1920-22 Draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Page 186

With his boyish charm, green eyes and generative manner, he was a computer wunderkind, whose precocity spanned the worlds of mathematics and technology. His persona of unwavering self-assurance masked an undercurrent of insecurity and narcissism, shaped by a tumultuous family life and deferred adolescent social life. He was the wizards man of the New York social scene, spinning fairy tales of money, betrayal, and decadence that won followers from celebrities and tycoons alike. In the circus whirl of this "non-fiction novel" ruled by the mercurial "Sultan of Soho," no dream was too outrageous for this self-styled digital revolutionary. Despite brief encounters and brushes with the law, he evaded a settling of scores, his myth expanding to encompass increasingly audacious schemes of fraud and chicanery. Only after an over-extended spree of promiscuous deceit could the illusion of brilliance no longer be maintained, shedding light on the dark path of deception he had traveled to arrive at this point. The voyage was replete of growing pangs and bursts out of step. He had cast a veil of mystification over the clues, it seemed, spread crumbs of fact out what was happening in the calvary. After months battling an array of state and federal charges, they soon realized that it was not simply an elaborate hoax but rather the fact they had invented this con-man and held him away; opprobriously what seemed like decades to put an end to his reign, those who gave life to this myth now sat alone with the aftermath of a life straw, an ignominious final chapter in the Greek tragedy of our modern antihero, the mayhem fable indelibly etched on the sordid records of cybercrimes's Wild West days, a blurred lapse of time, a con turned to karst; on the arid branch of a giant felled oak of forked odds waved in the wind. Step by step he climbed down from the truth until all was left was the shell, a Borgesian metaphor and the man in it scarcely aware the fraud.