Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life

Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life

Major motion picture Flag Day starring Sean Penn and his daughter Dylan Penn is based on this father-daughter story of a charming criminal—told by the daughter who loved him. One frosty winter morning in 1995, Jennifer Vogel opened the newspaper and read that her father had gone on the run. John Vogel, fifty-two, had been arrested for single-handedly counterfeiting nearly $20 million in U.S. currency—the fourth-largest sum ever seized by federal agents—and then released pending trial. Though Jennifer hadn't spoken to her father in more than four years, the police suspected he might turn up at her Minneapolis apartment. She examined the shadows outside her building, thought she spotted him at the grocery store and the bus stop. He had simply vanished. Framed around the six months her father eluded authorities, Jennifer's memoir documents the police chase—stakeouts, lie detector tests, even a segment on Unsolved Mysteries —and vividly chronicles her tumultuous childhood while examining her father's legacy. A lifelong criminal who robbed banks, burned down buildings, scammed investors, and even plotted murder, John Vogel was also a hapless dreamer who wrote a novel, baked lemon meringue pies, and took his ten-year-old daughter to see Rocky in an empty theater on Christmas Eve. When it came time to pass his counterfeit bills, he spent them at Wal-Mart for political reasons. Culling from memories, photo albums, public documents, and interviews with the handful of people who knew the real John Vogel, this is an intimate and intensely moving psychological portrait of a charismatic, larger-than-life figure—as told by the daughter who nearly followed in his footsteps. "Vogel evokes the dual nature of our intimate lives as well as the struggle between the straight and the criminal....[R]efreshingly well-paced." -- San Francisco Chronicle "[Vogel's] story, a dark eulogy, fascinates." -- Newsday "Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking." -- Time Out New York "Vogel's masterful account...[w]ill haunt readers for days." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Original, tragic, and heartbreaking in the way only true life can be." -- Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Vogel worked as a writer and reporter in Minneapolis for seven years before moving to Seattle, where she was editor in chief of The Stranger . She moved back to Minneapolis in 2003. Chapter 3: We moved to a remote farmhouse I have no recollection of Dad from before I was three. The years prior are shadows cast by scraps of paper, secondhand stories, photographs. I have a picture of him in a pressed suit and tie, riling the fat, tiger-striped cat splayed on my lap; we're both laughing. I can't tell whether it's day or night. I can't tell whether he's getting up from the sofa or sitting down. And no matter how hard I look, I can't decipher whether our interaction is genuine or staged for the camera. There are stories to suggest that he doted on me during the earliest years of my life, that he thought me the most beautiful baby ever born, despite my Eisenhower-size forehead. I'm told he proudly wheeled me around the neighborhood in a stroller, stopping for anyone who wished to rub my chin and spit out a coo-chi-coo, and that he toted me to work with him at the lightbulb company where he was a door-to-door salesman. I'm told also that I adored the attention, so much that I insisted on being held very close to the chest. Any embrace deemed less than intimate drew long, piercing wails. Apparently, I wished to remain a baby forever. I refused to walk, though I could rattle off fairly complex sentences. I continued to suck from a bottle even after Nick, my junior by over a year, had moved on to a sippy cup. It was at three that, in blurs and flashes, I began recording events to memory. That was the year, 1970, that Dad moved me, Mom, Nick, and Liz, just an infant, from Minneapolis to an abandoned sheep farm near Annandale, Minnesota. The farmhouse had long been vacant and the kids from town considered it either too spooky to approach or the ideal partying spot, depending on their age. Leaves had piled like snow against the wide front steps and many of the windows were broken out. The house was three stories tall with a dormered attic at the top, but it had the feel of a much larger place. It stood imposing on a hill, surrounded by old oaks that had stopped growing just as they reached the roof's peak. Built along straight lines, the house was almost perfectly square if you took into account the double-decker wraparound porches. The porches were picketed with spindly pillars that grinned menacingly at anyone who approached the front door. In summer, the porches were encased in rusty screen, but in winter, you could walk right off the floorboards and land on your back in the yard. Inside were six bedrooms, a mammoth fireplace made of big round stones, and a grand oak staircase that started on the third level and wound down like a spine until it sp