Pamela Colloff is a staff writer at New York Times Magazine, a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast.”
For most of his adult life, Paul Skalnik, a former police officer, pretended to be someone he was not. He posed as a decorated fighter pilot who had been shot down and taken captive during the Vietnam War. He claimed to be a Texas oilman, a real estate developer, an undercover FBI agent, a criminal defense lawyer and, for more than a decade, a man dying of cancer. A warrant for his arrest issued in the mid-1980s described him as “a con man extraordinaire.”
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