Ferdinand Waldo Demara American scammer Date of Birth: 21.12.1921 Country: USA

1. Ferdinand Waldo Demara: The Great Impostor
2. Early Life and Education
3. Impersonating Professions
4. Later Life and Death

Ferdinand Waldo Demara: The Great Impostor

Ferdinand Waldo Demara, also known as The Great Impostor, successfully impersonated various professions throughout his career, including a monk, a surgeon, a prison warden, a ship's doctor, an engineer, a deputy sheriff, a licensed psychologist, a lawyer, a sanitation worker, a teacher, an editor, and even a scientist searching for a cure for cancer. His biography inspired the film "The Great Impostor" (1961) starring Tony Curtis. It seems that Demara never sought financial gain from his impersonations and only aimed to gain temporary respect. Many unsuspecting employers would have been fully satisfied with his work under different circumstances. It was said that Demara had a photographic memory and a remarkably high level of intelligence. He was able to memorize all the necessary information from textbooks and manuals. The success of his fraud was based on two rules: "let the accuser prove it" and "if you are in danger, attack".

Early Life and Education

Fred Demara was born on December 21, 1921, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. His father worked in movie theaters owned by his brother, and the family was well-off. They lived in a spacious house in a good neighborhood. Unfortunately, with the onset of the Great Depression, Fred's father lost all his money, and the family was forced to move to a poor neighborhood. This angered the young Fred, and at the age of 16, he ran away from home and spent several years with Cistercian monks in Rhode Island. In 1941, he enlisted in the army, borrowing his army friend's name, and went AWOL the following year.

Impersonating Professions

Demara attempted to live in two more monasteries but then decided to join the Navy. However, he failed to become an officer, which he desired greatly. As a result, Demara staged a suicide attempt and became Robert Linton French, a psychologist with a religious inclination. He taught psychology at a college in Pennsylvania, worked as a sanitation worker in Los Angeles, and taught again, this time at St. Martin's College in Washington. However, the FBI eventually caught up with Demara, and he served one and a half years in prison for desertion. After his release, he bought fake documents and studied law for a while at Northeastern University. He then returned to the monastery, this time in Maine. There, he met a young doctor, used his name, and began posing as a trauma surgeon. Demara even served on board a Canadian destroyer during the Korean War, performing successful surgeries and fighting infection with generous doses of penicillin. His most notable case during his surgical practice was when 16 wounded soldiers were brought onto the ship. He was the only "surgeon" on board, and many of the wounded required serious operations or faced death. Demara instructed the staff to prepare the wounded for surgery and took refuge in his cabin with a surgery textbook. Not a single patient died under Demara's care. Unfortunately, a newspaper article about the achievements of the young surgeon caught the attention of the real Dr. Joseph Cyr's mother, and the deception was exposed. When the news reached the ship, the captain initially refused to believe that his surgeon had no medical background. Eventually, the Royal Canadian Navy decided not to press charges against Demara, and he returned to the United States.

Later Life and Death

Demara told his biographer that his success was due to appearing in the right place at the right time, where there was no one else to fill the void. During his time as a monk, the 30-year-old Demara even managed to found a college, which exists to this day. However, over the past half-century, the college has changed its location and name and has become Walsh University in Ohio. After this episode, Demara sold his story to "Life" magazine, becoming quite well-known and, as a result, had to take on short-term "jobs" to make a living. He even turned to alcohol due to depression. Only after Demara returned to his old tricks and obtained fake documents did he secure another job as a prison warden in Texas. However, his fame followed him there as well, and one of the inmates found a copy of an article about The Great Impostor. Demara continued to use new aliases, but it became increasingly difficult to impersonate someone else as he became more and more famous himself. In the early 1960s, he worked as a consultant at the largest homeless shelter in Los Angeles, Union Rescue Mission, and in 1967, he received a college degree from a college in Oregon. In the late 1970s, he served as an itinerant priest at Good Samaritan Hospital in Anaheim, California, but when news of his exploits reached there, he was almost fired. Dr. Philip Cifarelli, an influential doctor and close friend of Demara, vouched for him, saving his job. Demara died on June 7, 1982, at the age of 60, from heart failure and complications of diabetes.