Free The Chameleon Conspiracy by Haggai Carmon

brought into the U.S. with him. That is, if all these cases are connected.”
    “Yes, but…” said Bob continuing to be the devil’s advocate. “To begin with, why does he need passports to steal identities?
     He just needs the bio details, Social Security numbers, and such.”
    I had an answer to that. “Because a U.S. passport is the best way of getting a copy of your old Social Security card, a driver’s
     license, and many other personal documents. Once you have these documents, the passport becomes secondary in the identity-theft
     scheme, other than for leaving the U.S. with your loot.”
    Bob wasn’t deterred. “Fine, but how do we know that Ward didn’t have yet another passport with an alias that he used to exit
     the U.S.? It’s not a big deal. If he managed to get eleven passports with aliases, he could get twelve.”
    “I still think there’s some organization behind it,” I said, but with less conviction.
    After we got off the phone, I decided to explore that direction.Was Ward the only solid name I had to look at? What about the others? I decided to stick with him, because chronologically
     he was the first to disappear. But the age issue made me more confident in my earlier theory that we had ourselves a case
     of identity thefts. All victims described the perpetrators as men in their late twenties or early thirties, but the young
     men whose passports were used were in their early twenties at the time the scams began. Although a victim doesn’t usually
     ask a purported business associate for a passport, in retrospect the discrepancy was too obvious to ignore.
    I turned to my desktop. I wanted to see if there were any news items about Ward. Maybe he’d sold photographs to some magazine
     in India, or had been arrested after a bar brawl in Indonesia. With more than ten thousand daily newspapers published around
     the world, maybe he had done something nice, or not so nice, that had been reported. Ward had disappeared in the early 1980s,
     before most international news was routinely computerized, and had then resurfaced irregularly starting in the mid-1980s.
     Still, I might get lucky. Maybe Ward’s irregular resurfacing was intended to establish a “clean” alias between scams? None
     of the other aliases turned up again for more than the one scam.
    I first ran a Google search. Nothing relevant. Then I tried the Dogpile search engine. Still nothing. Next I tried legal retrieving
     services and limited the search to newspapers and magazines. After scrolling down over hundreds of items, and just as I was
     about to give up, I got a hit on
Albert C. Ward III
. It was in a newsletter issued by the Jewish community in Sydney, Australia.
    A bigamous wedding was averted at the last moment last week, before Rabbi Applebaum was scheduled to celebrate the marriage
     of Mr. Herbert Goldman from the United States to Miss Sheila Levi, a member of our community. Just hours before the ceremony
     was to be held at our synagogue, Rabbi Applebaum received a facsimilefrom Loretta Otis, of Lexington, Kentucky, claiming that Mr. Herbert Goldman was still married to her. In the fax Ms. Otis
     said she had no objection to Mr. Goldman’s marriage, provided that he divorces her first and that they settle “some outstanding
     financial matters.” Rabbi Applebaum called Ms. Otis, who told him that Herbert Goldman’s real name is Albert C. Ward III,
     and he is using the name of Herbert Goldman because he acquired a U.S. passport in that name while living in the U.S. Ms.
     Otis told Rabbi Applebaum that Goldman informed her that he was traveling to Australia for business. According to Ms. Otis,
     Goldman rang her weekly from Australia, but recently told her, “I’m marrying an Australian woman, Sheila Levi, because that
     way I can get permanent residence in Australia. You shouldn’t worry, because it will only be a sham marriage, and I will always
     love you my sweet Loretta, my only true wife.” When it dawned