Mark was tweaking when he forged his own death certificate.
May 23, 2019 8:35 AM   Subscribe

He said he'd been diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s, at age 30, and had never expected to reach his 40s....To finance the life he kept thinking would end at any moment, he had committed increasingly creative and reckless varieties of fraud. He told me in our first conversations that he had faked his own death several times; I couldn’t quite keep track of how many. He had stolen his brother’s identity and faked his death, too, despite the fact that his brother was already dead.
posted by If only I had a penguin... (7 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
I read this yesterday, and was struck by the memory of all the insurance-buying company ads you'd see in magazines like the Advocate, trying to profit off of the imminent deaths of many people, some of whom I knew. I sort of understand the impetus to just give it all up and go do whatever (I had a bit of a wilding time after I was diagnosed), but the events that unfolded in this article take it to an almost cinematic extreme.
posted by xingcat at 9:51 AM on May 23, 2019 [8 favorites]


I kind of hate these kinds of profiles because it's unclear to me how much is true and how much was fabricated as part of Mark's fairy tale. I know a lot of people are able to enjoy the story as a story without worrying about veracity but I'm not.
posted by muddgirl at 9:58 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


I really dislike the casual conflation of taking on your dead brother's identity in a very literal sense with dissociative identity disorder.
posted by terretu at 10:06 AM on May 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


the memory of all the insurance-buying company ads you'd see in magazines like the Advocate, trying to profit off of the imminent deaths of many people

If it makes you feel any better, a number of them undoubtedly got burned when the retroviral cocktail was introduced.

(Also, that stampede led to the regulation of viatical settlements in many states--better late than never...)
posted by praemunire at 10:19 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


Having studied social work, and being familiar with fugue -like disorders, Mark almost certainly did NOT suffer from any such condition. One of the hallmarks of these types of conditions is a lack of awareness about the situation. Also, they don't tend to switch back and forth repeatedly; that's just not how they manifest.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 10:20 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


Like, I'm sure that fax from Whoopie is forged as part of some kind of movie investment scheme, right? What about any medical records that he submitted for his insurance schemes/showed to the reporter to justify his actions as an AIDS survivor - how many of them could have been forged? Once someone is at the point of forging official government documents to commit credit card fraud I can't trust much of what they say.
posted by muddgirl at 12:19 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


I did not enjoy reading that article.

As with xingcat , I remember the ads from several different companies offering to buy out your life insurance policies. In my head, they raised all kinds of red flags. This was a time before the SSA had put HIV/AIDS as a disability, so money was really, really short for many people, me included. To me, selling your life insurance was on par with selling your blood - a very desperate measure. The chunk of money you had to pay for that "service" was huge, and there were hidden fees etc. In other words, the money didn't last long (I believe a bottle of AZT cost like $600).

I'm still alive, in rude good health, never had to sell my policies, never had to commit a fraud thanks to my Sainted Mom and Dad. But I've had fraud committed against me three years ago: my brotherinlaw took out 4 credit cards in my name (he was asked why he did it: "he's going to die anyway". Nice. I'll never get out of debt. And out of all the people I knew in the mid 80's who got sick, I'm the only one left. That's hard to live with.
posted by james33 at 7:39 AM on May 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


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