A Grifter Magician
Someone sent me a link to this article yesterday, and it sounds pretty similar to Andy, right down to the Belfast/IRA lies: A Con Man Reinvents Himself…As a Reality TV Magician.
The only element of the article that bothers me is that the author asks a couple of times whether it matters that Outhier still isn’t being completely honest, now that he seems to have turned his life around. He notes that only some aspects of Outhier’s story can be verified, that he knows Outhier is still lying about some of it, and that other aspects of the story are almost certainly embellished. I would say it matters a lot.
Unless this newfound honesty turns out to be cloaking a massive long-con fraud—and it’d take a lot of chutzpah to do that while regularly outing yourself as a former con artist on television and on stage, though certainly chutzpah is not in short supply among grifters—is it really so important that the stories he’s telling are entirely free of embroidery?
Yes. It is. First of all, Outhier has demonstrated a tremendous amount of chutzpah many times in the past. This is a man who, immediately after being detained by the Marines and convicted of desertion, went AWOL again in order to enroll in the US Naval Academy under the name John Valjean. That doesn’t necessarily mean that what he’s doing right now is just a long con, but it does suggest the possibility that he might go back to grifting in the future. Secondly, continuing to lie and embellish his life story makes his onstage “confessions” little better than those Andy has made in the past. It also negates much of what he’s supposedly telling kids about the importance of staying honest and making good life choices. Sure, it’s a good message, but how can they take it seriously when it comes from a person who isn’t walking the talk?
This is a man who’s been telling major lies about himself and his life at least since he was in high school. For someone like that to change in a real and permanent way, he needs to have people close to him who will immediately call him on his bullshit when he’s being dishonest. That’s not to say that he needs to be nagged and “punished” 24/7 for the rest of his life, but it’s important to recognize that continual lying is a difficult habit to break, and an easy one to fall into again. Given that he had no problem lying on national television, it seems that either his friends and loved ones aren’t holding him accountable, or they don’t know the truth, either.
That article was written almost three years ago. I don’t know what Outhier tells people about his past these days, but I know that a year ago, he lied again on national television when he appeared on Penn & Teller’s Fool Us. Outhier claimed that he’d run into Penn Jillette in Las Vegas in 2005, and that Penn’s kindness to him was his inspiration to turn himself in, after which he served five years in federal prison. It’s only heartwarming until you realize that in 2005, he was actually on the run from Wyoming police, who never found him. Two years later, he was posing as an Irish bartender in Wisconsin, using the identity of a man with Down Syndrome, in whose name he racked up $26,000 in debt. Far from turning himself in, Outhier was busted on December 26 of that year for identity theft in several states, having used other people’s credit to obtain well over $100,000 (not including the aforementioned $26K). And then he served that five-year federal sentence.
Outhier (who’s gone by Aiden Sinclair for the last several years) is now running a “theatrical seance” at a Colorado hotel. He’s started an Indiegogo campaign to move the act to the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. I will be very interested to see what he does with the money, given that Indiegogo is well known for doing very little to hold people accountable for delivering on promises to their contributors.
