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thanked her and hung up. I hadn’t considered that direction. The yearbook’s black-and-white photo wasn’t high quality enough
     to set Ward—or Lennox?—apart from the other awkward teenagers on the page. I flipped through the file quickly. The FBI field
     office in Milwaukee reported on state records that showed that a Marshall Stuart Lennox was born in Meriter Hospital, Madison,
     Wisconsin, on June 11, 1960. His parents were Arthur James Lennox and Gretchen Melanie Lennox, née Schilling. Lennox attended
     local public schools and dropped out during the eleventh grade. He was issued a U.S. passport on May 1, 1980, and left the
     U.S. on a student charter flight to Athens, Greece. Both his parents died in a car accident two years later. Lennox had no
     siblings or any other known family members. A more recent report indicated that the neighborhood he grew up in had changed—
     people hadmoved out and small businesses and garages had moved in. From those who’d stayed behind, very few people who were interviewed
     remembered the family.
    The first two aliases I’d randomly checked, Lennox and McClure, had some things in common: they both belonged to young men
     who grew up in the Midwest, had no known living relatives, and both had left the country in 1980.
    I flipped through the pages of the FBI report and its attachments, pulling out the file on the first-reported savings-bank-fraud
     case in South Dakota. There, the con man had presented himself as Harrington T. Whitney-Davis. The FBI report went over the
     history of Harrington T. Whitney-Davis: born in Fargo, North Dakota, on April 6, 1959. Like a junkie looking for a fix, I
     quickly ran my eyes over the interesting, though now less relevant, stuff. All I wanted to know at that moment was whether
     Harrington T. Whitney-Davis had gotten a passport and left the country.
    He hadn’t, or at least the FBI report said nothing about it. My hopes deflated. The strange thing was, the name Harrington
     T. Whitney-Davis stopped appearing on mailing lists, credit reports, and IRS records in 1981. I opened the next file folder.
    The con man in this one had appeared in a small town in Nebraska as Harold S. McClure. The FBI report gave his date of birth
     as March 1, 1958. I wasn’t interested in the rest of the bio. Not just yet. Right now, all I needed to know was if he had
     disappeared from the U.S. like the others. It took just one glance to find out. Yes, Harold S. McClure had applied for a passport
     in July, 1980, and left shortly thereafter for Canada through a land-border crossing. Soon, his name stopped appearing in
     public records, until it resurfaced years later in the U.S. for a few months.
    One thing was clear: we had ourselves a modus operandi. It was all too much to be a coincidence. Operating now with a solid
     lead, I decided to check the other eight names in the FBI file later. I had a direction. Three, maybe more, young American
     men in their early twenties left the United States in 1980, showing signs of life just long enough to carry out highly lucrativescams. Did Ward have anything to do with their disappearances? Did he know that they were absent from the U.S.? And if so,
     how? And then there was one more intriguing question. Without physical evidence, how did the FBI tie the eleven scams to Ward,
     despite the eleven different aliases? I couldn’t answer the first two questions, but I could take a stab at the third by asking
     the FBI itself.
    I called FBI Special Agent Kevin Lee, the last agent named in the topmost file. After the unavoidable cordialities, I asked
     him how they had connected Ward to all eleven scams.
    “Well, our guys down at Quantico are pretty good at this type of analysis,” he told me. “The physical descriptions of all
     the defendants made by all victims generally matched Ward’s. We’ve a similar MO, and based upon that and other evidence we
     concluded that all the cases were perpetrated by one