The above didn't come from me. But I didn't steal it, either.
Lest I be accused of the subject of Chapter 17, "Getting Away with Plagiarizing," I want to disclose that I pulled the entire passage off a Web site promoting "The Art of Cheating: A Nasty Little Book for Tricky Little Schemers and Their Hapless Victims" (Simon & Schuster, $14.95).
If the title sounds familiar, it's because police discovered the recently published paperback among the spoils of "Bonnie and Clyde." Edward Anderton and girlfriend Jocelyn Kirsch are accused of a $100,000 crime spree that involved stealing the identities of their Center City neighbors and using their credit-card information to finance an extravagant lifestyle that included exotic travel, high-end digs and the latest electronic equipment.
When police entered the couple's apartment on Chestnut Street near 18th, they found fake identification cards, equipment typically used to create such cards, keys to their neighbors' apartments, $18,000 cash and other evidence. And also this 311-page book.
Had the attractive lovebirds purchased it, thinking it was a guide to some of the nefarious crimes they've been accused of committing? Might it have been an early holiday gift from a friend suspicious of their free-spending lifestyle? Or was it a gift from one lover to another, a private joke indicative of the lavish lifestyle they were enjoying? When I reached out yesterday to the author, Jessica Dorfman Jones, she was puzzled, too.
"What is one supposed to say or feel after getting caught up in such an odd story," she said. "It's hardly a genuine textbook for anybody who wants to do evil."
Besides chapters on "Forging Handwriting," "Faking an Orgasm" and "Falsifying a Workmen's Comp Claim," the book includes real-life scammers such as Jayson Blair, the disgraced former New York Times reporter accused of plagiarism.
