. Steve was fired, and all his freelance employers dropped their contracts with him. Harper's now questions the veracity of parts of Steve's phone-psychic story, and George has determined that Steve fooled their fact-checkers by fabricating the letterhead of a fictitious company. The New Republic has not completed its review of Steve's 41 articles for the magazine, but a preliminary report shows that at least three other stories were invented out of whole cloth, and many more appear to contain scenes and characters that were invented. But you don't need to confirm all the facts to smell something fishy. In hindsight, many of Steve's stories seem too good to be true -- and not just the recent ones. Why did Steve's colleagues, who pride themselves on their skepticism, fall for his pulp fiction? Trust, I imagine. Of course, there was no reason not to trust Steve. Journalists are wary of being spun by everyone except their fellow journalists. Fortunately, a journalistic con of this magnitude is an anomaly. But just because Steve's hoax is an aberration does not mean it is inconsequential. In the March 2, 1993, DP, Steve himself wrote, "The role of the DP is not to make allies and not to make enemies -- it is to report the truth." Journalists strive to tell the truth, and not just for lack of creative imagination or in order to hew to some shopworn ethical system. They seek the truth because it is what makes journalism distinct, what makes it not just a poor relative of fiction. But the biggest loser in this fiasco may be creative nonfiction -- the "New Journalism" which Steve mimicked. The world of journalism is full of solid, objective news reporting on the one hand and lazy puff profiles of celebrities on the other. But there is a middle ground, in which narrative serves to illustrate ideas and trends. The New Republic -- which loses money -- is one of the few publications dedicated to that middle way. If Steve's forgeries end up hobbling one of the last bastions of serious, creative journalism, I will never forgive him.

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